Dear Editor,

President Obama signed the Financial Reform Bill into law on July 21st. It passed along essentially party lines. A top level look at this bill will clearly demonstrate what a perverse piece of legislation it is.

We can argue over whom and what caused the current financial crisis and when it started. Were the origins in the Carter Administration and the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977? Was it a lack of oversight over big banks under George Bush? Was it the greed of Wall Street or the liberal left’s view that everyone is entitled to own a home, regardless of income or even employment?

Regardless of your views about the origins of this national financial disaster, near “ground zero” are Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac, established by the government to expand the secondary mortgage market by securitizing mortgages in the form of mortgage-backed securities. Most of today’s financial woes are traceable to bad mortgages backed by those two corporations and resulting “domino” effects. Just as Robert Oppenheimer and General Groves are most closely associated with the Manhattan Project and ground zero, Congressman Barney Frank and Senator Chris Dodd are most closely associated with championing the flawed, even insane, business practices of Fannie and Freddy, while reassuring the public that those corporations were “absolutely fiscally sound”.

So now I come to the reason why I entitled this letter “Perversion”. The new Financial Reform Bill, the 2000 pages of laws designed to fix our financial problems, guess who wrote it? Yes, it really was Chris Dodd and Barney Frank. Guess what single, significant problem it doesn’t address. You got it! It is the growing problem of Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac.

This is beyond stupidity and politics. It is distorted, twisted thinking. It is perverse. What else would you call Senator Dodd’s comment that “this Financial Reform Bill will affect every aspect of our lives and we won’t know how it will work until after it’s implemented”.This is why the Democrat Party, the party that also gave us such laws as Health Care and the butchering of 50,000,000 babies, is the Party of Perversion. It is also why the Republican Party, refusing to call evil by its true name and thereby giving the Party of Perversion legitimacy, is more aptly named the Pathetic Party. It is why both these parties need to be rebuilt from the grass roots up.

Ernie Albanese

Barnesville