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With Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson still refusing to bailout homeowners directly, FDIC Chair Sheila Bair has offered details of her new proposal for saving homes. She recommends payments for delinquent borrowers be reduced to fit their income, and that the government reimburse up to 50% of the bank’s losses if those borrowers ended up defaulting after all. The Bair plan would cost $25 billion dollars, which she says would have to come out of the $700 billion bailout approved recently by lawmakers. Over a million homes went into foreclosure in the second quarter of 2008, and two million more Americans are expected to lose their homes in the next two years. In response the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, has called for a minimum 90 day moratorium on home foreclosures accompanied by a structural changes to modify loans and help people stay in their homes. The fact that the FDIC chair and ACORN have similar views on how to tackle the home foreclosure problem, highlights the degree of denial of this crisis among Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and other members of the Bush Administration, especially given how significant the housing foreclosure crisis is within the framework of the entire national economic crisis.

GUEST: Austin King, National Director of ACORN’s Financial Justice Center

For more information, visit www.acorn.org, or call 1-866-67-ACORN.