Wrong End of the Stick

Copper theft is a rising problem
No commodity is more stolen
Larger, more profitable hauls of copper.
Thieves cut down the cable
From telephone poles and haul it away
Copper is an enticing metal to steal
It's easily recycled, and it's relatively plentiful and accessible,"
It's certainly not a spur-of-the moment crime.
This is a stick up. Give me all your pennies
Increasing demand in China and India
Once the powers plundered the colonies
Now it is their turn
Every time prices go up, just free market enterprise
With a revenge

All around the country, stealing scrap metal:
Telephone wires, air conditioner coils, and old radiators
Are just some of the sought-after items.
Petty criminals have also resorted to stealing
Aluminum gutters and copper downspouts
And some folks even get aluminum siding ripped away
Thieves simply pull up, drop off, get it weighed,
And pull away with the money.

Thieves smash windows, break in and gut property
For the copper pipes
As the economy slows and foreclosed homes stand empty and vulnerable.
Stories are unfolding nationwide as a glut of home foreclosures
Coincides with record highs in the price of copper and other metals.
Growing numbers of banks are balking at lending
To prospective buyers of foreclosed homes
That are stripped of copper pipes and other metals,
Further depressing housing prices.

Along with copper, the air conditioners and garbage disposals
Are often torn out.
When all the copper is taken out, the house
Becomes a knock-down.
Having a depressing impact on property values.

80 percent of recycled copper is exported to China and India.
To build their infrastructures
A different sort of prospector is at large
On a quest to harvest the dark metal
Shinning up utility poles
Stealing hundreds of feet of cable at a time
Wire is wire and pipes are pipes
Just another commodity


Recycling is working
It's just that now its our turn
To be on the wrong end of the stick

Welcome, to the Third World


QUOTE: Things and events happen at certain moments, the judgement which determines the occurrence of the thing or the event can only come after them; it therefore has its date. But this at once fades away, in virtue of the principled deep-rooted in our intellect, that all truth is eternal – Henri Bergson

Today its back to the Coffee Break, its bleak (the weather not the coffee) a cold front having blown in, leaves are falling and today I am reading:

Gertrude Stein – Three Lives;
Philip F Gura – American transcendentalism: a history;
Deborah Baker – A Blue Hand: the beats in India;
V S Naipal – A Writer’s People: ways of looking and feeling;
David Gardner – The Science of Fear;
Robert Musil – The Man Without Qualities
The Collected Poems of Jean Toomer
Mark Strand - Chicken, Shadow, Moon & more

I am hunkering down for the winter, not my favorite season - the stubble of barren wheat fields and a flat horizon of boney fingers grasping for a washed out sky here in the Mid-West.