As FOX News tries to link Obama to all sorts of ridiculous things, Jonathan Alter makes a good point with KO.
ALTER: [Y]ou remember the Keating Five scandal that he was a part of, which, by the way, it's crazy but there's been very little about it in the press in the last few weeks. And McCain thinks he's getting a hard time, he's really getting a free ride on the fact that he was in the middle of the last great financial scandal in our country. But his reaction to that, you would have thought, would have been more regulation of the financial services industry. Instead he moved forward on campaign finance reform after being caught in that scandal, but did nothing - nothing -to try to prevent another savings and loan crisis from happening down the road. He was missing in action when it came to even learning the basic lessons of a scandal that he said taught him all kinds of things that he would never forget.
Doesn't the media believe this is a relevant story being that we're in a huge economic meltdown? Can you imagine the media scrutiny if a Democratic politician had been linked to this scandal and ran for President? A new movie called Third Term will be released soon which goes into detail about the whole Keating5---John McCain connection. Please read this post (with video) if you missed it and then start demanding that the media cover McCain's past connection to the Keating 5 scandal and and see if the American people want him to lead them out of the economic chaos we're facing today...It was the biggest S&L scandal in American history at that time...
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.
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.
