WHY I LOVE DONALD TRUMP

Keeping illegals illegal while forgetting to deport them just happens to be the sweet spot of a strategy to keep a whole class of people working for sub-par salaries with no bargaining rights and no social protections like unemployment insurance, workman's comp if they get injured, no social security, no withholding and so on. Illegal employees are a huge gravy train for the employer class, both Republicans and Democrats. They are an underclass of super-exploited employees.

At the same time the presence of a large class of employees being paid sub-par salaries keeps constant downward pressure on salaries for everyone else. Which again improves profits for employers at the expense of their employees. Every politician who talks smack about the illegal immigrant "problem" is lying to you to your face. The two political groups perpetrating this immense fraud on the American public are the Democrats and the Republicans.

Donald Trump is in effect calling the Republican Party on its perennial hypocritical lying about being against illegal immigration when in fact they are all for it because they make so much money off it. Of course he is lying too but he is upping the ante on the rest of the Republicans who will still be in Congress trying to maintain the system long after Trump is gone.

Maintaining a class of millions of illegal immigrants is the edge of the sword of class warfare in the US.

Let's say Trump were elected and not assassinated and actually made good on his campaign promise to deport the illegals. (Because American politicians always keep their campaign promises.) There would be major dislocations in the US economy as agriculture and construction both collapsed. Service, manufacturing, and other industries would contract sharply.

Prices would shoot up because of labor shortages and because employees would no longer be as disposable as fast food wrappers as they are now. Salaries would rise and inflation would return. Interest rates would rise to accommodate inflation. Rising costs of borrowing would slow the economy and profits would fall or vanish. The economy would contract.

How do you think the economy can expand so much as it has in the past few years without causing any inflation? Because the presence of the illegal immigrant class keeps salaries from rising so labor costs remain flat while productivity and profits both rise.

What would be the effect of sending 17 million unemployed people to Mexico, a country whose government can barely maintain itself in power as it is? Between Mexico's revolutionary traditions and its modern cartel warfare, the influx of 17 million angry unemployed people could easily lead to the collapse of the Mexican state and the descent of Mexico, a country of 140 million people, into anarchy. Imagine that on our border.

An example of what happens was the mass deportation of 300,000 Palestinians whom Kuwait kicked out for siding with Saddam Hussein during the Iraqi occupation. The return of those hundreds of thousands of unemployed men to Palestinian towns and cities led directly to the Second Intifada - a year of rioting and guerrilla warfare against Israel. Imagine the same thing, but 50 time bigger, happening in Mexico.

Trump, in his own way, is pointing out on what rotten foundations our economy stands.

Neocolonialism in Berkeley

the Hovercam Solo 8 overhead scanner

Got the cardiac stress test results yesterday.  Negative.  I have been feeling the lifting of a weight I had not admitted to myself I was bearing.  I am now looking forward to a long and healthy​ life.

I have at last begun doing something about my diaries.  I brought them down from the attic.  45 volumes, penned over 50 years.  On the web I learned that the way I had dreaded scanning all those thousands of pages was stupid and wrong-headed.  It turns out that instead of the xerox machine-like lid-and-glass-plate​ flatbed kind of scanner I already bought for the task, there are overhead scanners.  The book lies flat on the table and the scanner is on a head 18 inches or so above.  Not only can the fancier ones be set to take a picture every so many seconds, they can also take a picture cued by my turning the page.   Which means the task is reduced to lying the diary on the table and turning the pages.

I also sent for a tsotske that fits flush in the pci-express slot on my elderly HP laptop and gives it two USB 3.0 input ports.  Which means that the laptop can now accept data as fast as the scanner can send it, and puts off the day when the laptop goes to Goodwill.    

​There is still no software that can recognize longhand and change it into text.  Only people can do that.  I have a list of typists in various poor countries like the Philippines who will gladly take my scanned .pdf's and return Word .doc files.

​For a generation I was unable to hire and exploit Mexicans to do work for me that I could do myself.  My then-fiancee Sheila finally overcame the residue of my socialist and Zionist scruples with the argument that the disparity of Mexican incomes and American ones like mine and the exploitation inherent in it, was part of the historical development of the two societies.  Remedying the disparity is to be worked out between the governments of Mexico and the United States, if at all, through mechanisms like NAFTA and that it was not my personal responsibility.  Further, the Mexicans in front of Home Depot needed the work and I needed the work done.  Eventually I relented, hired a bunch of guys to work on my house, and promptly got a lot more work done a lot faster than when I had been doing it all myself. 

Scruples, like hymens, once broken are not soon mended.

So once I have made .pdf files with the scanner, which should arrive in a few days, I will be able to send them as email attachments to poor people in remote lands.   For so many tenths of a cent per word, they will type them for me and send the product back to me, also as email attachments.  

I will send them files which they will process to a different kind of files and send back to me.  I expect to be able to pay them via Paypal.  How's that for good-old-fashioned neocolonialist exploitation in the Information Age?  I think Paypal will even do the currency exchange transaction as part of the payment transaction.

Still, the piecework rate I will pay, though paltry in the US, will be good pay in the country where it is done.  All the more for safe clean work that can be done at home while tending one's children.  It is my way of outsourcing carpal tunnel syndrome.