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The finger pointing continues as Congress struggles to sort out the need for an almost $1 trillion dollar bailout of America's major financial institutes. Americans are told that we are on the brink of a major depression, and that the years and years of mistakes, incompetence, greed, and potential graft and fraud on the part of the financial industry, supplemented by Congress' failure to anticipate this financial meltdown, have all culminated in the need to commit more money than has ever been spent at one time by our country. This, we are told, is a last, desperate measure to prop up our faltering financial system before we all line up in the soup lines once again. What Osama ben Laden and other terrorists have not been able to accomplish, the destruction of our economy, may still come to roost, but it will be our own financial institutions, negatively enabled by a Congress currently trusted by very few Americans, that shoot our country in the foot, perhaps crippling us for years to come. Now we appear to have two major challenges: fix the immediate problem and identify and hold responsible those who made and let this happen. If business and Congress were just "simple inept," we need to identify and fire those responsible. If these same leaders, administrators, executives and members of Congress intentionally allowed or made this happen, perhaps for their own financial purposes, we need to investigate and prosecute those who violated the laws of this land and violated the pledges most swore to uphold.
The FBI is our nation's lead investigative agency and is currently involved in the probe of the many firms and agencies that appear to be drowning in bad debt, pulling all of us down with them. Names like Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, Lehman Brothers, WaMu, and AIG are in the national headlines, this while the FBI is quietly investigating 30 or more firms and agencies for potentially fraudulent activities that may have contributed to our current national financial and housing crisis. Real estate lenders, appraisers and mortgage brokers are also under investigation, this as the FBI and the American public try to understand how someone without a job or adequate credit scores could buy a home worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, taking on a mortgage that the lender had to know they could not handle. Do we need decent housing for every citizen? Yes, but should greed and not an overwhelming sense of concern for their fellow citizen have been the root cause for this mortgage mess, i.e., the reason why these so-called sub-prime and really stupid mortgages were allowed to go through in the first place, and should the individual and corporate greed have resulted in the violation of the laws of this land, then people, probably many people need to go to jail. While investigators are already looking into mortgage related losses of over $1 billion, this is just a drop in the bucket of the potential losses that the American tax payer is being assigned responsibility for. Although we, as citizens are not screaming for blood, we are crying out for justice, justice for every citizen and justice by not rewarding those responsible for this calamity with golden parachutes while many Americans go without a home, a job, and a retirement account.
The FBI and the IRS are charged with this massive investigation, one that will look at dozens of agencies, result in tens of thousands of interviews, and require hundreds of investigators for many months to try to get to the bottom of this mess. Movies have portrayed financial institutions and companies as holding panicky shredding parties as documents critical to any criminal investigations are chopped in to tiny pieces while hard drives are erased or destroyed. In the real world federal investigators will need to issue do not destroy court orders to the agencies and companies under investigation, and to the employees and executives suspected of having played any role in this massive financial disaster. Then the long process of document review and personal interview will need begin, a process that will probably take us well into the next administration, this while the fraud likely continues with greedy hands trying to get their share of the yet to be decided financial bailout. The rich do get richer… It's amazing to most Americans that at this monumental moment of financial and personal crisis, that Congress and our national government leaders still engage in the blame game; who did what, who came to what the meeting and just voted "present," and which party, and party leader, should be held responsible, this all in apparent gamesmanship as the leadership of America is to be decided in less than two months. Why can't once, just once, both parties put aside their mindless political rantings and do what is best for America, partisan politics and personal gain aside? I can't help but think that we need return to the original purpose and position of our founding fathers, this concerning the selection of our national elected representatives. Even in the 21st century we are told that 75% of us dislike or distrust many of our national representatives, believing them to be more interested in themselves and less in us, the people they are suppose to represent. Perhaps we need to limit terms for Congress and the Senate to two terms. Perhaps we should tell every candidate for office: "put your day job on hold, serve your country for a maximum of two terms, and then go home and let another concerned citizen pick up the ball and run with it." It appears that "professional politicians," many of whom need to raise $5,000 a day in contributions to stay in office, simply do not have the best interests of their constituents at heart. After all, this national crisis did not happen overnight.
Most know that we didn't just wake up last week and find that someone had charged $700,000,000,000 to our national credit card. Both the Bush and Clinton administrations, for example, tried to reign in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, but Congress didn't see the need for such action and, therefore, the mess continued to compound itself. Why were our representatives so blind then and so stubborn now? Although there are no federal laws that cover sheer stupidity and gross professional ineptitude, those that lined their pockets while our economy sank, therefore requiring this bailout, need to be ferried out and held responsible. We the people must decide whether the bailout is actually good for America, but, after all, "we" really don't get to decide, it's the men and women in Congress, those who let us get into this mess in the first place that continue to poster and pontificate, covering up their inactions while refusing to accept any personal responsibility for how we got here in the first place. Forty-four percent of Americans are deathly against this bailout, indicating if an agency or individual got into trouble because of stupidly or greed, then those who acted responsible should not have to pay the price for those who knowingly put their finger into this financial mouse trap. While tens of thousands want Congress to slow down before it makes any decision, others believe that the American house of cards is teetering on collapse, while our elected officials continue, like Nero, to fiddle around while we watch our economy burn all around us. Like every other event in history, time will surely tell.
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