A few weeks ago The Nordstrom Rack downtown moved from Second Avenue to Westlake Center. I popped into the store yesterday for the first time looking for shoes and maybe a summery shirt that’s still acceptable to wear to work or a nice hat. There’s nothing in the entire goddamn store that was made in America.
Made in America isn’t necessarily a deal breaker for me, but I look for it and I happily pay a premium for it. And I don’t think just because The Rack is a discounter, that’s enough of a reason to assume all of the clothing I looked at the tags should have been made overseas. The shoes I’m wearing right now were made in America and purchased at The Nordstrom Rack on Second a few years ago. I don’t know if it’s worse in recent years/ at the new location or just a coincidence, but I could usually find Made in America at the old location.
Also, the location of men’s shoes was hard to find.
“No part of your argument has to do with racial or ethnic profiling, does it?” the chief justice asked Mr. Verrilli, who agreed.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04.....=2&hp
There just went a huge part of your racism allegation, Lefties.
“You can see it’s not selling very well,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor, a member of the court’s liberal wing and its first Hispanic justice, told Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr., referring to a central part of his argument.
The Wise Latina ain’t helping much, either.
@1
According to the story you link to the racism allegation is part of the lawsuit.
Personally, I don’t like the idea of every state having its own immigration rules, that’s what the federal government is for. I’m all for a national ID card and I think citizenship status should be part of what’s on the ID card. ;-)
@2
Border states have to do something if the Feds don’t uphold Federal law. That was the whole basis for the state law in the first place. There wouldn’t be myriad laws if adherence to existing Federal law was adequate.
How long until we go from national ID cards to implantable national ID microchips?
If border states are going to require “suspected undocumented alians” to carry copies of their birth certificates or passports, then everyone should have to carry a National I.D. Card, or something equivilent.
And the feds wouldn’t have the burden of upholding federal immigration laws if the employers would simply stop hiring undocumented workers. No jobs, no reason to stay here!
Instead, the Bush administration focused on building a “high tech” 10′ fence to keep out immigrants from crossing the border. The only thing “high tech” about it was the sensers and CC cameras, which only allowed a security guard sitting at a monitor to request patrols to move to that location. But any home-secuirty system could have done the same thing, and any 10′ fence could be defeated by a 12′ ladder. By the time the security patrol gets there they are long gone. But in the meantime defense contractors (including Boeing) made a mint installing a system which didn’t work very well.
The federal lawsuite against the Arizona law couldn’t include an allegation of racial profiling, because it was brought before the law went into effect. It would have had to wait until there was a recordable history after the laws went into effect to prove facial profiling. At the Supreme Court level, the lawyers for the government can’t argue anything not placed into the record at the trial court level – meaning that the record on review is limited.
The states could do the same thing and everyone already has access to everyone else’s data. A national card, helps slim down government and saves us money.
Bobbie Mac blows a fuse.
@5
Thanks.
# 5: I made a typo, saying “facial profiling” instead of “racial profiling”. But considering we are obviously including the racial profiling of hispanics, maybe it really is the same thing.
As for Nordstroms Rack: I haven’t shopped there in years. My wife keeps encouraging me to go looking for men’s shoes, but it’s a fool’s errand. I wear extra-side sizes, which never make their way as “remainders” from the main stores to the “Rack” stores. If you’ve got narrow feet, be my guest. But I’ve got better things to do than spend two or three hours searching for shoes among the mis-shelved sizes and scattered ones dropped on the floor, only to conclude there weren’t any there which fit me anyway.
I think it was the author of “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus” who postulated that our shopping habits are set in our genes as a part of our old survival habits. Men went out on the hunt, taking the shortest route to their target, making the kill, and bringing it home for the family. Women were the gatherers, who were content to spend hours looking at trees, bushes, and on the ground for edible nuts and berries. From this, they postulated that our modern shopping habits are engrained – men go straight to their targets without spending much time being distracted otherwise, whereas women find satisfaction in searching for just the right shoe/purse/clothing/groceries, at the best price.
The problem, of course, is that the original argument isn’t valid beyond the narrow culture of some North American native American tribes and our assumptions/prejudices regarding their behavior. The moment you get away from that in distance, you end up with even ancient man in more cooperative ventures which require a higher social state and cooperative efforts. Hence the Navaho hillside cliffs, the Pacific Northwest salmon fisheries and whale hunts, etc. Even relatively recently you have ancient socoities around Asia reliant upon communal practics of village farming and especiall rice farming (requiring terraces, dikes, rice paddies, draining at the time of harvest, etc.)
@ 10. I wear a size 12 6E and usually find what I need at the Racks and at a third of the price or better.
All this border crap is about brown people from Mexico. In bars in Boston and New York it isn’t hard to find some one from Ireland here without any papers, but the government isn’t looking too hard for them. We should have open borders from one end of the hemisphere to the other. In some place in Vermont and New York State towns are right up to the border and people used to cross back and forth without a problem until 9/11.
# 12: I’m impressed you are able to find 12 exra wides at The Rack. I’ve never been that lucky. Maybe I just dont’ look often enough.
@13
I dated an Irish woman for a while, never thought to ask her for her papers.
It’s not even about brown people. Immigration from Mexico has been slowing for a decade (immigration in the oughts matches nicely the reduction in the Mexican birthrate that started in the early 70’s) and looks like it either has or is about to reverse its self with more people going back to Mexico than are coming here.
I think the world’s undergoing very rapid change and those who can’t deal with it and keep up are just howling at the moon.
We have a right to know who’s in our country and what their citizenship status is, but you should be able to move though out the hemisphere fairly freely and easily.
So you compare a couple hundred or thousand illegal Irishmen to 20 million illegal mexicans?
You are right, it is about “brown people”, because “brown people”, by shear numbers, are the current illegal immigrant problem.
Its not a race thing, its just a pure fact of numbers.
And if you want to live in a 3rd world county, then yes, by all means, open up the borders.
Mexico’s fertility rate.
http://tinyurl.com/77a6ydq
@ 16. I believe in free trade and free trade requires the free movement of labor. Besides the well to do can send their capital around the world electronically while a working person cannot since their capital is in the hands and backs, so I view this issue of immigration as a form of class bigotry.
“The shoes I’m wearing right now were made in America and purchased at The Nordstrom Rack on Second a few years ago.”
That was a few years ago; this is now. Yes, it has gotten worse, and not just in the US. Doc Martins are now made in China.
You’ll probably have a heckuva time finding anything in the Nordstrom main store (or for that matter in Neiman-Marcus) that wasn’t made in some offshore sweat shop.
@18 The labor isn’t moving. The money is.