Such naivete. One would think
that the Working Class had never heard
of a loss leader, or Brer Rabbit’s plea,
“Please don’t throw me in the briar patch”,
when indeed that was where he wanted to be.

Corporate Vultures loosed their cadaverous grip
on wages and hours strictly for their own benefit,
so “labor units” would have the shopping time
to service the corporate bottom line
by returning their meager weekly wages,
the only portion of the wealth Labor created
that the Vultures had not already appropriated.

Capitalism’s out-of-control, metastasizing
method of mass production
needed the corresponding outlet
of burgeoning mass consumption,
which, aided and abetted by worker productivity
and psy ops created by the advertising industry,
could be used like small pox-laden blankets
to pass infectious greed
from the Vultures to the Working Classes,
instilling in them the desire to emulate
their exploitative predators, thereby sealing their fate.

Labor unrest was lessened
by diverting the freedom
to choose the direction of one’s life
and replacing it with a myriad
of meaningless choices
which were actually a bribe -
the dizzying array of mass produced goods
corporations had already chosen
for the workers to consume.

Not only would profits soar like vultures
circling the carrion of the American Dream,
but corporate supremacists could exercise
a humiliating Droit de Seigneur
at the end of every weekend.
For Labor had won nothing
but a royal reaming
froma scheming cabal
of Vultures who were succeeding
in picking the corpse
of the American Working Class
clean.

As we go back on the rack,
grudgingly trudging in each Monday,
to the eternal treadmill
and the Iron Maiden of wage slavery,
we yet again submit to rape
by the corporate supremacists
made all the more onerous
by the knowledge that they own us
as they rip away the raw
and partially regenerated
maidenhead of freedom
the weekend
sadistically
created.

“What the people want is very simple - they want
an America as good as its promise." - Barbara Jordan