PHOTOS, PAGE 1

       Editor and prime reporter is Doug Terry, a veteran television and radio reporter in   Washington, DC, (details below)

It’s bad out there on the mortgage/home foreclosure front. Really bad. The banks are getting mean and meaner every day and they don’t, from all reports, give a damn about working things out and giving the mortgage holder a chance to catch up on payments. Just outside of Pittsburgh, Bank of America sent a contractor to a woman’s house and padlocked it, even though she wasn’t in default. This is from the WSJ:

PITTSBURGH Bank of America Corp. apologized after its local contractor entered the home of a mortgage borrower when she was away, cut off utilities, padlocked the door and confiscated her pet parrot, Luke.

Angela Iannelli, 46 years old, alleged in a lawsuit Monday that the October incident which separated her from her 11-year-old parrot for more than a week and caused so much "emotional distress" that she needed a prescription medication for anxiety.

Since banks charge you a fee if you sneeze the wrong way in their lobby, apologies don’t really matter, do they? Let’s see some cash and an apology. In this case, the woman is suing and chances are BofA will offer a small cash settlement just before the matter is to be heard in court. By pressing her case, she could help the rest of the public by asserting her rights and letting the banks no they can push, but they can’t push too far.

Big companies have lots of lawyers. They pay the lawyers so they don’t have the pay out in disputes with customers and others. So, they will readily tell you to go stuff it rather than make a small payment, because they’ve already made their investment in lawyers and they want to get their money’s worth from that investment. The money they spend on lawyers is also defensive, since they want you, and everyone else, to know that if you sue them, they’ve got the fire power to fight back easily.  It is the same principle as a bee hive: come to close and you are in big trouble.

This is just one of the reasons that the customer is the odd man out in the “free enterprise system”. The customer doesn’t really matter any more to most businesses. They just want you to pay up and shut up. You are an annoyance unless they can make more money from you, period.

For a company like Bank of America, if they anger and lose a thousand customers a day, so what? They are taking in three or four thousand new customers for those they lose. This is one of the very big downsides to having huge national corporations, especially banks: they don’t rely on any base of business, the roam the land like hungry lions in search of prey. Only the largest corporations and the government are big enough to have anything to use as a threat in return for their actions. (Could someone please explain why Republicans want to leave citizens helpless, with nowhere to turn, in all of this kind of mess, other than pleasing their backers, the big corporations?)

There are no signs that the Obama administration is taking any serious steps to rein-in the inherent abuses caused by banks that are so big, and so callous, that ordinary human values mean nothing to them. Instead, they have appointed products of this system to be the regulators and bailout artists in chief. Meanwhile, Republicans are chomping at the bit to get back into power and do away with any effort at further regulation.

2.11.10

LINK TO WSJ (no sub required for this article)

http://tinyurl.com/ygbbdfw

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