SOUNDING OFF:

It is unfortunate that Tom Williams’ Sounding Off (“Columnist laid blame with the wrong party,” Sept. 23) chose to cherry-pick and mischaracterize former Labor Secretary Robert Reich’s MSNBC interview to make yet another tired claim that the Democrats are responsible for everything that ails America.

Reich attributed responsibility for this financial mess to both political parties. Reich said that with respect to “the meltdown on Wall Street, the sub-prime mess, it’s very clear that there has been a relentless desire on the part of people in Washington, Republicans and the Bush administration to look the other way, not to regulate and not to even enforce current regulations.”

After discussing the Democrats’ attempt to deregulate the market by splitting commercial banks from investment banking and reducing short-term interest rates, Reich concludes, “So, yes, there is some responsibility on Democrats, some responsibility on Alan Greenspan and the Fed. But I’ll tell you, the Republicans have avoided any kind of regulatory oversight of this entire mess, and not just housing and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, but all of these institutions have just gone haywire.”

Reich’s bigger point is how did we get here, and how do we fix this mess? If lack of regulation is the cause, its origins go back further than the Clinton administration. The conservative agenda to deregulate anything that remotely restricts business or industry started under Reagan and has reached its apex under Bush 43.

May I be so bold to suggest that the 600-pound gorilla in the “financial mess” room is the lobbyist who by and large represents those who benefit most from deregulation and who works both sides of the aisle? Williams mentions former Fannie Mae Chief Executive Franklin Raines and his alleged connection to the Obama campaign. Is he equally outraged when Republican advisors and lobbyists engage in questionable conduct?

What about the news that Freddie Mac, “one of the giant mortgage companies at the heart of the credit crisis, paid $15,000 a month from the end of 2005 through last month to a firm owned by Sen. John McCain’s campaign manager,” Rick Davis?

More importantly, how did we get to this state where “regulation” is such a dirty word? The current financial mess is evidence that not all regulation is a bad thing, and there is no such thing as a free lunch or a totally free market (i.e., the billion-dollar taxpayer bailout). I suspect we could endlessly go tit-for-tat picking out instances of abuse of power and assessing blame on both sides, but this solves nothing.

Until we start electing representatives who have the political will to fix our financial, political and infrastructure problems in a bipartisan manner, the lobbyists rule by default.

MICHELE MURPHY lives in Newport Beach.