There are so many things about the sub-prime mortgage crisis, Wall Street’s massive financial troubles, and the bizarre politics of the federal government’s bailout attempts, that it is really very difficult to know where to begin to question how and why this whole thing happened.

Why, for instance, did Congress, which oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, change the rules to permit unqualified buyers to get home mortgages in the first place? Is this a case of good intentions gone wrong? Was it simply a desire to offer the American dream of home ownership to a larger number of Americans? Or was this lobbying, corporate greed and congressional negligence gone wild? Who was watching these agencies when they were making unprecedented numbers of high-risk loans?

And then there’s Wall Street. Sophisticated market watchers like Warren Buffet have been warning about Wall Street excesses for years. Buffet went public about his doubts about mortgage-backed securities five years ago. Why wasn’t anyone on Wall Street or in Washington listening?

Why is it only now, in the midst of a severe financial crisis that Congress has realized that executive compensation in the United States has become absurd? I was always taught that where there’s smoke, there’s usually fire, as the cliche goes. The extraordinary greed exemplified in executive compensation in the past decade and the ludicrous “golden parachute payments” that rewarded failed executives who leave failing companies in crises with tens of millions of dollars should have alerted regulators that there were serious problems on Wall Street and in board rooms around the country.

Let’s not forget the president, the secretary of the treasury, Congress and the chairman of the Fed and how they’ve been handling the current crisis. When I watched President Bush give his “we must act or the world will end” speech, I was struck by how similar his tone and choice of words were to the speech he gave after 9/11. Except on 9/11 the United States was attacked by an external enemy.

Now, if there are enemies, they are among us, in the board rooms and on the trading floors, and in the halls of government. The government’s response to 9/11 was to pass the Patriot Act with unprecedented speed, so much speed that we now know that few members of Congress understood the legislation they were passing and even fewer had read it when they voted.

But our current financial crisis is not as simple as a terrorist attack. Many of the financial instruments currently at risk are so complex that they are only fully understood by the mathematics Ph.D.s (known on Wall St. as “quants”) who created them. I wonder, for instance, how many members of Congress understand the complexities of credit-default swaps, the instruments which brought down AIG? If you don’t understand a problem, how can you fix it?

To be honest, I have no idea whether any “bailout” plan is going to work. I’m fairly certain that most members of Congress don’t either. Certainly, economists, some with Nobel Prizes, are divided on what, if anything, to do. I know one thing, however. I believe that the majority of Americans have lost all trust in Wall Street, Congress and the executive branch. I believe that most Americans are sick and tired of watching both parties play “chicken” with the financial well-being of every one of us. I think most Americans are dismayed by the lack of transparency in this whole process.

Is the American public once again being asked to change its way of life on faith in our leaders alone? I have faith in God; I don’t have faith in our government or the financial “masters of the universe” who got us into this mess in the first place. From them, I want information and answers.

I wish I had a solution to the current crisis, but people far smarter than I am are stumped. I confess, I’d be happier if Warren Buffet were secretary of the Treasury instead of Henry Paulson, but I doubt that’s going to happen. I’d be even happier if the federal government were required to issue an explanation of the problems we face and of their proposed solutions. That isn’t going to happen either.

The only things I feel certain about is that any solution ought to focus on the average hard-working American and we deserve to be told what’s going on, told what the possible outcomes will be, and told what the alternatives are. And there needs to be accountability, real accountability.

I suggest, and only half in jest, that one provision of any legislation Congress passes should redefine treason to include any individual who knowingly subverts the economy of the United States for personal gain. Isn’t there something ironic in the idea that those who created this crisis may well have done more long-term damage to the American people than terrorists with bombs could ever do?

Even more ironic, how many of those people can weather any financial crisis because of the millions of dollars they walked away with?