On New Years Eve, like many geeks, I set about doing some year end backups and OS upgrades. It also lead to some experiments with OpenMandriva and OpenSuSE Tumbleweed, but that is fodder for another post. I bring it up to set the stage for why I ended up surfing to the UseNet group “Political Euwetopia” and being entertained by people who obviously haven’t been taking all of their meds. You can’t really do much else with a “live” disk while it is installing.
A pair of individuals, or possibly the same individual or possibly two people sharing half a brain were ranting and frothing about the mouth demanding to abolish the Electorial College because they didn’t get their way. Well, I didn’t either. Compromise is the art of not getting what you want. The venting of these inflated sheep’s bladders and their “logic” <cough><cough><hack><hack> did send me down a path of research and thought though. Has California become the modern day Jim Crow state?
Think about it. By some counts there are now over 800,000 visa workers in the United States and most of them are in California. None of them have the right to vote and they are locked into a job getting paid roughly 1/3 the going market rate. Locked in because they have to continue working for their sponsor until the visa is up. U.S. workers are being replaced by visa workers with wanton abandon at California companies. And those who bother to interview the visa workers who have been here a while find them saying “It’s modern-day slavery, more or less.” The displaced STEM workers have finally forced a Senate hearing about the gag orders being placed on them so no criminal investigations can happen.
It is not just the tech workers being oppressed in California, but the traditional manual labor jobs of lawn care and agriculture.
California is home to more than two million undocumented immigrants.
By some estimates using payroll tax information the actual number appears to be more than twice that. Many of them will be counted for purposes of assigning Electoral College votes but none will have the opportunity to actually vote. Unlike the Jim Crow days, they are counted in whole not as three fifths so slaves in California have at least made that much “progress.”
