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Tonya
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Tonya
Post Number: 7520
Registered: 07-2006
Rating: 
Votes: 1 (Vote!) | | Posted on Saturday, September 20, 2008 - 07:48 pm: | 
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John McCain and the Keating 5
One Crook Went To Prison, The Other Is Running For President
mccainkeatingfive.com
During the 2000 Republican Presidential Primaries, Slate.com writer Chris Suellentrop wrote an excellent in-depth feature article about John McCain and his role in the Keating Five. This is a must read article for every American, especially for anyone who thinks John McCainis a hero.
Two Important things to know before you read the article:
1. John McCain admitted to intentionally filing false income tax returns to defraud the IRS by not claiming thousands of dollars in gifts McCain and his family received from Charles Keating and Keating’s company. Years later, when the IRS noticed Keating’s company had written off the gifts to McCain as business expenses, McCain fessed up and admitted filing false returns and made a “donation” to the U.S. Treasury to cover the amount he defrauded American tax payers. (Committing tax fraud is one of the least offensive things John McCain has done over his career, but this article just focuses on his role in the Keating Five, and the Lincoln Savings and Loan scandal of the late 1980’s-early 1990’s). McCain also leaked information about the Keating Five to the press multiple times in an effort to appear above the other Senators in the scandal. A 1989 Phoenix New Times article summed it up best with their title - McCain: The Most Reprehensible of the Keating Five.
2. John McCain’s wife, Cindy McCain, along with her father, made a $359,000 investment in retail property owned by Charles Keating in 1986, a year before John McCain first met with federal regulators on behalf of Keating. Keating was later convicted on 73 counts of fraud, conspiracy, and other crimes. Years later, Cindy McCain sold her investment for $15,000,000.
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 (and 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.
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 had to reimburse Keating’s customers who had been ripped off.
(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. 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, but because McCain accepted Keating’s gifts of travel and vacations to Bahama while McCain was a member of the House of Representatives (he served one term there before moving to the Senate), the Senate claimed they had no jurisdiction to censure McCain. (However the meetings to pressure federal regulators occurred during the first few months of McCain serving in the Senate in 1987, so that excuse doesn’t hold up)
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.
After reading the Slate article, ask yourself: if Obama or any other candidate had a scandal such as the Keating Five in their past, would the mainstream media never question it? Could any other candidate even have a political career after the Keating Five? For the other four Senators, the answer is no. And while Charles Keating went to prison for his role in the scandal, John McCain swept it under the rug and could soon be President of the United States of America.
The FDIC also has a list of recommendations for further reading on Charles Keating and the Lincoln Savings and Loan. http://mccainkeatingfive.com/?p=6
Is John McCain a Crook?
Chris Suellentrop
Posted Friday, Feb. 18, 2000, at 2:35 PM ET
The controversial George W. Bush-sponsored poll in South Carolina mentioned John McCain's role in the so-called Keating Five scandal, and McCain says his involvement in the scandal "will probably be on my tombstone." What exactly did McCain do?
In early 1987, at the beginning of his first Senate term, McCain attended two meetings with federal banking regulators to discuss an investigation into Lincoln Savings and Loan, an Irvine, Calif., thrift owned by Arizona developer Charles Keating. Federal auditors were investigating Keating's banking practices, and Keating, fearful that the government would seize his S&L, sought intervention from a number of U.S. senators.
At Keating's behest, four senators--McCain and Democrats Dennis DeConcini of Arizona, Alan Cranston of California, and John Glenn of Ohio--met with Ed Gray, chairman of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, on April 2. Those four senators and Sen. Don Riegle, D-Mich., attended a second meeting at Keating's behest on April 9 with bank regulators in San Francisco.
Regulators did not seize Lincoln Savings and Loan until two years later. The Lincoln bailout cost taxpayers $2.6 billion, making it the biggest of the S&L scandals. In addition, 17,000 Lincoln investors lost $190 million.
In November 1990, the Senate Ethics Committee launched an investigation into the meetings between the senators and the regulators. McCain, Cranston, DeConcini, Glenn, and Riegle became known as the Keating Five.
(Keating himself was convicted in January 1993 of 73 counts of wire and bankruptcy fraud and served more than four years in prison before his conviction was overturned. Last year, he pleaded guilty to four counts of fraud and was sentenced to time served.)
McCain defended his attendance at the meetings by saying Keating was a constituent and that Keating's development company, American Continental Corporation, was a major Arizona employer. McCain said he wanted to know only whether Keating was being treated fairly and that he had not tried to influence the regulators. At the second meeting, McCain told the regulators, "I wouldn't want any special favors for them," and "I don't want any part of our conversation to be improper."
But Keating was more than a constituent to McCain--he was a longtime friend and associate. McCain met Keating in 1981 at a Navy League dinner in Arizona where McCain was the speaker. Keating was a former naval aviator himself, and the two men became friends. Keating raised money for McCain's two congressional campaigns in 1982 and 1984, and for McCain's 1986 Senate bid. By 1987, McCain campaigns had received $112,000 from Keating, his relatives, and his employees--the most received by any of the Keating Five. (Keating raised a total of $300,000 for the five senators.)
After McCain's election to the House in 1982, he and his family made at least nine trips at Keating's expense, three of which were to Keating's Bahamas retreat. McCain did not disclose the trips (as he was required to under House rules) until the scandal broke in 1989. At that point, he paid Keating $13,433 for the flights.
And in April 1986, one year before the meeting with the regulators, McCain's wife, Cindy, and her father invested $359,100 in a Keating strip mall.
The Senate Ethics Committee probe of the Keating Five began in November 1990, and committee Special Counsel Robert Bennett recommended that McCain and Glenn be dropped from the investigation. They were not. McCain believes Democrats on the committee blocked Bennett's recommendation because he was the lone Keating Five Republican.
In February 1991, the Senate Ethics Committee found McCain and Glenn to be the least blameworthy of the five senators. (McCain and Glenn attended the meetings but did nothing else to influence the regulators.) McCain was guilty of nothing more than "poor judgment," the committee said, and declared his actions were not "improper nor attended with gross negligence." McCain considered the committee's judgment to be "full exoneration," and he contributed $112,000 (the amount raised for him by Keating) to the U.S. Treasury.
Chris Suellentrop, a former Slate staffer, writes "The Opinionator" for the New York Times.
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/1004633/
http://www.slate.com/id/1004633/ |
Cynique
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Cynique
Post Number: 12887
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Sunday, September 21, 2008 - 09:50 pm: |
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Doesn't matter how shady John McCain's past is. The latest polls show that even a significant percentage of Democrats and Independents will not vote for Obama because they don't have a favorable opinion of black people.
America is not ready for a black president. Obama can hang it up - his presidential aspirations will be lynched...IMO |
Robynmarie
Veteran Poster
Username: Robynmarie
Post Number: 819
Registered: 04-2006
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Sunday, September 21, 2008 - 10:23 pm: |
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^^^
I saw the polls you are talking about. According to the survey it is white Dems who won't be voting for Senator Obama. Whatz up with that? |
Tonya
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Tonya
Post Number: 7522
Registered: 07-2006
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, September 22, 2008 - 01:22 pm: |
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I have TONS of negative views about white folks, tons of them, and some of them make me a stone cold rabid racist. Yet them same hard-core views have never done a thing to stop me from voting for a white person. That's because I might be a stone cold rabid racist, but I'm also a person who is drowning in student loans and debt.
These yahoo polls are a bunch of B.S.
They say NOTHING about how folks are going to vote. |
Tonya
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Tonya
Post Number: 7523
Registered: 07-2006
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, September 22, 2008 - 02:51 pm: |
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The brain in McCain under strain about Spain: http://www.smh.com.au/news/us-election/the-brain-in-mccain-under-strain-about-sp ain/2008/09/19/1221331207145.html |
Chrishayden
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Chrishayden
Post Number: 7442
Registered: 03-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, September 24, 2008 - 12:51 pm: |
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According to the survey it is white Dems who won't be voting for Senator Obama. Whatz up with that?
(This is a rhetorical question, I know.
We are finding out who our real friends are.
And John McCain is a crook.) |
Tonya
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Tonya
Post Number: 7525
Registered: 07-2006
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, September 25, 2008 - 12:16 am: |
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"We are finding out who our real friends are."
You're JUST finding that out?? 
Gee-whiz,
I'm surprised at you Chris. |
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