The Credit Crisis

Re Op-Ed Columnist: A Swarm of Swindlers by Bob Herbert in today's NY Times: This is one of those opinion columns which sheds no light at all on the key issue, but only muddles it. This happens when one looks at only one instance of a problem which is far more complicated than we are led to believe.

Of course, Rosa Dailey is a victim of our times. Her story is heartbreaking. However, we are told just one side. I would guess that she actually needed a loan to keep the house she lived in. Perhaps, the house would have been in foreclosure even sooner had she not taken out a loan. But we cannot tell this from the article, since it never explains the specifics of why she took the mortgage in the first place. "They knew that the woman who owned the house was old and sick and that her two aging daughters were struggling with illness and poverty as well." (Ms. Dailey is the daughter who survived after her mother and sister passed away.)

The real culprit is the American Capitalist system. It taxes everything in life in order to produce a relatively small number of super-rich people. So, while Bill Gates can own multiple residences containing millions of square feet of living space, people like Ms. Dailey lose their homes in their old age. Another example would be Lloyd C. Blankfein, chairman of Goldman Sachs, who will get a $75 million paycheck this year after his firm squeezed billions out of the "credit crisis" in our economy.

Mr. Herbert does us a service by spotlighting the losers in our economy, but it would actually do more good if he would dig deeper into the core factors affecting the widespread economic injustices of our modern society.