About a year ago, I appeared at Netroots Nation with Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR), the Huffington Post’s Ryan Grim and Professor Elizabeth Warren on a panel called “The Forgotten Foreclosure Crisis.” Speaking with Merkley today, I remarked that we could hold the same panel again this year, without changing a word of it, and not be out of date in the slightest. Sen. Merkley agreed.

At a press event in North Portland in front of the home of a family struggling to avoid foreclosure, Senator Jeff Merkley unveiled a six-part plan to fix the housing market and rebalance the relationship between borrower and lender. The plan includes what Merkley calls “lifeline bankruptcy,” which is basically the cramdown proposal to allow bankruptcy judges to modify the terms of primary residence loans.

The Federal Reserve is trying to roll up a key law that allows borrowers to challenge predatory lending. Under “rescission” rules, if a borrower can prove that a mortgage loan was created in a predatory way, they can basically nullify the bank’s right to foreclose. Under the Fed’s new proposal, borrowers would have to pay off the balance of the predatory loan before the bank loses the right to foreclose, which renders a rescission judgment virtually meaningless. The entire point is to void out a fraudulent mortgage.

Yesterday in downtown Los Angeles, 22 activists, including the head of SEIU Local 721 and members of ACCE (the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment), were arrested outside a Chase bank for protesting the foreclosure crisis. The banks have basically disregarding all the legal constraints on their activities, and people have begun to fight back.