Hernando Cortez arrived with five hundred men and a papal blessing
And stripped Tenochtitlan of everything that glittered
The Aztec treasury crossed the Atlantic in the hulls of caravels
And what remained was called the will of God delivered
The East India Company held monopoly on opium production
Forced the trade on China when the Chinese tried to close the door
They fought two wars to keep the drug routes open
And called the Chinese addicts morally impure
The International Monetary Fund arrives with reconstruction loans
At interest rates that guarantee the principal compounds past repayment
The nation signs away its water and its mineral extraction rights
And the economists call it structural adjustment — call it payment
Valefor walks with the thief and also walks him to the gallows
He loves the fellowship of those who take what isn't theirs
The question is which thief receives the scaffold and which knighthood
The answer is determined by the volume of their shares
The man who steals a loaf is given twenty years
The man who steals a continent is given a foundation
Valefor leads them both — but only one walks to the gallows
The other gets a portrait in a hall of higher stations
The fellowship of thieves is very tiered
The small ones hang — the large ones write the law
Valefor tempts them both with equal hunger
But the scaffold only rises for the poor
The savings and loan crisis cost the public one hundred sixty billion
Charles Keating served four and a half years and left
The two thousand eight collapse erased sixteen trillion in household wealth
Not one senior Wall Street executive went and wept
Inside a federal cell — they paid a fine, they wrote a memoir
They took a board seat at a nonprofit and called it penance
While in Detroit and Cleveland families lost everything in foreclosure
On mortgages designed from the beginning to accelerate their sentence
Three strikes laws were written the same year as NAFTA
The factories departed and the prisons opened up their gates
The theft of labor and of future was called economic freedom
The theft of bread was called a threat to social order and the state
Valefor maintains the fellowship — he is consistent
He does not distinguish between the corporate and the desperate kind
The gallows, though, are very selective in their placement
And the fox that guards the henhouse wrote the law on theft you'll find
The man who steals a loaf is given twenty years
The man who steals a continent is given a foundation
Valefor leads them both — but only one walks to the gallows
The other gets a portrait in a hall of higher stations
The fellowship of thieves is very tiered
The small ones hang the large ones write the law
Valefor tempts them both with equal hunger
But the scaffold only rises for the poor
I am the hand that reaches toward the thing that isn't yours
I am the justification built at three in the morning
I am the bonus and the theft I do not know the difference
I am the fellowship of taking
TheSeventhKey_77
