Song of the Day: Saturday 7/23/11

Banks of Marbleis the Royal Song of the Day. This song was written by Les Rice. You can find this song on page 180 of Rise Up Singing. It’s still hot out. Just like yesterday. And entirely coincidentally we are on the next page of Rise Up Singing from yesterday.  My friend Linda introduced me to this song last week.

I spend a good part of my daylight hours helping people deal with their mortgage banks.  The mortgage industry is such a disaster because everything is broken up between different corporations so no one has any responsibility.  The simplest explanation of the mortgage industry is that it is broken up between two different entities: 1) the investor who owns the promissory note and 2) the servicer who is basically a bill collector.  You only get to deal with the front man, the servicer, rather than the investor who holds the real power.  If you try to contact the investor, they give you a Sgt. Shultz “I know nothing attitude.” The servicers are byzantine, disorganized, redundant, bureaucratic and sometimes arbitrary.  Occasionally, I will hop over to Linda’s office to express my frustration. Her response was to introduce me to this song which, like so many great songs, was popularized by Pete Seeger:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-o3CJytIPE] 

But the banks are made of marble
With a guard at every door
And the vaults are stuffed with silver
That the farmer sweated for

I have come to realize that it is the bankers, not the banks that are made of marble. The banks are required to pay fines in the millions of dollars for wrongdoing that wrecked the world economy.  Yet not a single bank goes to jail.  How can wrongdoing have happened on such a scale and not a single human being is responsible?

Just like when these banking corporation were given billions of dollars of TARP funds because the corporate media talking heads say they are too big to fail so it is in our interest to give them tax dollars for free.  Yet the same corporate media elite treat the home-owning taxpayers who are victims of the banks wrongdoing as the criminals themselves for asking for help to keep their homes and protect their neighborhoods.  Talk about the victim having no rights.

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