The Plains of Erogg

Heaps of Flesh

Wand

Dream

Embrace

Adrift

We will bend and we will suffer
We will close our eyes and obey
We will silence the truth tellers with our cowardice

I walk through rivers of spent syringes glowing grey white
Like the skin of the breathing corpses on either side of me
Offering the needles to their necks, the tender skin under their knuckles
Deliverers of death that will be their only grave stones

I have been evicted from my business
I have no way of making a living
I have been evicted from my home
I live in my car
Each morning I stretch painfully
Working out the arthritis
I take a whore’s bath
I put on a coat and tie from the trunk
I smear deodorant under my arms
I chase away the horror so I can survive the interview

There is hope
There is hope
There is hope

I see the same look on their faces
Every time I walk through a door
Too old
Too much of the truth to look at today
Let alone every day
I walk the long miles back to my car
The bus is expensive
There is an empty space where my car was parked
Waiting for me
Waiting for me

There is hope
There is hope
There is hope

A utility company blows up a neighborhood
To save money
It is convicted of six felonies
No one goes to jail
The fines to be levied are dropped from six hundred million to five
The company appeals
And raises its rates

We will bend and we will suffer
We will close our eyes and obey
We will silence the truth tellers with our cowardice

Chancellors at a world renowned public university
Raise their salary and raise tuition
Every year
Millions are spent on their personal security
Tax money and private donations
Are invested in private online universities
That they own majority stock in
Their president is former head of
Homeland Security
Professors are adjunct contract workers
Employees salaries are halved
Students are enslaved in debt
With no way to pay is off
Unless they code

Code and you
Eat sea urchin roe on a bed of truffle quinoa
Drink thirty year old scotch in an artisan cocktail of cucumber juice and coco puffs
Spend $500 on a pair of torn jeans
Rent a two bedroom apartment for seven grand
Ride a private bus to work
Start an app
With an angel investor
That writes a simulation of a birthday card to your grandma
Takes a picture of your dogs droppings
Delivers artisan pizza to your door
Cleans your toilet
Washes your feet
Disembowels the middle class

We will bend and we will suffer
We will close our eyes and obey
We will silence the truth tellers with our cowardice

They have innovative palates

                                                 They have innovative palates
.
Most said the pizza delivery was fast and they appreciated the no tips policy.
Baking en route means more customers. A truck makes 56 stops. That replaces a lot of expensive pizza delivery employees.
Most employees realize that hiking the minimum wage to $15 an hour will mean fewer jobs and more automation.
Those folks deserve to continue to get skills and resources to progress through their careers. We sponsor educational opportunities for our line cooks.
On how to make better pizzas faster for less wages.
Ten million in venture capital start up.
A service economy that is fueled by a few elite who have gotten rich by bleeding the productive  economy dry and turning the middle class into proletariat slaves who serve the elite and the few managers of the service economy whose ultimate goal is to develop AI and robotic replacements for their line cooks.
And their delivery truck/pizza oven drivers.
And all the other drivers.
And all the other cooks.
And all the other waiters.
And all the other salespeople.
And all the other grocery clerks.
And all the other house keepers.
And all the other proletariat slaves.
No more slaves!
Free! Free at last! God Almighty, free at last!

Please Explain

Please Explain
The oligarchy’s venture “philanthropists” breed and feed their spawn, CEOs of the unicorn startups, from UBER to Munchery, and spread the cancer of the on demand economy throughout the world. As it metastasizes, both creator and created are so poisoned with power, they are an almost unrecognizable caricature of themselves. Everything around them, their fellow citizens, their wives, even their pets become gilt couture play things to wear and discard while the power that drives them, technology glowing in the perfect metaphor of the cell phone has turned from a liberating promise into a gilded dagger that eviscerates the rest of us. All that sustains us, from the food we eat, to the jobs that once gave us a way of life, to our democracy, to our planet, to our very humanity falls out of our bodies into a steaming pile at our feet.
(I’ll be speaking this Sunday outside of the Brown Jug Saloon on the corner of Eddy and Hyde)

Mine Is This Big

Crawling Back To Where He Came From

Slavery on a Plate

  
                                                       SLAVERY ON A PLATE  


     What if we were conquered and enslaved? What if everything that was once ours was no longer? What if it happened without an invading army, valiant battles, a great struggle that somehow, no matter how heroically we fought, we lost? What if it happened without us even knowing it was happening, without even a chance for a fight? What if we just one day woke up conquered and enslaved?
   Once we made more of more different kinds of things than the rest of the planet. Today we make almost nothing. A few of us gamble with money they print out of thin air. A few of us make apps that deliver a burrito in the middle of the night. A few of us make perpetual war. The rest of us who lose everything when that gambling goes bust, who deliver that burrito in the middle of the night, whose sacrifices for their country in that perpetual war are rewarded with lost limbs and lost minds, the rest of us who face a retirement home in the back seat of our car or a tent under a bridge are told that we are blessed with The Sharing Economy, an economy of masters and slaves that has nothing to do with sharing and is all about subjugation and conquest.
   Uber is bragging about its new $2000.00 a week incentive to recruit drivers and offset its fifty percent defection rate. If a driver works sixty hours a week at two rides an hour, drives seven hundred miles, accepts ninety percent of fare requests, pays Uber a twenty five percent commission and forks over $378 for gas and wear and tear (figured by Uber and omitting car payments, insurance, license, etc.) that works out to (according to Uber’s calculations) $18.70 and hour, or (Uber’s figure) $1122.00. Subtracting the $1.55 Uber booking fee per ride times two per hour brings it down to $936.00 or $15.60 an hour. Then, since you are an independent contractor and Uber doesn’t contribute to your taxes, another 15.3%  is due for social security and medicare and, according to 2015 income tax rates for income between $9,225 and $37,400 filing single, yet another 15% in income tax. That works out to $10.45 an  hour. So if you drive complete strangers anywhere they want to go sixty hours a week for three hundred and sixty five days a year with no health care, no unemployment, no paid holidays or sick days, no retirement, you can net $32,688 and twelve cents a year. As long as your car holds out.
    Not so many years ago there really was a flickering American dream, a democracy that was far from perfect, that had more than its share of inequality and injustice but was working toward a better life for its citizens, mostly middle class who either worked for themselves in small businesses or worked for an employer who paid them well and offered job security, decent benefits and retirement. Its police were members of the community. Its media were the guardian of its freedoms. Its food came from citizen farmers. The homes and businesses of its citizens were financed by community banks. The term Main Street was not a cliché spouted by gas bags. There was a Main Street in town with a book store, a shoe store and a drug store, a ladies clothing store, a men’s clothing store and a toy store, a grocery store, a gas station, a nursery, a doctor, a dentist, a beauty salon and a barber, most owned by independent business people often for generations who were their own boss living in their own home making a decent living raising a family in an interconnected community.
     Now we have Walmart. Now we have meth and heroine addiction in every corner of the country. Now we have corporate schools teaching children what to think, a corporate ‘health care’ industry that sucks the life out of us, corporate banks that bury us in debt, corporate prisons with more people in jail than any other country.  Twenty-two percent of our children live in poverty. Seventy-six percent of us live paycheck to paycheck. Our democracy is no longer. We have a police state that watches every move we make. Now if we work really, really, really hard sixty hours a week, three hundred and sixty-five days a year as we sink deeper and deeper into debt to make ends meet, we can make $32,688 and twelve cents - slavery on a plate.
Rick Hill
5/16

Make America Great Again

The Donald