On Finance Reform, Foreclosures and Evictions

I haven't posted in a while. And I deeply apologize for that.

What I have been doing is some research on a book I have been writing when I came across an old poem dedicated to a rack renter landlord in Ireland in the 1890 time frame.

When the family and I went to Ireland in 2007 we visited an old manor home called Portumna Castle in east Galway. Inside were some paintings of the family members that ran the estate. Finding them interesting I snapped a pic of each of the portraits, really not knowing why.

I researched them this morning, I discovered I was staring into the face of one of the worst rack renters in Irish history and who perhaps had a hand in the removal of one of my ancestors from County Galway.

I give you Hubert George de Burgh, 2nd Marques, 14th Earl of Clanricarde. There he is.

The reason he's here is simple: even as we speak people are being evicted from their homes. Different from many foreclosures, these are folks whose banks are using robo-signatures and other illegal methods to speed the illegal foreclosure process.

Where in Clanricarde's day, a land agent used a battering ram against the side of the house, for renters who couldn't make the extortionate payments of their landlords; today we have robosigned documents ousting people from their upside down mortgages just when they almost get rightside up.

I think bankers, financiers and elected officials need to tread very carefully around the boiling kettle of public distaste all of this mess has engendered within the American public. While corporate media has many of us like lemmings following the party of the tea, the people who have been and are being boosted from their homes ILLEGALLY are waking up to who is really at fault for all this - bankers and Wall Street thugs - and to the fact that much of this was done in a DELIBERATE EFFORT which is on-going TO DESTROY THE MIDDLE CLASS.

We have to combine what has happened with the outrage of the oil spill to understand THAT ALL OF THIS IS INTENTIONAL and some of the very same people claiming to be outraged at an alleged scheme for a communist take-over and being paid under the table to ship even the bad jobs to China.

This poem from the past could just as easily be a warning from our future.

By “Brigid”, reply to Hubert George de Burgh-Canning 2^nd Marques and 14^th Earl of Clanricarde

Portumna County Galway, Ireland

Circa 1890

So you say we are cunning, ungrateful

Our cabin doors kept on the latch

Show nothing but squalor within them

While money we’ve hid in the thatch

That we smile in the face of “his honor”

And blessings invoke on his track

While we mutter a curse as he leaves us

And shake the clenched fist at his back

But you don’t give a hint, my Lord Marquis

That we dared not to own those few pounds

Or show signs of comfort around us

For fear of your sharp scented hounds

For fear of your spies and informers

On the watch to report to their lords

If their serfs had coin in their pockets

Or a decent meal on the boards

And you hint not , at times not long vanished

When ye chased us to woods and the caves

Where we wailed over the corpse of our freedom

A poor stricken nation of slaves

We are cunning, aye we needed cunning

When our lives were scarce held as right

And plundered unarmed and unlettered

T’was our last weapon left for the fight

It was men such as you taught us cunning

As up these old tales we must rip

When for Limerick’s trust they repaid us

With pitch-cap and gallows and whip

When we dared not stand upright and fearless

As men should on their own native sod

Nor dared the faith of their fathers

Save in secret to worship our god

Can it be your Lordship in College

Never heard a text all should know

Coming straight from the lips of our savior

Men should only reap as they sow?

Why the words of our poor hunted teachers

That ever kept school by the hedge

Could tell that if fathers eat sour things

Their children’s teeth will be on edge

And when savage things scattered the cockle

Through our lands years early to late

Till it choked the wheat of good feeling

You must now reap a harvest of hate

Then your Lordship says “nothing would please them”

Though you take but the corn and the wine

And leave us with freehanded bounty

The husks in the trough with the swine.

Oh specimen peer of our rulers

Great the anger with which you give breath

But no doubt we are very ungrateful

For rack rents, evictions and death

For fevered ones homeless at Christmas

Cast out by the snowy ditch side

While my lord draws his ermine around him

And scoffs at their rags in his pride

Ah my lords, up to this it was your day

Our bent necks were held in your thrall

For you were soft ease and rich plenty

For us were the labor and gall

But today we feel life in our members

Good blood each vein flows apace

Tis not the clenched fist to your back now

But sturdy demand to your face

Cling not to your old rules they are broken

Old customs have rotted away

Ireland must be at length for the Irish

No more in strange lands shall you squander

What this land our labor has sown

As of old fell the horse and the rider

You are now overthrown

*Hubert George was an absentee landlord who scarcely set foot in his Irish estate, using a number of land agents to evict 243 tenant farmers, and their families, between 1890 and 1893, for as little as 5 pounds sterling owed in arrears. He was condemned by fellow members of the English Parliament for his cruelty to his tenants.