Conspiracy in the making—the Keating Five affair—which involved Charles H. Keating, Jr., Chairman of the Lincoln Savings and Loan Association, and five senators. The Keating Five were: Alan Cranston (Democrat of California), Dennis DeConcini (Democrat of Arizona), John Glenn (Democrat of Ohio), John McCain (Republican of Arizona), and Donald W. Riegle, Jr. (Democrat of Michigan). The savings and loan scandal of the 1980′s and 1990′s resulted in the loss of at least 747 banks.
And yes, this is the same Senator John McCain that ran against Barack Obama.
“Lincoln Savings and Loan collapsed in 1989, at a cost of over $3 billion to the federal government. Some 23,000 Lincoln bondholders were defrauded and many investors lost their life savings. The substantial political contributions Keating had made to each of the senators, totaling $1.3 million, attracted considerable public and media attention.”
In testimony, in 1985, before a congressional committee, Edwin J. Gray, chair of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board (FHLBB), “he testified that the US League of Saving Institutions, told him not once, but on several occassions, that the overriding strategy of the Savings and Loan industry was to buy time, to buy time, and to buy time, until only the taxpayer could bail it out.” In other words, the initial plan was for taxpayers to bail the banks out.
Charles Keating ran the American Continental Corporation and the Lincoln Savings and Loan Association. “When Lincoln failed in 1989, it cost the federal government over $3 billion and about 23,000 customers were left with worthless bonds. In the early 1990s, Keating was convicted in both federal and state courts of many counts of fraud, racketeering, and conspiracy.”
You can get more details out of the Keating case in a 1993 book — Trust Me: Charles Keating and the Missing Billions
[...] while we don’t have enough time to cover it in this post, the Keating Five affair was another scandal in which John McCain (Republican of Arizona) was involved in. Enough said. [...]
[...] while we don’t have enough time to cover it in this post, the Keating Five affair was another scandal in which John McCain (Republican of Arizona) was involved in. Enough [...]