Reply #45: Again (and now ever more obviously with malice) you misquote me:

[newswolf56]

"you think employing people is stealing from the workers, and you think using a machine is stealing from the workers too?"

It is profoundly telling you would derive the above statement from what I really said -- 'The myth of “wealth creation,” a shibboleth of the modern world, seems to have come from three sources: the vital need of capitalism to obscure the reality of class-struggle by obscuring the exploitation inherent in all capitalist economic relationships; the tendency of capitalism to euphemistically disguise the profits gained by replacement of workers with machines as “created wealth” (rather than wealth stolen from workers); and the false and ruinous prejudice at the core of Abrahamic religion (and therefore inherent in all societies so founded) that man is not part of nature and is therefore exempt from natural law.'

Despite the inherent falsehood of capitalism, I know of no capitalist so dishonest he will deny that the motivating force of automation is the increased profit that results from replacing (relatively expensive) workers with (cheap) machines -- our jobs stolen with the result we workers are flung into permanent impoverishment from which no escape is even remotely possible.

Nor do I know of any capitalist so dishonest he will deny that the ultimate goal of all personnel policies is the extraction of maximum productivity for minimum cost -- not "fair" cost or "living wage" but MINIMUM cost -- and minimum cost enforced by an entire system of laws, courts, goon squads and police all intended to hold the worker in the most abject and servile bondage possible: our work stolen by an economic system now ever-more-brazenly structured from top to bottom to facilitate just such thievery -- the paycheck equivalent of a despised company-store merchant who habitually short-changes all his customers.

While it is true the U.S. workforce was once adequately recompensed, those days -- and the American Dream that was their byproduct -- are gone forever, lost to the fast-approaching post-apocalyptic realities of Peak Oil and environmental collapse, vanishing into a new and eternal Dark Age beyond even the faintest hope of recall. The lot of American workers and in fact all the world's workers is naught but ever-more-intensified oppression in every way imaginable -- a tiny ruling class living behind impregnable fortifications in obscene opulence, the remainder of us condemned to Third World squalor of a kind most of us cannot even imagine -- the ultimate reality of capitalism now finally revealed in all its tyrannosauric savagery since there is no longer even the sadly imperfect alternative of the Soviet Union to keep it in check.

Of course I'm amazed by those who cannot see how capitalism is increasingly savaging every worker on the planet -- not to mention methodically destroying the planet itself -- and all in the name of ever-expanding greed: the genocidal/ecocidal shibboleths of "profit" and "growth." I'm only slightly less astounded by those who still deny the fact -- crystal-clear to every real environmental scientist on earth -- that until we subdue the capitalist threat once and for all, we have absolutely no hope of saving either ourselves or our planet. Your inability to grasp these ever-more-obvious truths merely begs the question: pray tell in what posh club or walnut-paneled boardroom have you spent your adult life?