Financial Crisis: Who's REALLY To Blame?

I had to turn off the TV just 9 minutes into the Vice Presidential Debate. It is painfully clear that both political parties are still trying to place the blame for the nationwide financial crisis on big business and unscrupulous lenders when, in fact, it was our government itself that put enormous pressure on lenders to make the ill-fated 125% home mortgage loans to people who were not capable of making the payments -- in the name of Equal Opportunity.

The [Democratic] Clinton White House sent specific instructions to the FHA and HUD to relax mortgage application qualifications, going so far as to insanely specifically include Food Stamps as qualifying income. The administration then offered large bonuses to Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac executives who met or exceeded their goals in this outreach. These were the huge executive bonuses we've read about and they were sponsored by your own Government, not by Big Business.

With such a large ready market in place it was necessary to devise financial instruments to handle it all and that's when the house of cards began to build, as futures and derivatives traders took the mortgage insanity to crisis levels.

It was THE GOVERNMENT and not Big Business who got us all in this mess. Check it out for yourself. You'll find that the real culprits are the same people who go on TV trying to buy your votes by promising change, when they themselves should be changed -- replaced -- by lawmakers and a President who understand business.

DALTON HAMMOND