In case you
missed it
What is the Keating Five?
28/08/08 --- "McCain
Keating Five"
For anyone not aware of the Keating Five, here’s a very
simple summary:
Charles Keating owned a savings and loan in California. He
was illegally using the money of his bank’s customers to give
loans to himself and friends that they didn’t have to repay, and
to speculate on risky real estate investments, which was
strictly forbidden by U.S. law (the latter was one cause of the
Great Depression).
When the feds found out what was going on and launched an
investigation into Keating and his company, Keating called five
U.S. Senators whom he had wined, dined, and lavished with
hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign donations and
personal gifts for years.
Keating asked the five Senators to tell the feds to bug off,
and the five Senators, later known as the Keating Five, obliged,
meeting with federal investigators twice and pressuring them to
stop investigating Keating’s crimes. They bought Keating some
time, but the feds didn’t give up and eventually Keating was
nailed. The reason the feds were so persistent was because
Keating wasn’t playing with mere chump change. Keating blew $3.4
billion through illegal personal loans and bad investments, and
the FDIC eventually had to reimburse Keating’s customers who had
been ripped off. (The FDIC is a part of the federal government
funded by taxpayers dollars, so when Keating stole from his
customers you and I were the ones who paid for it.)
(Background Info - Keating wasn’t the only Savings and Loan
owner who was committing fraud, 20% of the S&L’s that failed
during that three year period were found to have been caused by
fraud and/or insider trading. The failure of the Lincoln Savings
and Loan and other S&L’s pushed the country into a recession,
costing the U.S. government $126 billion dollars in FDIC
insurance payouts to investors. All of this came to a crescendo
during the first year of the presidency of George H.W. Bush, who
pushed through the S&L bailout plan to keep the economy afloat.)
When the involvement of the Keating Five was made public, a
scandal erupted and the Senate Ethics Committee launched their
own investigation into whether the Keating Five had violated
Senate ethics rules. It was a giant mess (see
the Keating Five Videos section). The other four Senators
left office either immediately or within one term. John McCain
was formally rebuked by the Senate Ethics Committee for
exercising “poor judgment” for intervening with the federal
regulators on behalf of Keating.
John McCain then went back to the drawing board and
re-invented himself as “the Straight-Talk Express” and the media
gobbled it up. “Tax-Evading-Criminal” doesn’t sound as catchy as
“Straight-Shooting-War-Hero”.
Ever since the scandal, when McCain lies today, it’s never
questioned, because he’s a “straight talker”. The man has more
skeletons in his closet than any politician in history. The
Keating Five is just one bone.
There are two fantastic articles about the Keating Five we
highly recommend reading.
One is from 1989, written by the Phoenix New Times, called
McCain: The Most Reprehensible of the Keating Five. That
article does a good job of capturing the anger at the time at
John McCain and the other corrupt Senators. It took an
incredible spin job for McCain to have survived the scandal.
The other article is from Slate.com, written in 2000 and
titled,
Is
John McCain A Crook?
Copyright 2008. McCain Keating Five. All
rights reserved
http://mccainkeatingfive.com
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