The Unknown Candidate: Keating Five

Showing posts with label Keating Five. Show all posts

Sunday, November 02, 2008

Should McCain Have Been Expelled From the Senate?

MUST READ:

Sahil Mahtani, The New Republic, reports (via t r u t h o u t):

"��Should he have been expelled from the Senate? Exclusive evidence reveals the Keating Five story you've never heard...."

Read all about it here.

Photo credit: In this November 20, 1990 file photo, Senator John McCain, R-Arizona (left) sits with his attorney during a Senate Ethics Committee hearing on the Keating Five Savings and Loan Scandal. Carefully timed leaks during the investigation successfully deflected the blame from McCain to his other Senate colleagues. Evidence continues to surface that points to John McCain as the possible source of those leaks. (Photo: John Duricka / AP)

Technorati tags: John McCain, Keating Five, The New Republic, Ethics, Abuse of Power, Sahil Mahtani

Friday, October 10, 2008

Who Is Cindy McCain?

Someone lacking ethics and honesty.

Cindy McCain Kept Keating Partnership After Scandal:

"Sen. John McCain's wife and father-in-law continued a lucrative business partnership with disgraced financier Charles H. Keating Jr. for 11 years after the GOP presidential nominee said he ended his close friendship with Keating in March 1987.

Cindy McCain's business partnership with Keating in a real-estate development between 1986 and 1998 netted her a tidy profit, in addition to years of significant tax benefits. Her father, who died in 2000, earned similar returns...."

Every day, it becomes more apparent that John McCain is part of the problem, not the solution to our current economic crisis. Every day, he continues to try to bring down Barack Obama with lies and distortions directed at both his policies and his character. Every day it becomes apparent that John McCain's attempts to divide us in a time of crisis is the exact opposite of what this country needs.

Photo credit: Cindy McCain. (Huffington Post)

Sunday, October 05, 2008

Keating Economics

John McCain and the Making of a Financial Crisis:

FULL DOCUMENTARY AVAILABLE MONDAY, OCTOBER 5TH, AT 12 PM EASTERN

The current economic crisis demands that we understand John McCain's attitudes about economic oversight and corporate influence in federal regulation. Nothing illustrates the danger of his approach more clearly than his central role in the savings and loan scandal of the late '80s and early '90s.

John McCain was accused of improperly aiding his political patron, Charles Keating, chairman of the Lincoln Savings and Loan Association. The bipartisan Senate Ethics Committee launched investigations and formally reprimanded Senator McCain for his role in the scandal -- the first such Senator to receive a major party nomination for president.

At the heart of the scandal was Keating's Lincoln Savings and Loan Association, which took advantage of deregulation in the 1980s to make risky investments with its depositors' money. McCain intervened on behalf of Charles Keating with federal regulators tasked with preventing banking fraud, and championed legislation to delay regulation of the savings and loan industry -- actions that allowed Keating to continue his fraud at an incredible cost to taxpayers.

When the savings and loan industry collapsed, Keating's failed company put taxpayers on the hook for $3.4 billion and more than 20,000 Americans lost their savings. John McCain was reprimanded by the bipartisan Senate Ethics Committee, but the ultimate cost of the crisis to American taxpayers reached more than $120 billion.

The Keating scandal is eerily similar to today's credit crisis, where a lack of regulation and cozy relationships between the financial industry and Congress has allowed banks to make risky loans and profit by bending the rules. And in both cases, John McCain's judgment and values have placed him on the wrong side of history.