A day before the Federal Reserves cut interest rates yet again, astute and straight-talking social commentator, Mike Whitney, wrote: "The stakes couldn't be higher for Ben Bernanke. If the Fed chief decides to lower rates at the end of April, he could be condemning millions of people to a death by starvation [...] Bernanke, with one swipe of the pen, now has an opportunity to send more people to their eternal reward than Bush." When Bernanke first came on, the Seattle Post Intelligencer commented that "he will have to get into the habit of parsing his words extremely carefully as he moves into a job where the wrong head tilt or inflection can make or lose millions." What kind of a job is it where a tilted head or an inflection can cause fortunes to evaporate? Where one swipe of the pen will kill millions? The New York Times' Richard W. Stevenson wrote about Alan Greenspan, Bernanke's predecessor: "his every phrase will be transmitted instantaneously to stock and bond traders worldwide and [...] his merest inflection can send markets stampeding." As poets, we spend our lives massaging inflections and tilting heads in front of empty chairs, but no one shudders, no money appears and no family goes hungry.

People are going hungry because the world is awashed with our rapidly depreciating dollars. On April 22, 2008, Oscar Spengler wrote in Asia Times: "The global food crisis is a monetary phenomenon, an unintended consequence of America's attempt to inflate its way out of a market failure. There are long-term reasons for food prices to rise, but the unprecedented spike in grain prices during the past year stems from the weakness of the American dollar. Washington's economic misery now threatens to become a geopolitical catastrophe."

One can make a dollar even more ethereal by printing poetry on it. After a reading I gave at Evergreen State College earlier this year, two individuals, one male, one female, white, youngish and unarmed, not visibly drunk, stoned or tripping, gave me these mysterious bills no store would accept [click on each image to enlarge]: