Escalating President Obama’s bid to help Americans holding mortgages bigger than they can repay, a powerful Senate chairman today said that banks should be told to forgive bad loans, especially for the poor.

Charging that the U.S. economy is “rigged in favor of the very rich and powerful,” Sen. Tom Harkin, chairman of the influential Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, said that the federal government should work on a way to order banks to write-off part of bad loans as a way of addressing the imbalance between the rich and poor.