Taxpayers are bailing out Wall Street, but where will their help come from?

Although it's bad manners to crow when you've been right about something, consumer advocates, civil rights organizations, and community housing groups should be shouting, "We told you so!"

The Neighborhood Assistance Corp. of America, ACORN, NeighborWorks, Center for Responsible Lending, and the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, to name a few, were screaming about the subprime mess and predatory lending practices before it became prime-time news around the world.

These organizations long ago predicted that a crisis in the housing market would result in a staggering increase in foreclosures and cause the largest loss of personal net worth since the Great Depression.

Now these folks are seething because the proposed bailout of financial institutions fails to include any provisions to directly help the people at the center of this crisis. To fund the bailout, $700 billion of Treasury securities would be issued to finance the purchase of troubled mortgage assets.

Federal Reserve chairman Ben S. Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson have argued that we need an immediate fix to stem further market losses and can't afford any tinkering with the administration's proposal.

But Congress has to find a concrete and long-term way to help individual homeowners.

"If the taxpayers - many of them homeowners facing foreclosure - are going to bail out Wall Street, then they should be given the opportunity to bail themselves out as well," said Nancy Zirkin, executive vice president of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights.

Nonprofit leaders want any bailout bill to include a provision that would give bankruptcy judges the discretion to modify primary mortgages.

If bankruptcy court judges could modify people's mortgages, this might give homeowners leverage to compel lenders to restructure loans or face a forced modification in bankruptcy, said Bruce Marks, chief executive of the Neighborhood Assistance Corp. of America.

"This bill should not happen, period," Marks said.

Martin Eakes, chief executive of the Center for Responsible Lending, said the government's plan fails to deal with the root cause of the crisis - families in foreclosure.

Paulson said during a Senate hearing that the bailout isn't ignoring homeowners but rather is intended to remove troubled assets from company balance sheets that have choked off the flow of credit which he said is "vitally important to our economy."

"Address the woes of Wall Street second," said John Taylor, chief executive and president of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition. "Bailing out the very firms that caused this crisis in the first place would be an outrage."

Michelle Singletary is a columnist for The Washington Post. She can be reached at singletarym@washpost.com.