Thread: John McCain and the Keating Five

We have to remember the past. Besides amnesty, besides his contempt for the American worker. Besides his willingness to pander to foreign militaries and foreigners needs, John McCain was a crook.

John MCCain is one of the most corrupt politicians alive and South Carolina Republicans just confirmed they are of the same ilk.

In 1980 a congressional corruption scandal lead to the collapse of many Svaings and Loans and John McCain was the only Republican involved! What part of this Americans cannot remember or don't care to look up I simply don't get. But how can you really consider this man (all recent corrupt behavior aside) to be just and moral?

Here is the 2001 Mark Levin article where he mentions that the same man who dares to lecture congress who be hung as the result of his own behavior:
http://www.nationalreview.com/contribut ... 0501.shtml

Quick Synopsis of the incident:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keating_Five

In Depth analysis of John McCain and his links to Corpratists and Junk Bond Criminals:
http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2002/2932mccain.html

EXCERPT:

'The Keating One,' and Carl Lindner
From 1981—the year before John McCain ran for U.S. Congress—until the early 1990s, the former Navy pilot was totally beholden to junk bond swindler Charles Keating for his political fortunes. When the S&L scandal exploded and Federal prosecutors were breathing down Keating's neck, it was McCain who tried to bully Federal regulators into backing off. While the affair became known as the "Keating Five" scandal, none of the other members of the Senate and House implicated in the ethics violations, were as closely tied to Keating as John McCain.

And Charles Keating was no "loan assassin." He was but one player in a larger organized crime apparatus that ran the $200 billion-plus rip-off, in what may have been the biggest actual RICO (racketeering) scheme ever.

Between 1959 and the late 1980s, Charles Keating was the business partner of Carl Lindner, the Cincinnati, Ohio-based financier who would be one of the central figures in the $200 billion S&L rip-off. In 1959, Lindner and Keating co-founded American Financial Corporation (AFC). Keating served as the mortgage and insurance company's general counsel, and later as vice president.

Between 1974 and 1976, Lindner and Keating engineered a series of stock purchases and mergers with some of the leading figures in the Lansky crime syndicate—who had followed the Bronfman family recipe, and gone from "rags, to rackets, to riches, to respectability."

In 1975, Lindner's AFC allied with Detroit financier Max Fisher, formerly of the murderous Purple Gang; Detroit real estate developer Alfred Taubman (a Fisher associate); and Paul and Seymour Milstein, to grab a 50% controlling interest in the United Fruit Company. Drug Enforcement Administration officials had confirmed to the authors of EIR's bestselling book Dope, Inc.: Britain's Opium War Against America, that United Fruit was a major force in the Latin American cocaine trade—a business that skyrocketed following the Lindner-Fisher, et al. takeover.

The Lindner group's takeover of United Fruit was only made possible by the mysterious death of the company's chairman and largest stockholder, Eli Black, on Feb. 3, 1975. Black fell to his death from the 44th floor of the Pan Am Building in New York City, in what was officially declared a suicide.

At the same time that Lindner, Fisher et. al. were grabbling United Fruit, Lindner's AFC simultaneously allied with a group of other Lansky-linked entities to establish a formidable pool of interlocking companies that would collectively form the core of the junk-bond raiders. By 1977, Lindner owned:

40% of Saul Steinberg's Reliance Insurance Company. Steinberg had gotten his start as a business partner of Britain's Lord Jacob Rothschild and later had extensive dealings with Kenneth Bialkin, the longtime Chairman of the Anti-Defamation League and a top New York City lawyer representing many junk bond pirates and corporate raiders of the 1980s.


40% of Meshulim Riklis' Rapid-American Corp., which at the time, owned Schenley Distilleries, Playtex International, Lerner Shops, and RKO-Stanley Warner Theaters. Riklis was an Israeli immigrant mobster and onetime British Mandate police informant, who had been bankrolled, from the 1950s, by Burton Joseph, a Minneapolis grain merchant and top ADL official. Riklis was so close to Israel's top mafia politician, Ariel Sharon, that he bought Sharon his Negev Desert ranch.


The largest minority share of Laurence and Robert Preston Tisch's Loew's Corp., the theater, hotel and real estate corporation that had also evolved out of the Prohibition-era Lansky move into Hollywood's motion picture industry. Laurence Tisch was later a founder, with Michael Steinhardt, of the secretive "Mega" group of some 50 billionaires, which today supports Ariel Sharon's war drive and the broader Clash of Civilizations.


10% of NVF, the holding company of Victor Posner, who had been the chief accountant for Meyer Lansky and the National Crime Syndicate.


8% of Gulf & Western, the debt-pyramided conglomerate run by Charles Bludhorn, which owned Paramount Pictures, Simon and Schuster Publishers, Esquire magazine and extensive properties in the Dominican Republic.


19% of Charter Oil, the Florida-based company partly owned by Armand Hammer. Charter was at the center of the late 1970s "Billygate" scandal, implicating President Jimmy Carter's brother with Libyan dictator Muammar Qadaffi and Italian Propaganda-2 Freemasonic Lodge gangster Michele Papa.
Over the years, this group of companies' ill-gotten money created and funded 70 separate pro-Israel political actions committees—all part of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee money-machine, earmarked to buy members of the U.S. Congress.

How can anyone of moral character vote for this man?

passing this on to my family and friends

One of the things that I have found to be the most irritating about John McCain is this marketing profile he created as the "Maverick." We really have to stop and think about that one and give it a real definition. If maverick means constantly going against your party's (supposed doctrine) and siding with Ted Kennedy, pandering to illegal criminal foreigners, working at the behest of foreign governments, attacking your own constitutency, pandering to global corporate interests, being involved with underhanded financial scams that cripple our monetary institutions, throwing tantrums like a spoiled child, voting against every best interest of our nation and siding with collectivists...Then yes he is that kind of Maverick. John McCain is a Maverick in the sense that he is rebelling against the Constitution.

John McCain is the new Major John Andre.
http://www.ushistory.org/march/bio/andre.htm

A quick summary on the Keating Five associations that included his family:

Keating Five


McCain's upwards political trajectory was jolted when he became
enmeshed in the Keating Five scandal of the 1980s.


In the context of the Savings and Loan crisis of that decade,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savings_and_Loan_crisis Charles Keating,
Jr.'s Lincoln Savings and Loan Association,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln_Sa ... ssociation a
subsidiary of his American Continental Corporation, was insolvent due
to some bad loans.


In order to regain solvency, Lincoln sold investment in a real estate
venture as a FDIC insured savings account.


This caught the eye of federal regulators who were looking to shut it
down.


It is alleged that Keating contacted five senators to whom he made
contributions.


McCain was one of those senators and he met at least twice in 1987
with Ed Gray, chairman of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, seeking to
prevent the government's seizure of Lincoln.


Between 1982 and 1987, McCain received approximately $112,000 in
political contributions from Keating and his associates.


In addition, McCain's wife and her father had invested $359,100 in a
Keating shopping center in April 1986, a year before McCain met with
the regulators.

To me this criminal behavior simply speaks to his character and the constant hypocrisy he recites. Most especially as it deals with his mentioning of reform and campaign contributions. In reality it simply proves that in the era before the internet all one had to do to fight off corruption was to take the oppositte stance. At least as a public marketing push. As far as the main stream media has allowed, John McCain has turned himself from a two-bit corrupt crook taking underhanded payoffs from dispicable bankers to someone who is a champion of campaing reform...Only an information system that moves one way could allow this...Hopefully the internet can prevail here and his "supporters" find out about this.

To a greater point is that the two-step he did then, taking bribes and payoffs then becoming a champion of "reform" is exactly what he is trying to do now with illgeal immigration during the election year! He is simply trying to paint himself as some sort of border security "maverick" because this strategy has worked for him in the past. Do criminal things, say the opposite to the public. Let's stop this theif!

It's unbelieveable that NO ONE has brought up the scandalous Keating Five! Where are the veteran reporters who were around in those days? Granted, it was almost a generation past...and many were still in diapers at the time....but why is this being totally ignored?

Now that Lazarus has risen from the bottom of the heap...it's time to refresh everyone's memory!

Great thread "Chosen" I read the whole thing and enjoyed the links just for a reminder after so many years.

If most people just looked at Mc Cains record the last couple of years in the Senate they would see though him. But they pay no attention and this is a huge problem in this country.

His illegal immigration stance alone should be enough for people to just say NO.

How are we ever going to save this country if people just keep puting these crooks back in office. If they didn't work for the good of America in the currant job, what the hell makes people believe he will work for them in the highest office in the land.

I know the war is one reason he won in SC (military state) but I will say people better stop voting for the war in Iraq, out of fear of terrorism, and start voteing for America.

I am stumped and worried about uneducated or nieve voters !

I second your fears about the McCain voters. I am hoping it is some sort of stupid fluke, but even so, that level of carelessness could cost us our country.

Again you are right about his stance on illegal immigration being enough of a reason to vote him out rather than in, you throw constant scandals on top of it and you have to think about the voters and what they are doing.

And even if they are just RNC robots voting with the winds, do they think he would have any chance of beating Hillary?

Here is an excellent article at gopusa that mentions a nomination of McCain and Huckabee would destroy the Republican party. Too bad this hasn't been read by the freeper style zealots (it lists many great points about how McCain is all wrong):
http://www.gopusa.com/theloft/?p=643

McCain's Lazarus Routine
Posted by Chuck Muth
January 14, 2008 at 1:44 pm
>> Printer-Friendly Version

Many conservatives thought - hoped - that John McCain’s presidential campaign was dead beyond revival last summer as, indeed, it appeared. Alas, his win in New Hampshire last week has resurrected his campaign corpse, so it’s time to remind everyone why nominating McCain, for conservatives anyway, would be the next worst thing to nominating Mike Huckabee.

In a Washington Post column yesterday, McCain adviser John Weaver had this to say about opposition to McCain’s candidacy by various conservative leaders such as our good friend and best friend of the American taxpayer, Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform:

“Here's who John McCain has angered: self-described conservative lobbyists who basically represent special interests. They're angry at him because he has put the national interest in front of their special interests.â€

Here is some information on the realtionship between McCain and the Banker Charles Keating:

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.

Should also mention that Zeezil posted this about the Skeletons in McCains closet (one of the many is the Keating Five):

http://www.alipac.us/modules.php?name=F ... ic&t=98472