DaytonDailyNews.com

Seattle was the site of bitter irony growing out of the nation's steadily worsening home mortgage foreclosure crisis.

In January, the city's mayor announced a modest foreclosure-prevention pilot program. A total of $200,000 was set aside to provide $5,000 loans to 40 families at risk of losing their homes to foreclosures. The idea is to keep these families current in their payments, buying them time and giving them breathing room to renegotiate or refinance high-cost loans.

Each $5,000 loan must be repaid when the mortgage is refinanced. Participation is limited to families with low or moderate household income — up to $48,000 a year for a family of two or $60,000 for a family of four.

Seattle officials argued that the loans are a sound public investment, noting how foreclosures have consequences to the community at large through lost taxes and lower property values.

Yet, this sensible program made news not because it could do some good, but because of the negative reaction it provoked. Some saw it as a misuse of taxpayer money to rescue people who made poor financial choices.

The attitude is understandable, especially when some foreclosure "victims" are speculators who bought homes beyond their means with no money down in hopes of turning a quick profit.

The lending industry, with help from powerful friends in and out of government, has masterfully exploited this sentiment. The Bush administration and Senate Republicans have rallied under the banner of "no bailout." They have put the kibosh on a bill that could make a real difference — one that would provide bankruptcy courts with the power to modify home mortgages, much as they can now for debt related to vacation homes and family farms.

There is nothing new in this approach. For years, the industry has deflected mounting evidence of lending abuses by claiming that the rising tide in foreclosures and other bad outcomes in mortgage loans is partly the work of a small rogue element in the industry, but more often has resulted from consumers' own poor choices and lack of financial literacy.

The industry's goal hasn't been to promote sound borrowing habits. It has been to duck accountability for its own contemptible, breathtaking irresponsibility in pushing expensive loans on unsophisticated borrowers and then packaging and peddling the mortgage as shaky investment securities — all of which has contributed to what may become the worst home foreclosure crisis since the Great Depression.

The irony of some people in Seattle lacking sympathy for those at risk of losing their homes is that Washington state's Department of Financial Institutions has provided among the most vivid revelations of lending industry chicanery and abuse of consumers in mortgage transactions. It has offered painstaking proof of how unwitting consumers have been hustled into loans containing predatory terms.

Lending industry opposition to providing major relief to borrowers in trouble is part of the same hustle.