As the economy worsens, perhaps we need to ponder how we got into this mess.

Some – and almost all of them are on my side of the political spectrum – have tried to blame the Community Reinvestment Act, a law Congress passed in the 1970s to encourage banks to lend money to potential homeowners in poor minority neighborhoods. The hope was that the CRA would encourage banks to stop “redlining,” the practice of banks not lending to black people to keep them out of certain neighborhoods.

Talk to an economist – the ones who know about this stuff of why and how recessions start – and they almost laugh at the idea of blaming the CRA. Apparently, it’s just another attempt by conservatives to scapegoat liberals in general and black folks in particular.

There are several other theories floating around about why the economy tanked. My favorite suspect is the American International Group, better known lately as simply AIG. No point in rehashing for BlackAmericaWeb readers what AIG is; I’m sure they already know. There are exactly 170 billion reasons to know, as that's the number of dollars in our tax money Congress doled out to keep AIG afloat. And there are 165 million more. That would be the amount in dollars of what $170 billion AIG tried to give executives in bonuses.

Apparently, someone at Time magazine feels the same way I do about AIG being the number-one suspect as to who or what caused the economic downturn. When I went to my mailbox this week and pulled out the current issue of Time, I was greeted with the following headline on the cover: “The Bailout Bomb: Why AIG = WMD.” The sub-headline read, “Forget those bonuses. The real scandal is how AIG was allowed to become a financial weapon of mass destruction.”

Inside the magazine, above reporter Bill Saporito’s byline, is the following summation:

“Years of unregulated and risky deals exposed the insurance giant (AIG) to catastrophic losses. Now it’s paying bonuses to the same people who helped create the mess. With our money. A look at why a dark corner of the global economy is costing U.S. taxpayers $170 billion – and counting.”

Saporito’s story is filled with a lot of economic jargon I won’t bother to repeat in this column. What I got from it – after repeated readings, I’ll admit – is that AIG lost billions of dollars by insuring a lot of high-risk, bad loans with money from something called “collateralized debt obligations.” AIG lost big money when the value of CDOs did what the economy has now done: Drop like a dead guy’s blood pressure.

But there’s yet another suspect I’d like to add to the list. Saporito mentions that suspect in this passage from his story:

“How was AIG able to live so dangerously for so long? In part because for years Washington looked the other way. The company befriended politicians with campaign cash - $9.3 million divided evenly between Democrats and Republicans from 1990 to 2008, the Center for Responsive Politics reported. And it spent more than $70 million to lobby them over the past decade, escaping the kind of regulation that might have prevented the current crisis.”

Congress is my number-two suspect, the same Congress that has been bought and paid for by AIG and God knows who else. And that brings me to my third suspect on the list of culprits responsible for the mess we’re in: The American electorate.

That’s right - US. We’re the ones who put those senators and representatives who served in Congress from 1990 to 2008 in their seats. And note that the CRP .....

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