Tuesday, December 7, 2010

The Scarab,
or Complicity in Fort Wayne, Indiana

In memory of my Great-Great-Great Grandfather Hugh McCulloch, born on this day, my birthday, in 1808.

“What is threatening to collapse the dollar today is not that it is not backed by gold. It is that 99 percent of the U.S. money supply is owed back to private lenders with interest, and the money to cover the interest does not exist until new loans are taken out to cover it. Money created privately as multiple “loans” against a single “reserve” is fraudulent on its face, whether the “reserve” is a government bond or gold bullion. The private banks are not really creating credit and advancing it to us, counting on our future productivity to pay it off, the way they once did under the functional facade of fractional reserve lending. Instead, they are vacuuming up our money and lending it back to us at higher rates. In the shadow banking system, they are sucking up our real estate and lending it back to our pension funds and mutual funds at compound interest. The result is a mathematically impossible pyramid scheme, which is inherently prone to systemic failure.” – Ellen Brown

You were sick the night the greenbacks died
In that brain-splat show of force in old Ford’s Theater,
And as they buried any thought we could be free
You pinned the cockroach to your suit in fine obeisance
And let them mint the credits from thin air,
So Gould who stole the nation’s gold
And Morgan who had armed the South
And the House-picked team of psychopaths
Could be owed at last the lives of all your blood.

I for one was collateralized at birth
For the debts owed before more credit could be secured,
But now it’s gotten to the point that you can’t
Even see “It’s a Wonderful Life” any more
—It’s not in any store or TV station—
More mortgages have been re-sold
Than there were deeds to write the debts to begin with,
And all the bets that they would fall have been cashed in
And all the gold to help the banks survive procured
By throwing people on the street without legality.

That’s just the way the system has to work;
One has no right to life save banker’s blessings,
No right to think that counters their control.
They own one’s house, one’s car, the air one borrows.
One pays in exponentials for the right.
Education only matters ‘cos expensive
Just as warfare only matters ‘cos it’s debt.
The scarab only cares that it is owed more
But there is no more debt the world can hold.

Even my grandma’s bank stocks now are worthless,
What you bequeathed to us as your last wisdom.
And I, who write poems from the scarab’s droppings
See them fly away as something worthless, what everything
But money somehow is, that once was not a thing at all
But a relation, like I to you, a long-lost son
Who learned the way to speak the propaganda
That cannot touch the horns of this dilemma:

The question “are we able to wake up?”
“Can we raise the dead – investments – from their sleep?”
“If we threw on shadows light would they be gone?”