McCain as one of the Keating Five

Obama may not be perfect - but he didn't bring down the U.S. Savings & Loan industry in the 1980s.

Read below about the Keating Five - then watch the video

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The Washington Post
November 19, 1989, Sunday, Final Edition
The Lincoln Mess: Let's Say Goodbye To Keating Five
BYLINE: HOBART ROWEN
SECTION: FINANCIAL; PAGE H1

"Everybody does it, it's legal, that's the way the system works." That's the defense for Sens. Dennis DeConcini and John McCain of Arizona; Alan Cranston of California; John Glenn of Ohio; and Donald W. Riegle Jr. of Michigan, who are accused of pressuring a federal regulator to go easy on Charles H. Keating Jr., a constituent who had raised $ 1.3 million in campaign funds for them.

The regulator, former Federal Home Loan Bank Board chairman Edwin Gray, contends that two 1987 meetings to which he and his colleagues were summoned by the Keating Five were "exercises in naked political power on behalf of a major political contributor."

What these five experienced legislators (two one-time presidential hopefuls and one chairman of the Senate Banking Committee among them) did may not have been technically illegal, but ethically, it stank to high heaven.

If there were true justice in the world, all would be forced to resign their Senate seats. Unless further unsavory details emerge, that's not likely to happen because too many of their colleagues have been similarly (if not equally) guilty in the past. But the Senate Ethics Committee is planning a formal investigation of the five senators to determine whether their intervention on Keating's behalf may have delayed the government's takeover of Lincoln. In the end, voters in their respective four states -- where Keating has extensive financial interests -- can and should dump them at the first opportunity.

In the true sense of the word, their services were bought by Keating, an Arizona land developer who acquired the California-based Lincoln Savings and Loan Association. The bank board's San Francisco office had begun an investigation in 1986 that convinced it the S&L was indulging in wild, speculative ventures and that it needed to be sharply restrained.

Since then -- and despite the Keating Five's intervention -- Lincoln Savings has gone belly-up, and the failure will cost taxpayers about $ 2.5 billion, making it the single biggest bust of the whole dreadful savings and loan scandal...

In the wake of all the bad publicity, DeConcini and Riegle have by now returned some of Keating's money, but they argue they made only routine and unobjectionable representations for Keating. Glenn and Cranston have stonewalled reporters' inquiries. McCain has sounded contrite: On one occasion, he weakly noted that he had been a senator for only three months by April 1987. That won't wash, even for a war hero.

The Keating Five should go.

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