On a smaller scale, some locations have also stemmed depopulation through the employment of existing ethnic enclaves as portal communities. Even in places like deindustrialized metro Detroit, depopulation was offset by an influx of Mexican and Middle Eastern immigrants into existing enclaves, transforming areas that were thought of as ghost towns. While traditional immigrant/refugee communities, like those in the Detroit Metro region were quite large, much of the new resettlement has been more geographically diverse and dispersed than it once was. For example, over 70,000 Bosnian refugees have resettled in St. Louis within the region over the last 20 years.

The New York Times reported in 2014 that new immigrants are more often to be found in midsize cities, like Dayton, Ohio than in New York, Chicago, and other large cities.  Like Youngstown, Dayton had lost over 40% of its population. But city officials embraced immigration by establishing a “Welcoming Dayton” plan in 2011. The plan encouraged new immigrants and refugees to relocate in this Southwestern Ohio community and developed support groups to help newcomers adjust to their new community. Most of the new growth in Dayton has been the result of the relocations and the city is in the process of accelerating the plan.

Another example is Utica, New York. In 2002, this deindustrialized city established the Mohawk Valley Resource Center for Refugees (MVRCR). Over 10,000 immigrants, largely from Bosnia and Vietnam, relocated to the Utica Area. The 2012 U.S. census reports that 17.6 percent of Utica’s population was foreign born and 26.6 could speak a language other than English. NPR reported that the resettlement succeeded in part because Utica had low housing costs and many low-skilled jobs that were unfilled as result of depopulation. Refugees found jobs as meat cutters, greenhouse workers, and nursing home attendants. Some saved enough money to go into business themselves. They bought low-priced homes and rehabbed them, began to pay taxes, and purchased goods and services. No doubt, the refugees initially generated costs to taxpayers in terms of housing subsidies, Medicaid, Welfare, and education, but over time, repopulation stemmed depopulation and provided a glimmer of hope for economic revitalization.

Winnipeg, Dayton, and Utica are examples of small-scale attempts at repopulation using relatively small-scale government initiatives and ethnic portal communities. But the scale of today’s refugee crisis suggests the need for larger scale efforts, including, perhaps, a national program. For example, the German government uses an administrative formula for distributing refugees and asylum seekers among the 16 German states. The percentage that states will receive reflects the combination of their tax base (two thirds) and their population (one third). Other administrative formulas are then used to distribute people within the states. Relocated refugees are accommodated in small centers or apartments; have access to medical, educational, and other social services; and may receive work permits for up to two years. While the details of the distribution formula are not clear, many refugees have been assigned to the depopulated parts of East Germany, and the hope is that they will develop their own micro-economies that will contribute to the revitalization of the region.

No doubt, the surge in refugees in Germany has caused resentment toward the policy and government in the short term, especially in those areas where unemployment is already high. Yet the German government has announced its willingness to accept 800,000 new refugees, largely from the Syrian war, promised greater economic aid to state and local communities, and enlisted German companies to cope with the influx of refugees. While these efforts reflect ethical and moral commitment, there is more to the story. The population of Germany has been dropping for some time, and it has become older while birth rates are among the lowest in the world. The German government and business leaders understand that “demographics are destiny,” and if it is to be a leader in economic growth it needs not only more people but also younger people – like the refugees.

Will any large immigration/refugee repopulation policy be considered in the US? It does not appear so given some recent attempts – by localities, states, and even the U.S. Congress — to discourage immigration and refugees. But the Federal government has final authority over immigration policy matters. If the US were to follow Germany’s approach and offer relocation incentives, Rust Belt communities have the infrastructure and housing to accommodate many refugees. In turn, the new immigrants could establish microeconomic communities, compliment established markets, invest earnings and consume in the local economy and become a source for new tax revenue.

No doubt, this will be a political challenge given the current zeitgeist. But such a policy would be moral and ethical and in the best traditions of America. It could also help boost the economies of cities that are still struggling to recover from deindustrialization. One thing that is for certain, if St. Louis can resettle 70,000 Bosnians in a 15 year period, the US can certainly accommodate more than the 10,000 Syrian refugees currently slated for resettlement, especially in the deindustrialized and depopulated in the Rust Belt.

***

This has been reposted from Working-Class Perspectives.

It's really quite astonishing when you take a step back and think about it. The CEO and billionaire class has already been so successful in changing the economic rules that they have managed to siphon off virtually all of America's economic growth over the last 15 years. But that just isn't enough. Their greed seems insatiable.

Now they want to make things even worse for ordinary people by making it harder for them to negotiate together to raise their pay.

The case before the court is called Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association.

The law stipulates that when the majority of people vote to form a union, the union is required to represent everyone in the workplace, whether an employee is a union member or not.

It is also settled law that anyone who decides they don't want to be part of the union (a right that all employees have), but who benefits from the agreement on wages and benefits the union negotiates, should contribute their fair share of the cost of negotiating and administering that agreement.

And it is important to know that no one is required to join a union, and therefore no one is required to contribute to the political or lobbying program of a union. Those who elect not be a member only need to pay the cost of the negotiations on their behalf.

Seems only fair, right?

But the Center for Individual Rights, and their corporate CEO backers, want to take away this basic right of working people -- to come together and negotiate as a group in order to secure safe working conditions, and wages and benefits that allow them to support a family.

That basic right benefits the entire community, since if ordinary people have money in their pockets, they turn around and spend it at stores and shops and buy products that create more jobs.

Right now the case is restricted to "public employees," but if they win on this case, you know what's next -- the same restrictions on the rights of workers for all employees.

The lawsuit has been brought for one and only one reason. The Koch Brothers and the other CEOs want to weaken -- and ultimately eliminate -- the rights of workers to ban together into unions and negotiate over wages and working conditions. Then the CEO gang would have unlimited power to pay their workers as little as the market will bear, while keeping as much as possible for themselves.

After all, they know that in an increasingly global economy, if they don't have to negotiate with their employees over wages and working conditions, they can drive wages lower and lower.

They know that if they make yet another change in the rules governing the economic game, they can make our economy even more unbalanced than they have made it over the last 15 years.

Don't believe me? Just take a look at the record of the Center for Individual Rights--or CIR.

Two lawyers from a Washington right wing think-tank, who built their reputations challenging civil rights measures, founded CIR in in 1989.

Since then CIR has followed through on the founders' anti-civil rights focus by challenging the 1965 Voting Rights Act that was the product of the battle for voting rights in Selma. In addition to challenging the rights of employees to negotiate with employers, CIR has also concentrated heavily on attacking affirmative action programs.

According to the Center for Media and Democracy, funders to CIR include a parade of right wing, anti-labor organizations, foundations and donor advised funds. These include: the DonorsTrust, the Donors Capital Fund, and the Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation, and many group in the Koch Brothers network such as the Dick and Betsy DeVos Family Foundation, and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, which was instrumental in the legislative attack on labor in Wisconsin. Others include the John M. Olin Foundation, F.M. Kirby Foundation and Sara Scaife Foundation.

Early on, CIR even got several grants from the Pioneer Fund, an overtly white supremacist organization that supports eugenics.

Several organizations in the Koch Brother's CEO network have filed amicus (Friend of the Court) briefs including: the National Right to Work Legal Defense Fund, the CATO Institute and the Mackinac Center that was a major player in the 2012 anti-union legislation enacted by Michigan.

The lead council on the Friedrichs vs. CTA case is Michael Carvin, an attorney with the corporate law firm Jones Day. Among other cases, Carvin argued King v. Burwell--the challenge to the Affordable Care Act.

All of this is part of a long-term, highly orchestrated campaign by right-wing, CEO-backed organizations to undermine the bargaining power of ordinary working people. They are very explicit about their goal of a "union-free" environment; one where a company's workers have no rights and have to accept whatever pay and working conditions the billionaires and Wall Street Banks that own them will offer.

They do not believe that a company's employees should have anything to say about their wages or working conditions. They want the market -- which is to say the owners -- to have complete control over what they see fit to pay.

They have chosen to begin their attacks on the rights of ordinary workers by taking on public employees. And, of course, the CEO class has no interest in paying public employees like teachers, firefighters and water safety inspectors descent wages, since instead they want taxes on the rich to be even lower.

But don't be fooled. Their attack won't stop with public employees. If they win there, they plan to expand those attacks to working people throughout the country.

The CEO crowd already makes an average of 354 times the pay of their workers. The CEO of Chipotle makes 1,522 times the rate of his average employees and the CEO of Walmart makes 1,133 times as much.

Some of the hedge fund mangers that invest in these companies literally make $500,000 per hour. That's not a typo. Ken Griffin the billionaire hedge fund manager who has joined with Governor Bruce Rauner in Illinois to attack the rights of working people to negotiate their salaries and working conditions, made $1.1 billion in 2014. That's $528,000 per hour.

Griffin makes more in 2 minutes than a minimum wage worker makes in an entire year. He makes more in 6 minutes than the average American worker makes all year long.

These are the kinds of people behind the Friedrichs lawsuit. Unbelievably, they want to make even more.

Poll after poll shows that ordinary Americans are saying no -- enough is enough. Ordinary Americans want their government to take action now to stop people like Ken Griffin on their march to unlimited wealth and economic power.

Everyday Americans are way ahead of the politicians. By big numbers, they want their political leaders to restore rules of the economic game that will allow us to build an economy that benefits all Americans -- not just the wealthy few.

For decades, the Supreme Court has affirmed the constitutionality of labor laws that provide ordinary people the right to negotiate their wages and working conditions. The Court has also held that fair share payments by non-union members to pay the costs of negotiating and servicing labor agreements are clearly constitutional.

Now the Supreme Court must listen once again to the common sense of everyday people and refuse to make even more changes in the rules of the economic game that will benefit a tiny sliver of the wealthiest among us at expense of the vast majority of Americans.

***

This has been reposted from The Huffington Post.

The purposeful murder of civilians during wartime is widely considered a crime against humanity. Specifically, under the U.S.-signed Hague Conventions, the U.S. has agreed not to intentionally use violence against civilian non-combatants during wartime. The Fourth Geneva Convention also requires that civilians be protected during wartime.

***

This has been reposted from Think Progress.

The odds of being gunned down in America by a jihadist are far smaller than the odds of such self-inflicted deaths, but the recent tragedy in San Bernadino only heightens an overwhelming sense of arbitrariness and fragility.

The anxious class feels vulnerable to forces over which they have no control. Terrible things happen for no reason.

Yet government can’t be counted on to protect them.

Safety nets are full of holes. Most people who lose their jobs don’t even qualify for unemployment insurance.

Government won’t protect their jobs from being outsourced to Asia or being taken by a worker here illegally.

Government can’t even protect them from evil people with guns or bombs. Which is why the anxious class is arming itself, buying guns at a record rate.

They view government as not so much incompetent as not giving a damn. It’s working for the big guys and fat cats – the crony capitalists who bankroll candidates and get special favors in return.

When I visited so-called “red” states this fall, I kept hearing angry complaints that government is run by Wall Street bankers who get bailed out after wreaking havoc on the economy, corporate titans who get cheap labor, and billionaires who get tax loopholes.

Last year two highly-respected political scientists, Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, took a close look at 1,799 policy decisions Congress made over the course of over twenty years, and who influenced those decisions.

Their conclusion: “The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”

It was only a matter of time before the anxious class would revolt.

They’d support a strongman who’d promise to protect them from all the chaos.

Who’d save jobs from being shipped abroad, slam Wall Street, stick it to China, get rid of people here illegally, and block terrorists from getting into America.

A strongman who’d make America great again – which really means make average working people safe again.

It was a pipe dream, of course – a conjurer’s trick. No single person can do this. The world is far too complex. You can’t build a wall along the Mexican border. You can’t keep out all Muslims. You can’t stop corporations from outsourcing abroad.

Nor should you even try.

Besides, we live in a messy democracy, not a dictatorship.

Still, they think maybe he’s smart enough and tough enough to pull it off. He’s rich. He tells it like it is.

He makes every issue a test of personal strength. He calls himself strong and his adversaries weak.

So what if he’s crude and rude? Maybe that’s what it takes to protect average people in this cruelly precarious world.

For years I’ve heard the rumbles of the anxious class. I’ve listened to their growing anger – in union halls and bars, in coal mines and beauty parlors, on the Main Streets and byways of the washed-out backwaters of America.

I’ve heard their complaints and cynicism, their conspiracy theories and their outrage.

Most are good people, not bigots or racists. They work hard and they have a strong sense of fairness.

But their world has been slowly coming apart. And they’re scared and fed up.

Now someone comes along who’s even more of a bully than those who for years have bullied them economically, politically, and even violently.

The attraction is understandable, even though misguided.

If not Donald Trump, then it will be someone else posing as a strongman. If not this election cycle, it will be the next one.

The revolt of the anxious class has just begun.

***

This has been reposted from Robert Reich's website.

London Transport Signal Cabin ‘box boy’, Kennington South London, c1955, photo by permission of Owen Smithers. Contemporary uniformed workers may think slightly differently about their company provided clothing. Often, as in the past, it is poorly fitting and unflattering, but it is increasingly likely to feature advertising slogans promoting a brand or the latest offer. Like the billboard men of the depression era, workers today are mobile hoardings promoting their companies.

But there are other ways to think about working-class clothing, including especially now that some items of workwear have become objects of desire that the middle class want to wrap themselves in. This is most apparent when politicians go to visit the latest economic success story, be it a successful factory or a construction project. Chancellor George Osbourne(educated at Eton College and Oxford University) regularly dons a hard hat and high-vis jacket when outside Westminster in order to associate himself with ‘hard working people’. Osbourne is rarely pictured in any other form of clothing, while in interviews and speeches he extolls the virtues of the entrepreneurial ‘builders’ and the ‘makers’ in refashioning the nation’s industrial past. To be fair, Osborne did wear a uniform of sorts while at University as part of his membership of the infamous Bullingdon Club, an elite and exclusive Oxford University dining club.

Recently, a number of manufacturers have stolen clothing styles usually associated with the working class, resurrecting heritage patterns and designs of long forgotten industrial clothing. Often the cut is improved and undoubtedly the cloth is of a far higher standard than the originals, but these are unmistakably the designs that used to grace working-class bodies. One example of fashion crossover can be seen in Carhartt’s presence on either side of the Atlantic – traditional workwear in its North American heartland, cutting edge youth wear in Europe. In my local town, an expensive menswear shop has a range of industrially inspired French workwear, such as dust jackets.

So what are we to make of this trend? On one level it could be seen as a harmless tribute to the uniformed working class, perhaps reflecting a desire to be associated with the virtue of hard work. But another, less benign reading would see it as the appropriation of a vacated identity and thus akin to the gentrification of former industrial buildings. Just as with redundant factories and warehouse buildings, where a decent interval is required before they are fit for habitation by more middle-class inhabitants, the same is true for discarded industrial clothing. In both the instance of the high-vis vest and refashioned workwear, the new bearer of the clothes wants to signal that he (or she, though the trend appears more in men’s clothing) is not really working class. So when politicians such as Osbourne wear freshly minted clean tabards and hard hats atop their Savile Row suits, they signal that they are only temporarily ‘on the shop floor’. Likewise, middle-class people who wear trendy crossover industrial designs would run a mile if someone suggested that they were blue-collar workers.

Somehow working-class life and culture still has a currency, dare I say a chic, which others outside that class want to buy in to. Like the gentrified loft building it must first be sanitised and packaged in the right way. Perhaps the trend draws on nostalgia for good solid dependable jobs of the past an era when working-class identity was more mainstream and more positively portrayed in the media. Now that both that era and the respected working-class that went with it have supposedly disappeared, it’s now safe to pull on their abandoned clothing.

***

This has been reposted from Working Class Perspectives.

***

Image permission of Owen Smithers

We calculated how much Amazon's has saved over its existence by not having to collect sales taxes in most states for most of the twenty years since it was founded. While an increasing number of states do now require Amazon to collect the sales tax, we calculated the cumulative savings to the company as more than $20 billion in 2015 dollars. With Jeff Bezos owning a 20 percent stake in the company, his personal share would be roughly $4 billion.

This is real money by almost any standard. There are many people who get very upset about families getting Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) benefits. Mr. Bezos' special treatment on sales tax would be equivalent to 10 million monthly TANF checks. Food stamps also get many people angry. Bezos' $4 billion is equivalent to more than 31 million months of the average food stamp benefit.

And just to be clear, the sales tax exemption enjoyed by Amazon is not some nitpicky point. The vast majority of economists across the political spectrum would agree that Amazon should have to collect the same sales tax as its brick and mortar competitors. There is zero logic in saying that customers have to pay a 5 percent tax on their purchases of books, clothes, or anything else, unless they buy them from a retailer like Amazon who does not have a store in the state.

This practice was effectively having the stores that hired people in the community subsidize Amazon and other Internet sellers who did not. That's a good way to put stores out of business and support the growth of Internet retailers. It's also a way to make relatively lower income people subsidize the purchases of higher income people, since low income people are less likely to buy over the web. Many lower income households do not have easy access to the Internet and/or credit cards. For these reasons they are less likely to be able to take advantage of no sales tax shopping than higher income people.

In many ways Jeff Bezos could be a poster boy for the modern U.S. economy. Unlike some of his fellow billionaires who made their money on Wall Street scams, Bezos can point to developing a service that is of considerable value to tens of millions of households. People appreciate the convenience of being able to quickly purchase a large variety of items on Amazon.

At the same time, he also benefited enormously from a set of rules that make no economic sense and are clearly unfair to traditional retailers. To get rich in today's economy it helps to have a good business plan, but it helps even more to have political connections that give a real competitive edge. Jeff Bezos clearly has both.

***

This has been reposted from The Huffington Post.

But wait – that was a very good question he asked, one ripe with the moral wrath that Jesus himself frequently showed toward the callous rich and their "love of money." Indeed, the Pope's words ring with the deep ethics you find in Jesus' sermon on the Mount. Was he a commie, too?

Could it be that the carpers are the ones lacking in real Christmas spirit?

***

This has been reposted from Jim Hightower's website.