In all the discussion about how to save the country from this terrible recession, I haven't seen a single actual idea surface for direct help to ordinary people (i.e. the recessed) as a means of stimulating demand or creating a trickle-up effect which would eventually restore the health of the financial markets. I do hear "Save the Credit Markets!" "Rejigger the Banks!" "Green Jobs!" "Lower CEO Pay!" "Rebuild Our Infrastructure" "Get the Dow to Rise Again!" It gives me a warm feeling about us rolling up our collective sleeves and doing...something.  

Why is this? It's all supposed to be about restoring public confidence, but has anyone asked the public what would make them feel more confident? When I talk with members of the public that I know, I hear: fear about housing values, pretty much everyone's only real source of security; fear about jobs, the other source of security; and as a distant third, Wall Street and the banks.

And yet, what's the first thing we all do when the puffs of smoke rise from Washington indicating that an idea has surfaced? We check the Dow Jones Industrial Average, to see whether the people who got us into this mess in the first place approve of the proposed solutions. Weird. Why do we do that?

Let's pretend for a moment that our representatives were elected by voters and not by corporations. What are the measuring tools we should use to determine whether the solutions are working for us? We can be patient--I mean, what choice do we have?--but it seems to me that we ought to be talking about how we the people will know when it's time to be more confident.

I have a hunch that one crucial measurement should be in the arena of housing, where all this began. And it shouldn't be in housing sales but in number of foreclosures, because unless the number of foreclosures drops, sales will just represent a downward spiral of forced bargain-basement selling. (A cellar of sellers, so to speak.) In fact, maybe the measurement should be of number of homeowners saved from foreclosure or numbers of upside-down loans stabilized--numbers which I suspect are shockingly low even after months of discussing the issue.

I was struck by the lukewarm response to Bertha Lewis' post on ACORN's activities to stop foreclosures.

As CEO of ACORN, Ms Lewis is surely the Warren Buffet of poor people. I'm a little uncomfortable with direct action tactics myself, and I could take issue with ACORN's representation of the foreclosed as hapless victims of the man--which I think has unintentionally contributed to the misunderstanding that the foreclosed are either inept or malicious. But at this point, that would sort of be like quibbling over whether the person who issued the hurricane warning ought to have worn a red suit or a blue one. ACORN is the only organization I know of that saw this problem coming a mile away and has consistently been on homeowners' side with a view toward fixing it.

I would like to see ACORN and others scrap the "workout options" presented by the banks, which have been revealed as ineffective, in favor of a more radical approach. It would be interesting to hear more from Ms. Lewis about whether that's what ACORN is doing, and to know whether it's possible to build a consensus around that more radical approach. Testing that here at TPM would be useful.

In any case, a critical measurement for how we are doing will be how many homeowners (and perhaps even how many rental property owners!) are made whole and able to provide stable housing for ordinary people once again.

I'm pretty sure it's a number that none of the big players have dared to look at yet. It's up to all of us to demand that they do so, because our future depends on it.