John McCain's Role In The $160.1 Billion Lincoln Savings & Loan Collapse

This morning in Green Bay, Wisconsin, John McCain, a former major figure in the 1989 Lincoln Savings & Loan Scandal and the $160.1 billion dollar collapse, with his running mate, Sarah Palin, under her own ethics investigation in her state of Alaska by the legislature over "Troopergate", gave an absurd and disingenuous speech calling for firings of some public officials and indictments for some other corrupt persons in business. Yet it is exactly these same sort of a personalities that McCain would either fire or indict that he was himself back in 1989 during the savings and loan collapse scandal that cost the American taxpayer $124.6 billion.

While the Senate Ethics Committee may have found McCain "not guilty" of any criminal conduct and only guilty of "bad judgement", McCain was the most personally involved of any of the "Keating Five" U.S. senators with Charles H. Keating, Jr., by far. Keating was eventually convicted of racketeering and other serious crimes and sent to federal prison for his trail of financial corruption in the scandal that bankrupted Lincoln Savings & Loan.

Interestingly, prior to his conviction as one of the worst white collar criminals in American history, Keating was best known as an anti-pornography crusader, most likely to mislead many that he was some sort of moral figure by fighting against dirty books, while being the most dirty businessman ever himself. But Keating's phony moral crusading was just part of his phony ruse to conceal all of his theft and corrupt financial dealings with crooked senators like McCain and the other "Keating Five" members.

Keating, and other close business associates hoped to use corrupt senators like John McCain to influence banking regulators, and had given McCain no less than $112,000 in political contributions over the five year period leading up to 1987. McCain's own wife, Cindy McCain and her father, Jim Hensley, were also involved in a shopping center business arrangement with Keating in 1986, in which they invested $359,100 in the business deal. In addition, the McCains had made no less than nine vacation trips at Keating's expense, often on Keating's own jet to a resort he built in the Bahamas. All of this acceptance of vacations, jet plane trips and McCain family business dealings with Keating led up to McCain and four other corrupt senators meeting federal banking regulators to hold off any federal regulators from a probe into Keating's conduct as head of Lincoln Savings & Loan using this company as his own personal piggy bank to fund his billionaire lifestyle. Only after Keating fell into legal problems did Senator John McCain make any attempt to repay Keating for all the vacations trips he and his family accepted from Keating, obviously intended to keep banking regulators from acting against Keating.

"Not indicted" or "not guilty" of any crime isn't really a very high standard to prove that McCain is an honest man. If anything, McCain's dealings with convicted savings and loan racketeer Keatings prove entirely the opposite.

Electing someone with a corrupt history of accepting Bahamas vacations on some criminals own jet plane in a resort paid for with money stolen from a business that McCain sought to protect from government regulators is like electing a fox to watch over the hen house.

John McCain is a perfect symbol of old time Washington corruption. And all of his phony rhetoric about being some sort of a government "reformer" is just pure political B.S. that McCain adopted after he nearly lost his seat in the senate because of his corrupt business dealings with racketeer Charles Keating. For a fact, McCain is part of the Washington problem, not part of the solution. Anyone who thinks the opposite is true is just not dealing with reality.