Nationalism and Globalism

@loppar
Again, no nuance.
I expressly said “well above their weightclass”. In regards to banks, they simply wield enormous amounts of power and they can’t seem to make good use with it.

Regarding “making muslim dominated power”
AGAIN, this is a absolutely naive pov from any perspective.
France will not be muslim dominated any time soon. But it will shatter, millions will be demoralized, beaten, bereft of hope and pride. It will be a multicultural zone, not a splendid grand nation anymore.

That is what a significant portion of jews work for, completely unapologetically and in the open.
Also, muslims and jews have been historically besties. The unusual period of discord will come to an end sooner or later. This is all basic history and basic kosher policy. Nothing is hard to research, confirm or understand about this.

@zecarlo
let me tell you something of “conspiracies”
Yes, there are some guys, you might know a lot of them personally, who believe in a flat earth, 911 stories involving lizardmen and whatnot.
But groups of people have an agenda. This is normal.
The US “conspires” regularly to shoot a missile here and there, as does Russia (btw how did the whole Russki’s-made-Trump angle turn out? a conspiracy dare I say?!), as does China, as does Israel.
This level of state agency is to be expected.

Jews have been expelled hundreds of times (maybe this should tell you something?) so they came up with options. Doesn’t mean they’re the sole reason unchecked globalism exists. Many parties profit from it. But their part in promoting it is quite significant.
As you grow up, you might overthink your black and white thinking.

When WW2 ended, a high ranking German officer said, with regard to Hitler’s belief in a Jewish conspiracy, that they found no evidence of it. He said if anything, the Jews seemed to be disorganized.

Why do you care to reply if you have nothing intelligent to contribute?

You repeating the over 100 year old Jewish global conspiracy myth, created by the Russian secret police, that simply was a rewriting of an earlier myth involving the Jesuits, is an example of an intelligent contribution?

Regarding Russian Nationalism. This is a fascinating article. I think most Americans are unfamiliar with the history. Tagging you @loppar.

WSJ - Russia’s Turn to Its Asian Past, July 6, 2018
As nostalgia surges for the eastern conquest of Genghis Khan, Putin maps out his own empire

Text due to paywall -

President Donald Trump’s summit with President Vladimir Putin on July 16 will take him to Helsinki, one of Russia’s many lost possessions. From Finland to Mongolia, the Russian Empire and then, in somewhat different borders, the Soviet Union once ruled more than a sixth of the planet’s surface. Mr. Putin has famously described the loss of this empire, which happened nearly overnight in December 1991, as the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century—not least because it has stranded tens of millions of Russian-speakers beyond Russia’s shrunken frontiers.

The phantom pain over that vanished greatness still haunts Russia’s collective consciousness. These days, the sting of this perceived historic injustice is redefining Russia’s sense of where its civilization really belongs—and is prompting a revision of how the country views its own past.

Less than a decade ago, it seemed self-evident that Russia, despite all of its cultural and political differences, was reclaiming its rightful place as part of the Western world. In a piece for a German newspaper, Mr. Putin wrote of a “Europe from Lisbon to Vladivostok” that aspires to free trade and shares common values.

Now Russia is increasingly looking East, toward an uneasy alliance with an illiberal and much more powerful China, and—in recognition of the country’s increasingly Muslim makeup—with nations such as Turkey and Iran. But even more pronounced is a sentiment that Russia, so unique in its vastness, must remain a world unto itself, a country that should expect kinship from no one—and that, in a motto coined by Czar Alexander III more than a century ago, can count on only two reliable allies: the Army and the Navy.

Russia is not the only country where nationalism, fueled by a desire to regain past glories, real or imagined, runs high today. From Brexit Britain to Mr. Trump’s “America First” policy to Xi Jinping’s emboldened China, the established international order and its institutions—based on cooperation and compromise and built largely by the U.S. and its allies—are struggling to survive. The very concept of the West is now in question.

This unraveling has prompted a dramatic change in how Moscow sees its own place in the world. “Russia followed a Western-centric approach for 200 years, with the West as its reference point, either in a positive way or in a negative way,” said Fyodor Lukyanov, head of Russia’s Council for Foreign and Defense Policy, a body that advises the Kremlin. “Today this no longer corresponds to the realities of the world—because the West is ceasing to be the center of the world.”

This change is happening even as Russia’s cities and lifestyle appear increasingly similar to those in the West, something evidenced by the festivities of this summer’s soccer World Cup. In Moscow, visitors now encounter bike-sharing, vegan cafes and bearded hipsters serving craft beers.

Still, the feeling of a separate destiny—and of being surrounded by foes—has taken hold of Russian society. Mr. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014, and the Western economic sanctions that followed suit, pushing Russia into a recession and a financial crisis, turned out to be a turning point of historic proportions.

“Until 2014, Russia used to see itself as the easternmost bus stop of the Western world,” said Dmitri Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Center. “Since then, there has been a fundamental shift and Russia has turned inward. The Russian elite and its leader, Putin, have come to the conclusion that attempting to become part of the West won’t lead to desired results.”

‘The forces pulling Russia apart from the West have long bubbled under the surface.’

What’s happening in Russia today isn’t just reversing the liberal legacies of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and Russia’s first president, Boris Yeltsin, Mr. Trenin added. It’s also an attempt to undo the westernizing approach that has dominated the Russian state going back all the way to Czar Peter the Great, three centuries ago. To some Russians, the reversal goes even further, with a new appreciation of the Golden Horde, the heir to Genghis Khan’s Mongol empire that ruled Muscovy from the early 13th to the late 15th centuries.

Some Russian nationalists now herald this Mongol-Turkic state, governed by descendants of Genghis Khan’s oldest son, as the foundation of Russia’s own eternal empire. Long expunged from memory, the Horde is trending in Russia again, the subject of movies and a popular TV series. There is even a theme park at the site of the Horde’s razed 15th-century capital Sarai Batu—a former film set of faux palaces and mosques where visitors ride camels, practice archery skills and take photos in Mongol dress.

Russia’s official historians and the Orthodox church long viewed the Horde’s rule over Moscow as a barbarian “yoke,” responsible for Russia’s underdevelopment compared with the West; studying its history was banned by the Kremlin in 1944. But modern revisionists, inspired by the “Eurasianist” ideology that sets Russia apart from the West, see the Russian state as the heir and beneficiary of that Mongol empire. They admire its ruthless centralism, its desire for conquest, its ability to maintain law and order—and its religious tolerance, which allowed Christianity and Islam to coexist.

Indeed, the medieval Russian state adopted much of the Golden Horde’s administrative system. Russian words for money (den’gi), treasury (kazna) and customs (tamozhnia) are all of Mongol-Turkic origin, and the Mongols’ system of yam postal relay networks became the backbone of the Russian empire. But after defeating the Horde’s successors, Russia eliminated most traces of its existence. Once a city larger than Paris or London, Saray Batu today is just a giant field strewn with medieval pottery shards, its mosques and palaces dismantled to provide bricks for the fortifications and churches of Astrakhan’s 16th-century citadel down the Volga river.

The leading voice of this Eurasianist movement in Russia today is the philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, who combines admiration for the Horde with close connections to the European and American alt-right and neo-fascist movements. “We, Russians, live under the shadow of Genghis Khan. He brought us not just the subjugation by the East but freedom from the yoke of the West,” Mr. Dugin has written. “Russians before Genghis Khan were just a periphery of Byzantium and Europe. Russians after Genghis Khan are the core of the Universal Empire, the last Rome, the absolute center of the geopolitical battle for the destiny of the world.”

Mr. Dugin, despite his frequent media appearances and a reputation of voicing what Russian officials prefer not to say in public, exercises little actual influence in Moscow’s corridors of power, said Andrei Kortunov, director of the Russian International Affairs Council, a state think-tank in Moscow. Yet, he added, this new fascination with the Golden Horde serves a clear political purpose. “There is a desire to show the history of Russia not as purely Christian but as Christian-Muslim because we now have around 20 million Muslims in Russia,” Mr. Kortunov explained. “And there is a desire to show that the Western orientation is not the only possible trajectory and that there are alternatives to it.”

The impulse to abandon Russia’s Western orientation was recently articulated by Vladislav Surkov, a close aide of Mr. Putin who advised him on the Ukrainian crisis. “Russia spent four centuries heading toward the East, and then another four centuries toward the West, without taking root in either place,” Mr. Surkov wrote in a much-discussed academic article in April. From now on, Russia—an eternal “half-breed”—will face “a hundred (two hundred? three hundred?) years of geopolitical solitude.”

The profound disillusionment also stems from the failure of policies that aimed to bring Russia closer to the West following the Soviet Union’s breakup—a failure that many Western officials now admit wasn’t just Moscow’s. “The West was not sufficiently imaginative or creative in how to embrace Russia back when Russia had the intention of becoming a normal country,” said Lithuania’s former foreign minister Vygaudas Usackas, who served until last year as the European Union’s ambassador to Moscow and now heads the Institute of Europe think-tank. “As a result, we are finding a Russia that is searching for its identity between Europe and Asia—and that, in the meantime, has become an assertive and aggressive power with the stamina and the resources to discredit and undermine Western democracies.”

While the forces pulling Russia apart from the West have long bubbled under the surface, the breaking point came with Mr. Putin’s decision in 2014 to invade Ukraine (which many Russian politicians and officials believe shouldn’t be a separate country in the first place) and to annex the Crimean peninsula. The Ukrainian crisis of 2014 and the Western reaction to it, Mr. Surkov wrote, “marks the end of Russia’s epic journey toward the West, a stop to the multiple and fruitless attempts to become a part of Western civilization.”

The Western economic sanctions imposed since 2014 hampered trade, investment and the access of many big Russian companies to capital—as well as the ability of prominent Russian officials and oligarchs to take European vacations. Despite the election of Mr. Trump and his oft-stated desire for warmer ties with Mr. Putin, this pain has only intensified. In part because of congressional pressure, Mr. Trump’s administration has tightened existing sanctions against Russian companies and individuals. Unlike President Barack Obama, who feared antagonizing Moscow with such a step, Mr. Trump has also delivered lethal weapons to Ukraine’s military.

In Russia itself, hostility to the West has also grown deeper, with TV hosts—while often sympathetic to Mr. Trump and routinely calling him nash, or “ours”—matter-of-factly discussing the projected impact of Russian nuclear strikes against American cities. Russian state propaganda often equates Western nations to Hitler’s Germany and promises to defeat them just as the Soviet Union vanquished Germany in 1945.

It’s not clear to what extent the Kremlin believes its own propaganda. While resentment over Russia’s diminished stature is a key motivator of Mr. Putin’s behavior, so far Russia’s decision-making has been driven largely by opportunism rather than by a grandiose civilizational shift. “I don’t think Putin is thinking in terms of historical mythologies,” said Mr. Kortunov of the Russian International Affairs Council. “I don’t think he needs an ideological grounding for his policies.”

Still, Russian expansionism is not all about Mr. Putin and his personal ambitions. Empire-building is part of the DNA of Russian and Soviet history, said Alina Polyakova, a Russia expert at the Brookings Institution. Stalin’s Soviet Union, just like Mr. Putin’s Russia, she pointed out, moved to reconquer lost parts of the Russian Empire once it became sufficiently strong, annexing the Baltic states and invading Finland. “Putin’s foreign policy is not really an outlier from a historical perspective,” she said. “There is a difference between Russia and the other empires, such as the British or the French. Those empires may have given up even more territory, but in Russia, the sense of loss, the sense of being a victim of the world, has never been healed.”

Mr. Putin highlighted this perception of victimhood in his March address to the Russian parliament, lamenting once again that, with the breakup of the Soviet Union, the country lost 23.8% of its territory, 48.5% of its population and 41% of its GDP. Though Russia within its current borders remains the largest nation on earth by landmass, it doesn’t even rank among the world‘s ten largest economies. Its GDP is roughly the size of South Korea’s or of the Guandong province of China. Russia’s political class naturally looks with nostalgia to the time of its youth, when Moscow was the feared and respected capital of one of the world’s only two superpowers.

Today, Russia has no ideology or alternative economic model to export, and its claim to global relevance is backed up almost exclusively by its military might and the willingness to use it, as in Syria, Georgia and Ukraine.

“The position of the authorities and of Putin himself is clear: Everything was awesome in the past, during the Russian Empire and even during the Soviet Union, and we want to return to that greatness,” said Russian historian Alexey Malashenko, the director of research at the non-government Dialogue of Civilizations think-tank. “But what greatness?” he asked. “There is no such thing as the Russian national idea anymore, just a thought that people should be afraid of us. It’s a hooligan ideology. We cannot imagine our future and so we keep distorting our past.”

And in Russia, he added, rewriting the past to suit present ideological needs is a time-honored tradition. “Everything is opportunistic. When I was a student, there was a Tatar-Mongol yoke, then it became a Mongol yoke, then it became just a Golden Horde yoke, and now it turns out there was no yoke at all, and it all was just an interaction between the East and Russia.”

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I think it all serves one purpose: keeping Putin in power. Why would he and his cronies want to become more like the West with its democracy and a people who in theory at least can decide who is in power.

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Just glancing at the world map one can see that the Russian expansion eastwards was even more formidable that the US expansion on the North American continent. The distances were much greater and the enemies more implacable as Russians had to deal with established Central Asian powers. Not to mention the fearsome Caucasian peoples whose supposed pacification required spectacularly bloody wars that lasted for three centuries (and one can argue that they’re still ongoing). But the end result for the native population was pretty much the same.

So it’s like American history but on steroids - fur traders encroaching on the lands of indigenous peoples, followed by the establishment of isolated military outposts, raids and counter raids and all the trappings of wild, lawless life on the frontier slowly pushing further inland.

And more often than not, Russian history reads like an intentionally lurid horror novel - for example, a hundred years to the day a spectacularly deranged Russian nobleman, who believed himself the reincarnation of Genghis Khan tried to recreate the Mongol Empire. Seriously.

http://badassoftheweek.com/index.cgi?id=39684745806

Baron Roman Nikolai Maximilian von Ungern-Sternberg is what you would get if you crossed Vlad the Impaler, Genghis Khan, Hitler, Stalin, Kali-Ma and goddamned Christopher Walken from Sleepy Hollow all up into one dude with access to automatic weapons, high explosives, a horde of psychotic Mongol warriors, then had him blessed by the fucking Dalai Lama to be the physical incarnation of the Tibetan Blood God of Vengeance. In the “Mad Baron”s six months humping sanity to death, massacring communists and fist fighting wolves (literally fist fighting wolves) in the steppes of Central Asia as the self-proclaimed heir to Genghis Khan, Maximilian von Ungern-Sternberg cleaved himself a blood-soaked reputation so horrific, brutal, and out-of-his-gourd fucking insane that it can only truly be classified as SPOOKY HALLOWEEN SHIT.

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Given the way Putin is describing this, and after Crimea, it wouldn’t be one bit surprising to me to see him annex other Baltic states.

Currently 20% of Georgia’s internationally recognized territory is under Russian military occupation. Russia does not allow the EUMM monitors to enter South Ossetia and Abkhazia in violation of the Six Point Ceasefire Agreement.

@pat, talking about military strength, I was thinking of this quote from the article above.

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I put this Article up in one of @Mufasa’s thread’s but the conversation had moved on to the topic of that day, which was the Helsiniki Summit.

I’ll post it here, since it’s more to this topic. I think we’re making a huge mistake to characterize these folks as bigots, motivated by ethno-nathionalism. “After the 1992 election, 15 of the 20 most manufacturing-intensive Congressional districts in America were represented by Democrats. Today, all 20 are held by Republicans,” WSJ. @thunderbolt23, @Dr_J2

The Elites Feed Anti-Immigrant Bias - WSJ July 9, 2018
As proud citizens of the world, they show little solidarity with working-class countrymen.

Article text below-

As recently as the 1990s, Harvard sociologist Michèle Lamont found that working-class men in the New York City area held generally positive attitudes toward immigrants, describing them as “family oriented” and “hard workers, just like us.” Yet real wage growth for the working class has been abysmal for a generation, and for many native-born blue-collar workers the culprit seems obvious—immigration. “My fiancé’s worked at the same company for 21 years and it’s a union [job], and they are hiring Mexicans,” one Trump voter told the Public Religion Research Institute. “And I don’t want to be racial, but that’s all they’re hiring. He makes like $31 an hour, and they’re coming in at making like $8 an hour.”

Economists have demonstrated immigration’s positive effect on gross domestic product, but that misses a crucial point: People don’t live the averages. They live where they live, and see what’s in front of them. In 2016 Donald Trump won far more counties than Hillary Clinton did—but Mrs. Clinton’s roughly 500 counties represented two-thirds of GDP. Mr. Trump won in regions left behind.

Today less than half of Americans born in the 1980s earn more than their parents did, according to a National Bureau of Economic Research study led by Harvard economist Raj Chetty. Antitrade and anti-immigrant voices offer a clear explanation of why good jobs left the U.S. (free trade), and why the jobs that replaced them pay less (immigrants). Those who believe otherwise need to communicate an alternative explanation and recognize that anti-immigrant fervor reflects cultural as well as economic divides.

Global elites pride themselves on their cosmopolitanism. Some younger elites reject the notion of national borders entirely. Many blue-collar whites interpret this as a shocking lack of social solidarity. They are proud to be American because it’s one of the few high-status identities they can claim. Elites, on the other hand, seek social honor by presenting themselves as citizens of the world. And many are, with membership in global networks dating to their college years or earlier. But blue-collar Americans tend to stay close to home because they rely on a small circle of family and friends for jobs, child care and help patching that hole in the roof. These are problems elites solve with money.

Driven in part by their contrary lifestyles and networks, elites and nonelites hold radically different core values. A 2007 study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that elites focus on achievement and individuality, while the working class prizes solidarity and loyalty—values that bind members to their communities.

This class culture gap is also fueled by what sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild calls “feeling rules” in her book, “Strangers in Their Own Land.” These unwritten rules govern who deserves sympathy and who doesn’t. Elites’ feeling rules mandate empathy for immigrants, viewed as vulnerable people separated from their families or fleeing persecution, gangs or conflict. This empathetic human-rights lens contrasts sharply with the neoliberal lens elites use for blue-collar Americans, who are often viewed as dimwitted and fat. Homer Simpson is emblematic.

All this has created a toxic environment in both the U.S. and Europe. Three steps can help turn things around. The first is to recognize that the nation-state matters greatly for nonelites in developed countries. “You can’t put a Danish flag on a birthday cake without being called racist,” someone recently commented to me at a book talk in Denmark. Dismissing national pride as nothing more than racism is a recipe for class conflict and more racism. Better by far to embrace national pride, balance it with concern for those outside the nation, and refuse to allow racism to pose as national pride.

The second step is to highlight the ways President Trump’s immigration and trade policies are hurting red-state constituencies that voted for him. Critics can point to farmers unable to find farmworkers, small-business owners unable to find dishwashers, and construction workers hit hard by steel tariffs.

The third step is to fight the scapegoating of immigrants by ensuring that hardworking Americans without college degrees can find good jobs. Economist Branko Milanovic has found that people in the bottom half of rich, developed countries’ income distributions have seen “an absence of real income growth” since 1988. What’s happening, Mr. Milanovic argues, is the “greatest reshuffle of individual incomes since the Industrial Revolution.” The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that average wages fell last year for nonsupervisory workers in the U.S.

There’s no inherent reason why native-born blue-collar workers should be anti-immigrant. They often hold similar attitudes toward hard work and family values. Elites who sympathize with immigrants do themselves no favors by dismissing the working class as too bigoted or too stupid to recognize the economic benefits of immigration. Instead they should actually try to make the case and address the causes of anti-immigrant scapegoating.

Ms. Williams is a law professor at the University of California, Hastings, and author of “White Working Class” (Harvard Business Review, 2017).

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(All in all a good article, @anon71262119. A couple of “Ummmmm…/Debatable” points…but overall, a good article).

I wanted to highlight this one.

I read somewhere that at one point; the people who lit, turned off, and maintained the oil Street Lights of the cities; or who cleaned up the horse waste in the streets; lost jobs…and they were jobs that were never coming back.

The days of coming out of High School; getting a job doing some repetitive task on an assembly line that paid 15 to 30 (or more) dollars an hour are also gone. In other words; the era of Middle-Class Lifestyle with the bare minimum of education and skill is ( regrettably) gone.

Technology; automation; business efficiency.

To blame immigrants and trade policies as being “the” reason for this paradigm shift is both disingenuous and dangerous. The truth simply is not pretty, and can’t be boiled down to a Campaign slogan or a Meme.

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…and all at a time , @anon71262119, when the Youngest Jenner in on the verge of becoming a BILLIONaire selling cheap lipstick and mascara…

God Bless America…

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Agree. I didn’t read that to say that it’s simple, or that it’s “the reason.”

I’m thinking of people who are running above board businesses in construction, landscaping, laying tile. Paying workman’s comp insurance, and SS, and being licensed and bonded trying to compete with people hiring illegal labor and flying under the radar. That’s a very real thing. I don’t see the CA sanctuary cities idea as something that would resonate.

Meanwhile, most people like me (and most of us here) are unconcerned with the idea that an illegal immigrant can take my job and do it for $8 an hour. That’s not something I need to worry about, so it’s very easy for me to hire an illegal housekeeper, or similar.

The Reps do have a serious blind spot related to upward mobility and poverty in this country. It’s become much harder for people to rise from the lower, or lower-middle class and wages have been stagnant for most of those folks. I don’t think either party is addressing it. Calling those people bigots certainly isn’t going to win them over.

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Thanks, @anon71262119

(P.S. Had a follow-up question/thought/observation for you on the “Supreme Court Fight…” thread…~ questions 744/45. ALWAYS value your insights! Don’t know how you put up with a bunch of (mostly) knuckle-dragging Ball Scatchers…but I’m glad you stick it out here!)

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One could look at it another way and ask the question, based on what this author wrote, “why is it people who have less power and less financial security more prone to look for something to be proud of that exists outside of themselves? Does this mean that the elites have a higher sense of self-worth and self-awareness? If the working class were paid more money and had more job security and better working conditions that would allow them to have a higher quality of life, physically and psychologically, would they be less nationalistic?”

So instead of embracing national pride, or at least extreme national pride, maybe we should look at the conditions that create it. If we addressed those causes then there would be no need to preach balance since that would work itself out on its own. Don’t give people a reason to blame immigrants and they won’t. Trying to tell working class people that immigrants are not the enemy will mean you have to show them who the real enemy is, and it’s not just those telling them it is the immigrants who are their enemy but those who are telling them they aren’t the enemy.

That’s the problem with this article, and it’s to be expected since it’s from the WSJ. It uses terms like Global Elites and tries to make distinctions between types of elites. It’s not all young elites but some (hmmm, which ones exactly). In other words, it’s the liberal and leftist elites, the Hollywood elites. But to take the position that it’s all elites who are the problem would be on the verge of Marxism and it’s the WSJ.

Of course there is, it’s called competition.

Benefits to whom? The working class or to the elites?

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It’s all about education. Republicans are typically against funding public education and Democrats are obsessed with everyone going to college and inclusive classrooms and identity politics rather that providing a young person with the proper tools that his individual talents, intelligence and desires need to be successful. We need more trade schools and there is nothing wrong with telling an inner city kid that he might want to consider it over going the college prep route.

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Agree.

In many areas; companies are literally trying to hire kids in Welding and Auto Mechanics (as an example) even before they graduate.

While I don’t know the mean wages; my understanding is that they are pretty good, and not just for someone right out of High School.

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And an immigrant plumber isn’t going to charge less than an American.

I’m sorry but that is not correct. For example, introduction of temporary immigrant tradesmen in Western EU countries from the East (the Polish Plumber stereotype in UK and France) led to their virtual takeover of specific trades and a dramatic drop in charged rates.

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That is a very nice piece, but there is no telling the smart people that they’re doing it wrong, no matter what your credentials.

Nice to see that in the WSJ though, and coming from a well credentialed person at that. It would be great to see that type of thinking gain some social traction but I don’t have much confidence that it will.

Too many people are willing to subjugate their own thoughts and observations to a George Takei meme on Facebook.

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I agree wit Z. The foreign tradesmen I know aren’t at all shy about their quality of work or billing. Most of them are borderline wealthy.

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