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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.

For a small sample, check out Brave New Foundation's new Web site, Fighting For Our Homes, where you can see video of people doing just that. People like Debra from Pennsylvania who, due to health-care costs, is facing foreclosure on her home of 33 years, or Penny from Texas, who has been pushed to the brink of homelessness as the result of costly repairs necessitated by Hurricane Ike.

"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?

Despite being treated as an afterthought, foreclosures are actually a gateway calamity: every foreclosure is a crisis that begets a whole other set of crises.

Someone loses his or her home. It sits vacant. Surrounding home values drop. Others move out. Squatters move in. Crime goes up. Tax revenues plummet, taking school budgets down with them.

So why hasn't the foreclosure crisis gotten the attention it deserves? A combination of perverse priorities and flawed thinking.

At the congressional celebration of Lincoln's birthday, the Senate chaplain thanked God for our 16th president who, as he put it, was able to "transcend the flawed thinking of his time."

Flawed thinking has been on full display in the way we have approached the foreclosure crisis -- particularly the notion that we can postpone dealing with the crisis while we focus our attention (and hundreds of billions of dollars) on saving Citi, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo.

Clearly, this thinking has been deeply -- and disastrously -- flawed. The public interest -- people being able to keep their houses -- is not aligned with the banks' interest. Banks don't want to adjust non-performing mortgages down to their actual current value because it would lead to marking down the value of the massive asset pools they have rolled the mortgages into.

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.

Given the enormity of the crisis, and the delay in finally putting foreclosures on the front burner, President Obama must be bold.

Obama clearly responds to the pain involved in the statistics. We saw how he reacted to Henrietta Hughes, the homeless woman who stood up at his town hall meeting in Florida and talked about her dire circumstances. And on "Meet the Press," David Axelrod mentioned a "heart-wrenching" letter Obama had received from a woman in Arizona whose husband lost his job, and had to take another job for one-third the pay. "They are really struggling to make their payments and meet their responsibilities," he said. "And she was emblematic of people all over the country."

The nuts and bolts of Obama's plan need to match the empathy. His plan should include mandatory mediation between homeowners and lenders prior to any final foreclosures. A pilot program along these lines, the Residential Mortgage Foreclosure Diversion Program, started in Philadelphia, has proven very successful. According to Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter, the program has prevented or delayed foreclosures in 75 to 80 percent of the cases that have made it to mediation. Currently, many homeowners don't even talk to their lenders until they have been foreclosed on -- partly because the lenders often make it next to impossible to reach them.

"I've been to the City Hall courtroom where the mediation hearings take place," Pennsylvania Sen. Bob Casey told me, "and they are crammed with lenders and borrowers and counselors and lawyers, and they are remarkably effective." Judge Annette Rizzo has been working hard to keep Philadelphians in their homes. She told Dan Geringer of the Philadelphia Daily News:

"There is hand-to-hand outreach to each client here. There is individual caretaking here. The lender lawyers get to know the homeowners as people here. We put a human face on this and they embrace it. So as I work the room, I feel a humanism here on both sides. If necessary, our volunteer lawyers pick up clients and bring them here. Housing counselors make house calls. Our mission is to save lives, one address at a time."

The foreclosure prevention program has worked so well in Philadelphia, it has spread to Boston, Pittsburgh, Cook County, Prince George's County, Louisville and the state of New Jersey. The administration should take this model and apply it on a national level.

It's time to start treating America's homeowners as well as we've been treating Wall Street's bankers.

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(Arianna Huffington's e-mail address is arianna@huffingtonpost.com.)

(c) 2009 Arianna Huffington. Distributed by Tribune Media Services, Inc.