http://www.yale.edu/ynhti/curr......01.x.html

Also, I do not only have friends in NYC. KFC sells mashed potatoes and gravy in paper buckets and a large group of people apparently buys that kind of stuff. If the US compares in any way to Germany re: the correlation between nutrition and educational degrees, it’s mostly the blue collar and unskilled workers that live on such “convenient” and in relation to their nutritional value overpriced diets. Old kitchenware isn’t a problem (my great-grandmother’s cooker ran perfectly for over forty years; we gave it to charity after she passed away, but I’d be surprised if it wasn’t functioning anymore), low quality kitchenware is. My parents have been married 37 years, and the same quality cookpots my mother got when they got married are still in perfect use today. If you want to save money, invest in quality.

As for the mortgages, I can see why people are upset, but then again, they’d never have been able to obtain mortgages (and never ever multiple ones) over here without securities. A non-tenured employment is not a sufficient security for banks here. Germans are more conservative when it comes to money matters, so certain expenses like rent / mortgage, health insurance etc. are top priorities. The LV totes often were bought on credit; that system of credit shopping only works to keep the economy going if there’s a constant cycle that may not be interrupted at any point. With the current and inevitable transition in industries and the resulting higher rates of unemployment (countries cannot hire foreigners just like that; even over there they need to give proof that there are no eligible US American applicants for the job) the cycle was interrupted. We’ve been going through that over here as well, but politicians were smart enough to support innovative industries (e.g. environmental technologies) and founding of businesses that work with lots of low- and unskilled workers in those areas most affected by the economic transitions.

However, safe trade areas remain just one thing, a popular slice of utopia to gain blue-collar and unskilled workers’ votes.

What’s led to Detroit’s inability to sell a car? No R & D? Marketing? Well, that takes foresight. But they were so focused on turning out big suburban assault vehicles that there was no time, inclination or need to develop anything new- or necessary for long-term solvency. Ironically, even if they’d kept up with new tech, no one would be able to get financing to buy in at this point. Except maybe the overseas market.

So back to our $3/hr dishwasher. First, despite all evidence to the contrary, NYC is not the entire US. Elsewhere, people are cooking at home, and, increasingly, on older equipment. Because most people financed renovations with equity from their homes, which they’re either fighting to afford, fighting to keep or have already lost.

But I digress. People aren’t eating out much outside of large cities where closet-sized kitchenettes are the standard. Restaurants are failing, and even if the dishwashers were down to 75 cents an hour, customers still aren’t coming through the door. Because lots of people who are still working have taken either pay cuts or reduced hours, and the ones who haven’t are trembling in anticipation of the inevitable day when they will. And then there are those who aren’t working, who are, increasingly, the ones who used to buy those cars, those vacations and those restaurant meals. The vast majority of people, even the lucky ones who’ve still got a few bucks after the market tanked and their property values pulled a free fall aren’t dropping small fortunes on Louis Vuitton handbags anymore. Did you see the recent Times article about the out-of-work 49 year-old tech analyst ? Welcome to reality, Darien, CT. And your wives, too.

So where did the skilled-labor jobs go? Lots are still here, but are filled by imported workers. Who aren’t using their locally-earned incomes to significantly enrich their local economies. Which means that tens of thousands of Americans are on futile long-term job searches, losing their homes, their insurance, their hope for their children’s college educations and futures, not to mention their retirement income- which is a problem that’s going to bite us in the butt big-time in another 30 years or so when we all get old and can’t afford to live anymore.

And business and government are lying, lying, lying when they say that we need to increase the number of work visas because there aren’t enough skilled workers here. And those who disagree with them are labeled anti-immigrant, protectionist; don’t we remember that our own great-grandparents were immigrants? I like immigrants. I believe that everyone has the right to earn a living.

Including me and my family. By the way, this isn’t some baseless rant; welcome to my life.

Sure, the hareidim, as you’ve pointed out, are abusing the welfare system. I’ve seen it first hand, myself. Shame on them. I suspect that as social services $$ start to dry up, they’ll be in for a rude awakening. But that’s a completely different issue.

So? It can be a “far cry” from Nazism and still be a problem. How about leaving the Nazi thing alone on this blog? No one wants that stuff here. This isn’t a far-Left site. We don’t constantly compare people to Nazis like the far-Left does.

Drop it.

Published in 1925, La Raza Cosmica (The Cosmic Race) is an essay written by late Mexican philosopher, secretary of education, and 1929 presidential candidate, Jose Vasconcelos to express the ideology of a future “fifth race” in the Americas; an agglomeration of all the races in the world with no respect to color or number to erect a new civilization: Universopolis. As he explains in his literary work, armies of people would then go forth around the world professing their knowledge. Vasconcelos continues to say that the people of the Iberian regions of the Americas (that is to say, the parts of the continent colonized by Portugal and Spain) have the territorial, racial, and spiritual factors necessary to initiate the “universal era of humanity”.

Claiming that the Darwinist ideologies are “scientific” theories only created to validate, explain, and justify ethnic superiority and to repress others, Vasconcelos attempts to refute these theories and goes on to recognize his words as being an ideological effort to improve the cultural morale of a “depressed race” by offering his optimistic theory of the future development of a cosmic race.

It has come, often in its shortened version “La Raza”, to refer to the mixed race people of Latin America, i.e., primarily mestizos, mulattos, and zambos or all three combined.

This is a far cry from the Nazi concept of “Das Volk”.

It may come as little surprise that elites in take-off countries are now taking over where the complacency of the West has put us into snooze mode. With a different work ethics than the one we’re accustomed to (i.e. placing emphasis on the needs and rights of the worker) as in that only the corporation’s success counts, we must reliven our virtues quickly if we do not want to be outdone.

And I wasn’t just talking about $3/hr dishwashers, btw. The science and tech fields have been gutted to their core by outsourcing, visas and other cost-cutting measures. So the business looks good on paper, stocks are up, but it’s a house of cards because no one is left working there. Counting on innovation? Don’t hold your breath. The pharmas are staying alive by repackaging their old stuff so people will please, please buy it instead of generics. Don’t believe me? I’ve got a state-of-the-art Bayer campus in CT to sell you. Oh, wait- Yale bought it at a fire sale price- only to have it sit vacant because there’s no money to fund the research they dreamed would happen there. So they’re using it to store surplus art from the Yale Art Gallery. I kid you not.

I want to be a citizen of the world, but I can’t afford the membership fee anymore.

The hareidim are the least of the problem.