PHOTO:  http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=ALPHA-400&cpc=SCH

The US rulers aren't going to like what they see at the CES 2009 (Consumer Electronics Show) in Las Vegas next week. Why? The thing globalists fear most is deflation, esp., in high-tech prices. So they should hate the plans of a Taiwan company called (LOL) "Watercom System Corp.," which is getting down to the $100 barrier (see photo, and note others have similar plans). Basically the current worldwide exploitation plan is: "We think (USA) -- they sweat" (foreigners, esp., the poor in sweatshops). In Marxist terms, the plan is a way of maximizing "relative surplus value" to extract the most profit out of *both* US and foreign labor (surplus value out of other people's labor is where all profit comes from).

US companies, which dominate the world economy by dollar hegemony, do the thinking (securing capital, planning products, designing, engineering, marketing, etc.) and contract with Taiwanese manufacturers of electronics, which employ slave labor in sweatshops in Mainland China. The plan has proved disastrous since the 1970s for US industrial workers as well.

Slave labor has been able since the 1960s to make electronic things cheaper than even robots could in the US. A computer must cost very little indeed to make if a notebook (laptop, netbook, or whatever) can be sold in the US for $149.95. Companies like Hewlett-Packard (world's largest electronics company), Intel, and Microsoft extort their obscene profits out of the whole world by maintaining monopolies based on US patents and copyrights.

Cheap computers for the masses ($150, $100, or less) threaten the profits. A $149 PC, like the ones being introed at CES 2009, threatens intellectual property: the more computers out there, the more informal "pirates" (as opposed to real ones like Microsoft). And they threaten the US war machine, which is able to employ a relatively small army because it has the most and best high-tech weapons of "Shock and Awe" -- all with "Intel Inside." ("Intel" doesn't just mean "integrated electronics"; it means intelligent systems and military intelligence.) At the same time, Microsoft threatens to lay off 15,000 (labor control method, stateside?)  http://www.dailytech.com/Rumor+Microsoft+to+Cut+15000+Employees+this+Month/article13841.htm because of their software being bypassed by many of the ultracheap notebooks.

SOME BACKGROUND

As Information Week reported on Dec. 21  http://www.infoweek.ca/index.php/CIO-Central/index.php?option=com_virtuemart&Itemid=1&category_id=81&flypage=shop.flypage〈=en&page=shop.product_details&product_id=3823&vmcchk=1 , another company, called COBY (sells electronics on bubblepack cards at Big Lots, CVS, etc.), had planned an even cheaper netbook ($100 !) Earlier in the month, a story had been leaked on these plans. Coby Electronics execs denied them when the story came out. Ross Rubin, who works for a market-research company in New York, was the front man for squelching the story. He helped Coby strongarm bloggers, even the search provider Yahoo, into suppressing the story.

In story a week or so later, Rubin admitted that $100 was not that crazy after all, that "as life quickly moved to imitate art" (as he put it), there was now a $170 computer  http://www.engadget.com/tag/Alpha400/ . It's the same one that is now $149.95. This shows how bloggers as well as the mainstream media hate price deflation -- it's bad for their business.

Now comes Richard Goldberg, presumably Ross Rubin's counterparty at Coby during the Coby PC flap, who is resigning!  http://www.twice.com/article/CA6625466.html And it's just 3 weeks after the story and one week before the all-important CES 2009 show.

Now really -- Ross, Richard -- was it worth it?