It's Time to Treat America's Homeowners as Well as We've Been Treating Wall Street's Bankers

[earth mom]

Arianna Huffington

It's Time to Treat America's Homeowners as Well as We've Been Treating Wall Street's Bankers

If you were to make a pie chart showing the amount of attention given to the banking part of the financial crisis -- both by the government and by the media -- and the amount of attention given to the foreclosure part, the catastrophe being faced by millions of American homeowners would barely rate a sliver.

But we are facing nothing less than a national emergency, with 10,000 Americans going into foreclosure every day and 2.3 million homeowners having faced foreclosure proceedings in 2008.
When we put flesh and blood on these numbers, the suffering they represent is enormous and so is the social disintegration they entail.

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"The banks are too big to fail" has been the mantra we've been hearing since September. But when you consider the millions of American homeowners facing foreclosure, aren't they also too big to be allowed to fail?

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This conflict between the banks' interest and the public interest is why the Wall Street-centric focus of Tim Geithner, Lawrence Summers, Ben Bernanke, etc. is so troubling. This focus has included the marginalizing of Sheila Bair, the chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (and a Republican) who has been ringing the alarm bell about the foreclosure crisis for two years now. She was ignored by George Bush and Henry Paulson -- and there are worrisome Washington whispers that Tim Geithner is following in their footsteps.



http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/its-time-to-treat-america_b_167429.html