Dad Gum Furinners Anyhoo

Yesterday afternoon I'm reading a story in The New Yorker about a guy selling repossessed houses in Los Angeles. He's very busy, working hard and making a ton of money. Sometimes the houses are vacant, sometimes they are still occupied by the former owners, and sometimes squatters just move in. And then there was one apartment house where this Indian dude decided to move in and insert himself into the legal morass of ownership. Every time our hero changes the locks on this place, the Indian dude changes them back. Looks like our hero is going to have a long row to hoe with this charlatan.

Last night after the Blazer's game (they beat the Lakers, nah, nah, nah), my wife and I sat down and watched Thursday night's episode of CSI. Here we have one Iranian tile dealer killing another by spraying him with poison from an aircraft. Sounds like something Saddam Hussein would have done, or maybe did. Note: they guy is a tile dealer, not an arm's merchant or a drug smuggler. He's a tile dealer, like in floor tile, for Pete's sake.

This morning I check my email and there is a message on a forum from an Indian guy (I assume he is Indian, his name is Jayaprakash K. I don't know, could be from anywhere). The message looks like spam. He's trolling for H1-B visa holders. Anytime I see this combination (spam, India, H1B) I smell a rat. I suspect there are massive kickbacks being paid to managers by the "employment agencies" who supply the people hired on H1B visas. I have no proof, but from where I sit, it sure looks a criminal enterprise.

Now as a red-blooded American (Hey, Hey, USA, all the way!) I am tempted to paint all foreigners as scumbags. Prison is too good for these parasites. Shoot, deportation is too good for them. Load 'em into shipping containers and send them back to where they come from. But I digress.

I am confident that most people are basically honest, whether they are Americans or not. We have plenty of red-blooded Americans who are running criminal enterprises. Any foreigners who are trying to play that game are just trying to get a piece of the American dream, just like any home grown gangster.

So now the question is why did these three items all pop up in the last day? Perhaps the tide is turning, we have vanquished the evil Republicans, so our new enemy is now foreigners? You'll have to ask Rupert (Murdoch) and the other media big-wigs, whoever they are, what's on their agenda.

On one hand I want to say that all this corruption that is coming to light stems from the corrupt environment fostered by the Bush administration. But maybe not, maybe it's just what comes from having massive amounts of money floating around, and no one able to give it a single unifying direction. Or maybe there isn't any more corruption than there has ever been, it's just that communication is much better now and so we hear about more cases. Or maybe it was just my bad luck to stumble over these three incidents in one day.