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Spreading blame around for the financial crisis are we? Yes, there are plentiful targets for blame in this matter. Naming them all would take a very long time if we didn't break it down into groups.

We had the sub-prime lenders that lent money to people who had little credit and wanted to buy more than they could afford. This includes Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, those government-owned piranha lenders that just ate up anyone who came to them for financing of debt they couldn't prove they could afford.

Then lets move on to the companies that owned banks and insurance agencies that thrived, for a while, on packing on the commercial and private paper. Shady deals and doctored loan papers that made people's credit look better than it really was.

Next lets go to the real estate people, most of which work on commission, desperate to sell something each month just so they could make enough commissions to pay their own bills. Some were honest, or tried to be, while others dove in head first to make people's paperwork look good enough to pass inspection by any regulatory agency or person.

We also have the construction companies that built far more houses than they could sell, all at inflated prices so the profit would be higher. Then when almost fifty percent of those houses went unsold, and many are still empty in my area, the builders and construction companies went belly up. Many construction workers that bought into the houses they'd built were now left with no job to pay the bills, helping to further the housing crisis and rising foreclosure rates.

Yes, there is plenty of blame to go around but I don't hear much about the politicians that kept pushing for more relaxing of credit policies and more regulations that added to the costs of homes, cars, and good we all purchase. Where are the red faces in Washington for the mess that they created? Plenty of fingers are getting pointed, and shouts of He did it', He didn't do it', We tried to do it', We tried to stop it', and so on with their whining.

We really need to look deeper into what was voted on in Congress, pushed through as add-ons to bills, earmarks, and contracts that threw a little too much shade. We also need to look at the experience and background each member has under his or her belt. How many of them have true business experience, how many are career politicians, and how many are lawyers that couldn't make it out in the real world? After all, in 2006 a study showed that out of 535 members of Congress 445 of them were lawyers. That's 83% of Congress!

Yes, there is a lot of blame to go around. However, we need to place politicians right at the top of the list of culprits in this mess. Wall Street is getting blamed a lot for the financial crisis, and maybe they do bear some of the blame. However, business is about making profit, and so is Wall Street. If they hadn't smelled blood in the water when members of Congress started pushing earmarks and lower lending standards through with their pet projects, maybe Wall Street would have put on the brakes sooner. When I was very small my grandmother taught me something about pointing fingers of blame. She reminded me, by showing me my hand configured for pointing, that while one finger pointed at someone else, three others were pointing back at me. Maybe Congress members should learn that lesson too, don't you agree?

Learn more about this author, Heather Foster.
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