The Slave Labor of the Internet

You see her every day. She sits down with her cup of water and large green tea. Her eyes are red and her hands chapped raw. She wipes the table carefully and opens her computer. She pours water into her tea and wipes her hands with a towelette. From her wrists up her hands are pink. She is gaunt. Her skin sallow. She looks like someone who never goes outside. She stares at her screen and waits for it to boot up. She takes out a small sticky pad and a pen. She then leans forward and stabs the keyboard.

For the next eight to twelve  hours she will frown and squint at her laptop. She will make notes on her sticky pad. Then she will surf looking for God knows what. But she is looking for something. Some marketing firm somewhere is paying her for hits or swipes or likes or views or just data. It doesn't matter. When they built the atomic bomb there was a giant factory to produce enriched uranium. It required hundreds of women to sit at a console and move a lever all day long day in and day out. This woman sits for hours upon hours with her hand punching the screen. Day in and day out.

She takes a break at noon  and bends her screen forward then goes for a walk around the strip mall. Usually for fifteen minutes. Then she returns and washes her hands again and pushes up her screen and starts stabbing her keyboard. She does not move for another four hours. And you see her every day and she is not married and you know from her clothes and from her frugality with the tea and the water she does  not have much money.

And sometimes she just sits there and stares out the window. Her only interaction is the dead lifeless imagery of the screen. There are now thousands  like her. Maybe millions. People doing the slave labor of the internet for a buck.

The PItcher...the story of a dream

 

Why does the Tea Party hate the Unions?

If you are populist party why pick on working people? I mean what did they do to you but work and try to get a little ahead and raise their families and own a home and maybe a couple of cars. What is wrong with people who want just a sliver of the pie that the rich gobble up like a feral cats? If the Bush tax cuts expired and the rich kicked in then half of the deficit would disappear tomorrow. Poof. So why does the Tea Party want to bust the unions and get rid of middle class entitlements if they are really the party of the people?

Or are they a shill for corporations that exploit the dark crevasses of the American psyche. Our secret xenophobia of the other that creates a birther movement because we have an African American President, then starts in on middle class entitlements like they are a Socialist plot. Could there be any bigger power play in America than dressing up a woman in Patriotism and folksy idiotic Alaska ditties, outfitting her with a great body and looks that can kill and then having her say every heinous thing about working people that gets fed to her by a network designed to break the backs of the working class?

So why does the Tea Party hate Unions? Are they an extension of the heinous government that offers Medicaid to the poor, Medicare to the elderly, tax deductions and Social Security for the middle class? Its like the woman from Wisconsin I talked too who said she hated the teacher unions, but whose husband was in a union. But that's different. They aren't radicals she said. Teachers are radicals? Oh I get it now. Those people in puffy jackets with a hats and scarves in Madison Wisconsin are radicals. My daughters first grade teacher a radical. Right.

But really. Mr. Hoffa calls the Tea Party a bunch of sonsofbitches and can you blame him? They are trying to eviscerate working class people. Wouldn't you call them a bunch of sonsofbitches. I'm not in union. I don't have a pension or retirement. I will will work (write) until the day I die. Should I bust the union because they are covered and I'm not? Thinking of it that way it does seem like class envy.

So that must be it. I think I will trade off my two degrees and years of doing what the hell I wanted to be in a Union and work my ass off. This must be the reason the Tea Party people hate them because they envy the unions for their jobs and their benefits. Wow. I guess things are pretty bad when we are envying a bunch of people working on assembly lines and in factories,warehouses and mills.  Or those rogue teachers in their cinder block luxury offices grading papers in schools without air conditioning.

 Sonsofbitches. All of them.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Rocket Man First Chapter--The American Dream Gone Wrong

Obama walking the Wisconsin line

Brats outside of bait shops. Cheese and really crappy Wisconsin wine.  Curds from the men who sit in the bars. Oh hey there. Lakes and lakes and lakes. Bars on every corner. Journey and Reo Speedwagon blasting out of a T Top. Shiny union jackets and women who eat too many BRAAATS and drink too many of Milwaukee's Best. Welcome to Wisconsin just a hop skip and a jump away from Chicago where we all escape to swim and putter around in boats and get some RR among the cornfields and small lost Germanic towns.

Chances are Obama shot up there when he was hanging out in Hyde Park. Maybe he saw it the way we all see it and the way it is. The Land Before Time. At least the land in the seventies where facial hair is still cool and guys wear their hair like Steve Perry still and woman still layout to get that orange glow. Good times. Meat and potatoes baby. Except now the land before time is getting caught up in our twenty first century mess and the President is trying to walk the Wisconsin line. Fiscal responsibility, but leave the Unions alone. He can't seem to make up his mind.

Tough line to walk. Like the Chicagoans the Wisconsinites tolerate but need their tourist dollars, he is conflicted. Unions are big supporters but the political winds are deficit driven and the states are broke broke broke. Now the Teaparty is descending. To have a brat or not have a brat. Maybe a little ice fishing. Maybe a little water skiing. Pick up some leaches and head out. But something has to give and the President is trying to figure out which way to go.

All eyes on the Cheese heads who kicked our Bears butt. It had not been a happy season for anyone North of Chicago except for the Packers. So it will be interesting to see if the President decides to partake of Wisconsin hospitality or be that guy who says the seventies are over and Trans Ams really are gas hogs and Journey broke up a long time ago and Unions are kaput. Brats and beer or sushi. Hmmm. Hard choice.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will blast off in April

Every writer wants to be a teacher

I don't know when it happened man but everybody I know wants to be a teacher now. Especially writers. The down turn turned every vocation into something that could vanish overnight and that includes writing. Teaching used to be regarded as the sort of thing you would do if nothing else worked out. Oh yeah I couldn't make it in the private sector so I'll go teach. Nothing against teachers it was just sort of those that cant do teach you know. Not anymore.

Teaching is one cool gig now. Benefits with a capitol B. Health care man, pension, great hours, summers off, get to learn something and you can not be fired. Take that last one and it is worth everything else. Tenure baby. You can not get axed no matter how bad things get and when you retire you still get your salary. And you get to hang out with other cool people who are doing something other than scratching for the all  mighty buck.

I taught for a while as an adjunct at a Community college and we all wanted a permanent position. But there were only a few and so we all scratched and clawed and tried to win favor with the powers that be. But there were twenty adjuncts and five full time. No way. I washed out like a lot of writers do with teaching because I couldn't stop writing. But I had this fantasy about being the cool teacher writer you know. And now it's all going down in Wisconsin. They will go after the teacher gig because it is sweet. All good things come to an end in this recession man, even for the teachers.

www.billhazelgrove.com
Rocket Man will blast off in April

The Death of General Motors

Geitner and the boys have told GM to get ready to file bankruptcy. GM is already spinning it as a "quick bankruptcy". Quick or slow the result will be the same. There will be a new GM and an old GM. You better hope you aren't at the old GM. The old GM will be dismantled, factories sold off, people terminated, unions busted, shareholders wiped out. The pension will be tossed into the new GM, but guess what, it is a cool thirteen billion light, so the Government (us) will pick up that tab. But the unions will take it on the chin. Basically, the era of the union will end when GM slips into BK land.

That's what this is really all about. New economy and old economy and what emerges from GM will not resemble the old company. It better not. The only way consumers will return will be a radical transformation along the lines of Apple transitioning from Mac into IPOD. We all knew it was coming. Americans are not buying cars. In fact, Americans aren't buying much of anything and the great flush is under way. Detroit is getting flushed out weather it wants to or not along with the banks and every other company that doesn't really work anymore. Planned obsolescence finally zeroed in on one of it's own.

As my father in law said, do we really need new cars every five years? Not really. Cars now last ten years or more and that's a good thing because who can afford to replace them now? So went General Motors, so went the country. Well the country is undergoing radical change where newspapers, banks homes, cars, people are all being reevaluated in the light of a digital economy that changes with nanosecond speed and updates the consumer in the same flash of lightning. We had all better get used to pulling our own weight now because there is simply no fat left and now there will be no cars either. At least cars from General Motors.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com

http://www.pantonnepress.com/chapter1.pdf

http://www.examiner.com/x-6837-Culture--Sociology-Examiner