Reply #4: Corporate profits for traded companies must increase year over year, every year

[kenny blankenship]

that has to come from somewhere. Growth for any company or any market is not limitless. Soon enough you've sold to all the people who can buy, and unless a new continent is discovered, or your stable competitors decide to pack it in, your market is about as large as it will get. Somehow, making new versions of the same stuff has to become more profitable. How can you do that? Taking it out of the people who work for you was an inevitable outcome in capitalist logic. Doing that (on a society wide basis) will contract the pool of people who have money to buy your goods. If the raw materials aren't in a price collapsing spiral, you will have to make the goods cheaper, crappier, less durable. You will feel even more pressure to shed workers and pay them less. You will want to break any unions that still affect your production chain. Perhaps you can move the factory to take advantage of rightless, starvation wage coolie labor abroad in foreign dictatorships, or else move your factory to the Mexican border and sneak coolie labor into the country... You're going to need political cover for any of these options, so get out your checkbook and start buying some Democrats. The Republicans would be glad to help you out for the usual fee, but they won't always be in power and you need to keep their "opposition" quiet, too, to be sure of succeess. It will take many years to free yourself of the American worker, and you will need the quiet protection that can only come from well-placed, paid off reliably complicit politicians.