I want to thank the the people from Progressive Accountability who have produced the new movie, "Third-Term," which revisits John McCain's role in the Keating 5 scandal of the '80s and see a direct connection to his approach and the people that surround him in today's economy as he runs for President.
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Download NARRATION: It's the same thing that's happening now, as banks fail, and as our housing market collapses. And the people responsible for this new crisis are the ones McCain has surrounded himself with, men like Phil Gramm and his banking lobbyists. He will offer the same kind of deregulatory policies that led to the banking collapse of the early ‘90s.
It will be available on Sept. 25th to the public.
NARRATION: All of this corporate influence should remind you a bit of a previous tale in the McCain saga, his involvement with the Keating 5. Charles Keating was a sort of mentor of John McCain, donating vast sums of money to his senate campaigns.
DAVID DONNELLY: Charles Keating helped out Senator McCain a lot in the early part of his career. ... Senator McCain was the closest of any of the Keating Five to Charles Keating.
NARRATION: But Keating was in trouble. His company, Lincoln Savings and Loan, was making a lot of risky investments, and the government was investigating.
ANDREA MITCHELL: Keating raised $1.3 million for them. They challenged regulators who were investigating his operations.
NARRATION: So Keating called some of his old pals in the Senate to put a little pressure on the government regulator and get them off his back. McCain accepted.
NARRATION: Lincoln collapsed, leading to a bailout of $2.8 billion in taxpayer money. Keating went to prison for four years. McCain was only chastised on the Senate floor.
The recent meltdown in the financial markets has rocked the country and as usual, required our government to pony up billions of tax payer dollars to try and rescue the corporate fat cats in Wall Street in the financial sector. It was also the reaction to the credit markets that caused the bailout of AIG to occur as swiftly as it did. So John McCain was implicated in the biggest S&L scandal of its time back in '80s --The Keating 5-- and yet HE accuses Barack Obama of not doing enough in today's nightmare. He had the nerve to say this:
JOHN MCCAIN: Senator Obama talks a tough game on the financial markets but the facts tell a very different story. He took more money from Fannie and Freddie than any Senator but the Democratic chairman of the committee that regulates them. He put the Chief Executive Officer of Fannie Mae--um, excuse me, of, yes, of Fannie Mae--who helped create this disaster, he put that Democratic chair--of the-- in charge of the selection process for who he was going to select for Vice President of the United States [crowd boos]. You know what? Fannie's former General Counsel is a senior advisor to his campaign. Whose side do you think he's on?
JOHN MCCAIN: There was no transparency into the books of Wall Street banks. Banks and brokers took on huge amounts of debt and they hid the riskiest of all investments. Mismanagement and greed became the operating standard while regulators were asleep at the switch. The regulators were asleep, my friends. They were not working for you.
Did John McCain --"The DeRegulator," as we call him -- actually say the word "regulators" with a straight face? Many people don't really know or don't remember what the Keating 5 scandal was all about and hopefully, Third Term will help explain a lot and possibly predict the future of our economy if he's elected.
DAVID DONNELLY: ...people who lost life savings through the scandal. There were, people who... pensioners who lost their money because those savings and loans went belly-up.
MITCHELL: Keating became a symbol of the worst financial scandal in history and the worst ethics scandal in the history of the senate.
NARRATION: He did not learn his lesson. The S&L collapse was a failure of adequate regulation, with the banks running wild, making dodgy investments with high risk-high reward margins. If that sounds familiar, it should.
DAVID DONNELLY: Fast-forward twenty years to now, we have a huge mortgage crisis on our hands, it's the result of years and years and years of a deregulatory approach that Senator McCain has supported.
NARRATION: It's the same thing that's happening now, as banks fail, and as our housing market collapses. And the people responsible for this new crisis are the ones McCain has surrounded himself with, men like Phil Gramm and his banking lobbyists. He will offer the same kind of deregulatory policies that led to the banking collapse of the early ‘90s.
CHRISTIAN WELLER: Well, Mr. McCain would take the worst economic policies from the Bush administration and put them on steroids. ... we would get not only the same that we've had for the last seven years, we would get actually the same, just a little degree worse than we had before.
