Just say No to Main Stream Media dribble and boycott HP.

More than a case that will need to be appealed, is the blatant illustration of the culture of neo-liberalism that adheres to the "growth" mandate - that is: the words in HP 'work' as long as it "grows" - that is, that it is part of the upward movement of financial concentration. In turn describing "growth", not of a healthy journalistic tradition that is consistent in practice but of being part of a false metric. The question is whether liberals will get rid of the four letter (count that hyphen!) word affixed to a classical concept that has been appropriated by a delusional construct.

People, and perhaps Ms. HP herself, I would submit, are terrified because the cat is out of the bag, but are ashamed to admit having been utterly led by the nose to the edge of collapse. It is as though it is better one sacrifice oneself as being dysfunctional in society than stand up with the truth. The system is utterly dependent on 'externalized' destruction of lives, ecosystems, integrity of information, etc. That means that the distancing of 'ancient' (either a century ago or last week) genocides, (distortion of survival of the fittest) is not an old and 'quaint' history, but does in fact apply to all of us.

"John Koeltl ...rejected the argument outright. He ruled that the bloggers had been fully aware that their work was to be unpaid when they signed up for it, and so any compensation would be to rewrite the terms of their engagement retrospectively."

And there you have it - a typical example of Marx's Labor Theory of Value, and the "inviolability of contracts" in all its enslaving glory. $315 million to a billionaire bitch; nothing to the people who created the $315 million of value. And, of course, any writer or writers who had attempted write a contract that includes a cut of the websites value would have been told to get lost and probably been blacklisted for being a "troublemaker".

Creativity in business these days means finding an untapped extractive market. With so many journalists out of work and so many wanting to write, it was simply a case of finding how low the writers would go (zero, in this case) - and then reaping the profits. The law protects capitalism through contract law, so it's a very simple ruling in this case for our "justice system."

Some publications have even stooped to hiring writers in India to write local news in the United States for pennies on the dollar. It takes a lot of gall, and lack of pride in one's objective, to do that sort of thing, but that's the state of the "glamorous" publishing industry these days. Publishers have never adjusted to the lower profit margins today, or figured out a viable Internet model. All they have left is their ability to cut labor costs.

And all of this is happening as people read less and less.

The fact that this exploitation was carried out by Arianna Huffington and company is no coincidence. She's always been somewhat of a Frankenstein monster on the public scene. She convinced her oil-rich then-husband to run for elected office on a conservative platform in Santa Barbara County (he lost, they got divorced). Next, she pops up with a "liberal" news site, exploits her writers and turns it into a celebrity gossip pub to grab ads. She finally sells out to AOL, a company past its prime looking for content so that it can sell ads and leverage its thinning audience.

Lots of people think that everyone benefits from capitalism. But the objective of capitalism is to turn a profit for the capitalists or investors while externalizing costs (typically labor, pollution cleanup costs, etc.). Historically, that's meant operating in an extractive and exploitive manner - at home and especially abroad. Human nature is very different, being cooperative and social, but that doesn't matter under capitalism, or it's something to exploit.

While it may once have been the case that writers had some status and maybe a livelihood of sorts, none of that matters when the business case is mapped out, even though the writers are the talent. The real business is selling eyeballs to advertisers, something that Huffington (an economist) got. It simply doesn't matter what material is put into the machine of capitalism. If they could sell child labor for a profit, they'd do that too. Pink slime - it's a-OK. Capitalism is amoral and the antithesis of people's sense of justice in the world, but it's 100 percent supported by the legal system. Ultimately, in our world, capitalism is based on the ability of the state to use force. Many people in the United States think that any critique of capitalism is Marxism, and will turn off from contemplating this mess. But all of this is just common sense. It's how it works, example after example. And it's getting more and more extreme here in the belly of the beast in the United States.

Hooray! Another great day for capitalism. The people who do the work get shafted, the owners run off with the money. Just another day of business-as-usual.