The laissez-faire Bush era of hands-off has produced disastrous results, as we are seeing in the current financial markets.

"This is bigger than the private sector can fix by itself," Reagan's former Secretary of the Treasury James Baker said on "This Week with George Stephanopoulos" Sunday. "Now we have to figure out a way to regulate out of it."

Too little, too late, some may say.

Last December, Martin Eakes, CEO of The Center for Responsible Lending, told the New York Times, "If the Fed had done its job, we would not have had the abusive lending and we would not have a foreclosure crisis in virtually every community across America."

Who is to blame for this nightmare? Free-market ideologues like former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan helped perpetuate this nonsense that business does not need regulation.

This approach allowed the bottom feeders of the mortgage industry, like Countrywide Financial in our own backyard, to grow and thrive and feed on the naiveté of families sucked into sub prime loans they could not afford. The bigger and riskier the mortgage, the higher the fees these mortgage brokers and lenders raked in.

These loans were in turn sold to investment banks and other investors. And suddenly the bottom fell out. Meanwhile CEOs have taken home millions of speculative dollars.

The banking industry has too much influence in politics. In 1987, the Keating Five scandal ensnared John McCain, who along with other senators, was accused of trying to improperly intervene in a federal investigation of Charles Keating, chairman of the Lincoln Savings and Loan Association. McCain accepted $112,000 from Keating and was flown to the Bahamas.

Lincoln Savings and Loan collapsed in 1989, at a cost of over $3 billion to the federal government.

Back in 2001, California had a chance to crack down on predatory lenders with AB489. Tony Strickland, now a candidate for State Senate, served in the Assembly Banking and Finance Committee where he was supposed to be looking out for consumers and protecting them from unfair banking practices.

Instead, Strickland took $47,575 in contributions from the banking and finance industry and helped them water down AB489, so it protected almost nobody.

It is time to end this disastrous influence corporations have on the decisions which affect our future.