Reasons for S&L; Crisis

The Column One article by Barry Bearak and Tom Furlong is the finest piece I’ve read on this maddening, incredibly complex problem.

The bottom line on this fiasco is more than the estimated $500-billion cost to us taxpayers, our children and our children’s children. It’s yet another massive injection of cynicism into the morass in which we’re already floundering. Our noses get rubbed in it: more slime-ball “businessmen” who give business a bad name, more crooked politicians who are in it only for themselves, more so-called public officials who serve their constituents last, if at all.

And we watch with mounting disgust as the search for blame continues--ineffectually, of course. It’s a fiasco in and of itself. Most of the guilty will never be brought to account. Those that are rarely get convicted. Punishment? You’ve got to be kidding. Puny prison sentences or none at all. Fines that will never be paid. The rich get richer and more powerful. The poor get poorer. The middle class gets ground down under an ever-growing tax burden. Our representatives make political hay from the crisis but no actual progress in solving it. And voter apathy increases exponentially.

It’s disheartening. We can’t even be cynics any more. We’re just realists.

JOHN C. KRUIZE

Van Nuys