The Dan Zuckerman commentary, "An Economic History Lesson" (March 29), is at best a subjective, fuzzy-math point of view. Liberals don't like objectivity, it gives them a headache and they don't have a retort. To wit, someone once said, "The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum."

In 1995, President Clinton ordered Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin to rewrite the rules of the Community Reinvestment Act, which broadened its scope beyond what Congress originally intended. Congress became complacent and is therefore complicit.

That was the same year Clinton had the immigration qualification procedures redesigned, allowing a million-plus illegals to attain citizenship, just in time for the 1996 election. In vintner terms, 1995 was a very good year.

The two government-sponsored entities, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which later were run and controlled by Clinton appointees, were chartered by Congress to establish/maintain a secondary mortgage market to provide liquidity to the primary mortgage market by purchasing subprime, zero-down, no-documents, no-income mortgages from lenders, then repackage them as investment-grade securities.

Enter Wall Street, stage right.

Lenders (banks), in order to get good (CRA) ratings, had to comply.

Fannie and Fred soon became the "proud" parents of a non-sustainable bundle of $6 trillion in bad mortgage debt. Compounding this led to a $10 billion accounting scandal. Incidentally, as coincidence would have it, those two aforementioned Fannie and Freddie CEOs became Barack Obama's political and economic advisers.

It doesn't take a Sherlock Holmes to follow those deductions.

May 2006, the resulting bill (S-190), Federal Housing Enterprise Regulation Reform Act of 2005 was introduced to the U.S. Senate. It would have reined in Fannie and Freddie.

"If Congress does not act, American taxpayers will continue to be exposed to the enormous risk that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pose to the housing market, the overall financial system and the economy as a whole," the introduction concluded.

How profound is that? Not one Democrat supported the bill, all the while praising Fannie and Freddie for their outstanding contributions. Where was then-Sen. Obama? He proclaimed himself present. Ironically, Bill Clinton in a recent interview was quoted as saying, "If action had been taken 1 1/2 to 2 years ago, most of this economic mess could have been averted." How's that for professing retrospective insight?

The word is, now we need a congressional insight committee to look into what went wrong. You are asking the inmates to evaluate the asylum? What is needed is an independent, bipartisan 9/11-type commission. I want to see members of Congress, among others, on the witness stand under oath.

Charles E. Brickell lives in Menifee.