PRAISE SONG FOR THE BANKERS

Praise song for the bankers.

Each day they go about their chicanery, scamming the scammers, catching each others' eyes or not, bullshitting or about to bullshit. All about us is greed. All greed and scramble, corn-pone targetted sin, each one of them with oiled tongues. One is bitching on CNN, damning a saver, stashing a flier, repairing the PR flack-shredded shield.

All are creating cacophony with credit default swaps, mortgage brokered carry traded bond Ponzi floats, Fed bedding, five hundred eighty-six trillion in derivatives, Congressional nod-nod-wink-wink, stimulus scams, and, above all, the promise of "change".

A woman and her son don't wait to cuss.

A farmer looks at the noisy sky where helicopters drop pesos in bundles bigger than cotton squares, and notes Bernanke's wave. A teacher says: "Take out your calculators. You have only a year to solve the problem."

We encounter each other like hasty promissory notes, promises reserved as napkins under leaky punch bowls.

Why did Madoff and the AIG team cross the road? They ran out of dupes to scam on one side.

We walk into that place we cannot yet see, and call it hope.

Say it plain, that China owns us. Sing the names of those who've brought us here: Nixon and the yellow allergy (gold, that is) and the press (printing, that is); Clinton's Glass-Steagall amnesia; Greenspan's decade-long national  Viagra  allowance leaving us limp and dry; Bush's "shop till you drop"; Paulson's rate slash-and-burn; Pelosi's feckless hypocrisy; greedy and paid-off and scammed lenders; greedy and gullible and scammed buyers.

Some live by: "scam him before he scams me."

Others by "create the hedge rules, then you don't have to worry about how much you take."

What if the mightiest word is energy? Spiritual, fossil fuel, intellectual, electrical, windy, oceanic, physical. Energy that identifies, remembers, and acts on grievances.

In today's false sparkle, this start of winter, anything can happen, any sentence served.

Blessings, as the Chinese say, for these "interesting times";
No lobby'll round up bankers/Fed for their century crimes.