Bank of America has been notoriously slow in getting borrowers into mortgage loan modifications over the last few years, losing paperwork, running borrowers in circles, and then resorting to foreclosure fraud to push borrowers out of their homes. And as it turns out, it’s not only loan modifications that the bank can’t keep straight. As Eamon Murphy laid out at Daily Finance, one couple needed to cut a music video mocking the bank in order to finally get BofA to close on its mortgage after a more than two month delay:

Ken and Meredith Williams’ humorous music video, the centerpiece of a no-holds-barred social media campaign waged against Bank of America (BAC), convinced the bank to finally close on the couple’s mortgage — despite the lyric, born of frustration with a 72-day waiting period, “Don’t let anybody tell you you’re too big to fail/Cause you belong in jail.”

As AOL Real Estate’s Teke Wiggin reports, Bank of America’s social media team took note. Not only did the bank finally close on the $203,000 loan on Dec. 16 — seven weeks after the Oct. 31 date given originally by a senior mortgage officer — it also agreed to pay the $50-a-day late fees the couple owed to the seller.

Watch it:

This isn’t the first time it has taken a public information campaign to shame BofA into treating a borrower properly. Back in August, the bank foreclosed on a New Jersey man two days after approving him for a loan modification, and didn’t correct the error until New Jersey’s largest newspaper pointed it out.

“The Williams’ loan closed December 16. We apologize for the delay in closing, and for the inconvenience, we provided a credit at closing,” Bank of America said in a statement. Perhaps those waiting on loan modifications from the bank should pick up a guitar and pen a tune if they want to get some attention?

Rick Santorum, the GOP 2012 presidential hopeful who has seen his support triple in Iowa, laid out a plan to end poverty at a campaign stop yesterday. As the Huffington Post’s Amanda Terkel noted, one of the plan’s two components is more marriage:

“Do you know if you do two things in your life — if you do two things in your life, you’re guaranteed never to be in poverty in this country? What two things, that if you do, will guarantee that you will not be in poverty in America?” he asked the crowd.

“Number one, graduate from high school. Number two, get married. Before you have children,” he said. “If you do those two things, you will be successful economically. What does that mean to a society if everybody did that? What that would mean is that poverty would be no more. If you want to have a strong economy, there are two basic things we can do.”

An Economic Policy Institute report from September explained that poverty is “is a jobs
and employment problem, not a marriage problem.” But Santorum’s stance is not surprising considering that he considers “huge moral failings” — among them “letting the family break down” — to be the “root” cause of the nation’s economic woes. And as Terkel pointed out, Santorum “is virulently against same-sex marriage, even though it would increase the number of marriages in the country and theoretically lower the nation’s poverty rate, according to his logic.”

Santorum said earlier this month that he is “for income inequality,” even as he rails against slowing economic mobility as he travels the campaign trail. And though equalizing marriage treatment would, according to his theory, lower the poverty rate, it’s not likely that Santorum is going to be changing his tune on that subject anytime soon.

2012 GOP presidential contender Newt Gingrich executed a high-profile flip-flop on cap and trade, saying in 2007 that “mandatory carbon caps combined with a trading system” were something he “would strongly support,” before disavowing that position this year. “I never favored cap and trade,” he claimed during a Fox News interview earlier this month.

It turns out that this move was more than politically convenient for Gingrich. As the Washington Post noted today, Gingrich’s climate flip-flop was also quite lucrative, with millions of oil dollars pouring into his now defunct energy non-profit after he announced it:

Within weeks, the money began pouring in from major U.S. energy firms, which eventually contributed more than $2 million to American Solutions’ pro-drilling and anti-cap-and-trade campaign for the next two years, according to a review of disclosure reports and other records by The Washington Post.

The top contributors included Peabody Energy of St. Louis, which gave $825,000, and Devon Energy of Oklahoma City, which contributed $500,000.

Gingrich also has a complicated relationship with oil subsidies, deriding Congress for not cutting them, but also mocking progressives for wanting to cut them.

Gingrich, of course, has been quote cozy with corporate interests in the last few years, making and taking millions from various corporations for work in a variety of areas. And those corporations have seen their investment pay off, as Gingrich has peddled his influence to secure earmarks and push for deregulation. His cap and trade flip-flop is simply part of a larger pattern of Gingrich saying what he needs to say to keep corporate dollars flowing.

Last month, there was finally some good news on the jobs front, as the unemployment rate fell to 8.6 percent and the economy created 140,000 private sector jobs. However, the continued slow-burning crisis in housing could easily short-circuit any burgeoning labor market recovery, as the Wall Street Journal detailed today:

Some economists fear the continued slump in housing could short-circuit the recovery in jobs by making it harder for Americans to relocate to find work.

In theory, as the economy improves, people tend to relocate from places where jobs are scarce to areas where companies are hiring…While some relocation continues, economists believe mobility overall has been muted in part because of the housing bust.

Low home values have made it much harder for Americans to move because selling a home is so difficult. That is especially true for the 10.7 million Americans—or 22% of homeowners with a mortgage—who owed more than their homes were worth as of the end of September, according to figures from real-estate firm CoreLogic.

According to work by Prof. Joseph Gyourko of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, homeowners who are underwater — meaning they owe more on their mortgage than their home is currently worth — are 30 percent less likely to move than non-underwater borrowers. So the housing crisis is locking people in place, even if moving could help them find a job and increased mobility could alleviate the unemployment crisis.

Borrowers being stuck underwater is bad enough, but adding to the bad news is the fact that, after slowing down their foreclosure processes to deal with the fallout from the foreclosure fraud scandal, banks have picked it back up, with foreclosure jumping 21 percent last quarter. And there’s little reason to believe things are going to get much better in 2012, as scheduled foreclosure hit a nine-month high in November, meaning a slew of foreclosure is right around the corner. Continued foreclosures will drag home prices down even further, sinking those already underwater down even deeper, in a vicious cycle that will weigh down the wider economy.