Alex - I know for a fact you are not a racist
As for the subject of search engine spammers/cheaters - I care not what colour, race, or creed they are - whether they prefer Pepsi to Coke, I don't care about their motives either - a cheater is a cheater is a cheater. There are American cheaters/spammers using Chinese servers to cheat, there are Russian cheaters using Brazilian servers to cheat, there are Eastern Europeans using Canadian servers to cheat - some think
these cheat -
these guys think
these guys cheat. Cheaters can be broken down further too - Surfers cheat, webmasters cheat, sponsors cheat, corporations cheat... and on and on it goes!
Like yourself, I'm a link list owner, I have enough on my plate keeping cheaters at bay on my own little corner of the web. Unfortunately greed is prevalent in all races - the point I was making is that not all members of any particular race are cheaters - most have morals and integrity - and lumping the tendency for greed and deception on any group just because they are outside of ones country is wrong - hence, I did get a little wound up by Gideon's post when I read parasite and foreigner in the same line.
To be honest - I'm past caring who is spamming Google with this and that new technique - let Google worry about it - it's their traffic after all - not mine or any other webmasters - cheaters will always be here - as you say ".. we can bitch and moan and whine and get google to remove their domains at the end of a cycle - only to have it all replaced with another pile of spamming dung". And also, as you rightly say, the only way you can compete with them is improving your own stuff! That I do believe to be true.