SOUNDING OFF:

We usually don’t have to wait very long in one of Joe Bell’s weekly columns for Joe to get to his usual condescending, snide, partisan, political remarks, but in his weekly diatribe last Thursday (“Woes on Wall St. nostalgic), Joe made us wait clear until the final paragraph for his endorsement of Barack Obama for president and his derision of his hated Republican Party. This guy is as predictable as the sun coming up. And his column is supposed to be about local events. What a farce!

And just as predictable, Joe is wrong — yet again. To hear Joe tell it, the current woes of our credit market and the housing industry are all the fault of President Bush and the Republican Party. I don’t know where you’ve been hibernating for the last two years, Joe, but your Democrats have been in complete charge of Congress since November 2006.

I’m also sorry to break this to you as well, Joe, but the seeds of this sub-prime mortgage meltdown were sown by none other Bill Clinton and his democratic administration more than a decade ago. And this comes from Clinton’s head economic advisor, Robert B. Reich, who stated on MSNBC on Sept. 15 that the blame for the current meltdown could be laid squarely at the feet of Robert Rubin (Clinton treasury secretary at the time) and Alan Greenspan, then-chairman of the Federal Reserve.

According to Reich, “they were so obsessed with multiculturalism that they dictated where mortgage lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac could lend and originally helped create the market for the high-risk sub-prime loans now infecting the financial community like a retrovirus infecting the balance sheets of many of Wall Street’s most respected institutions.” Institutions like: Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Bros., Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, etc. Any of these firms sound familiar?

Reich went on to say tough new regulations (under the Clinton administration) forced lenders into high-risk areas (the end of red-lining) where they had no choice but to lower lending standards to make the loans that sound business practices had previously guarded against. It was either that or face stiff penalties.

To add insult to injury, the Clinton administration used Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as its own personal “farm team” to farm out favored democratic operatives like Franklin Delano Raines and Jim Johnson, whom Clinton successively sent to take the helm of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac during his administration where they promptly proceeded to loot these institutions of more than $100 million for their own personal piggy-banks. Next was Jamie Gorelick (Janet Reno’s former aid), who proceeded to loot another $75 million for her account. In the end, Fannie Mae had to pay $400 million in civil fines for these egregious violations and others under their leadership. And who is now one of Obama’s top economic advisors? None other than Raines! And what has Johnson been up to? He headed up Obama’s vice presidential search committee and stayed on as one of his most trusted economic advisors.

TOM WILLIAMS lives in Newport Beach.