John McCain: Keating Five, Rolling Stone and More Mud…

Ok, what is the current state of the financial crisis?

Robert Reich talks about it:

Put simply, no lender trusts any borrower to repay, fearing that that borrower won’t be able to rely on anyone else to honor obligations. Even banks are hoarding cash, unwilling to lend to other banks. Everyone with any savings is heading for the hills — for gold, for under the mattress, for wherever savings can be watched. We’re witnessing a huge international bank run. We have not seen a global financial crisis on this scale since the 1930s.

What’s happened? Put simply, the Bailout of All Bailouts has been a dud, at least so far. Most obviously, it hasn’t done what it was intended to do — reassure financial markets that the Treasury and the Fed would have enough money to handle any financial crisis.

So it’s everyone and every institution — and every country — for itself. Several nations (Ireland, Greece, Germany) have basically guaranteed all deposits. As a result, global capital is moving their way. They’re also thereby creating a new form of socialized capitalism. At the rate they’re going, these nations will soon own and run their financial markets, and maybe a big chunk of the world’s.

Ok, what about John Mccain?

First, here is a link to a very interesting Rolling Stone story about John McCain. I honestly don’t know what to make of the POW stuff, but much of the rest of this story is confirmed by McCain’s own book.

McCain’s attacks: false.

Mr. McCain claimed that “as recently as September of last year,” Mr. Obama “said that subprime loans had been, quote ‘a good idea.’” But that quote is taken out of context and reverses the intent of Mr. Obama’s remarks, which were clearly meant primarily as a criticism of practices on Wall Street.

“Subprime lending started off as a good idea helping Americans buy homes who couldn’t previously afford to,” Mr. Obama said in a speech to NASDAQ in September 2007. But, he added, “as certain lenders and brokers began to see how much money could be made, they began to lower their standards. Some appraisers began inflating their estimates to get the deals done. Some borrowers started claiming income they didn’t have just to qualify for the loans, and some were engaging in irresponsible speculation. But many borrowers were tricked into glossing over the fine print.”

You’ll see this a lot from Republicans: the subprime loan crisis was the fault of the greed of the poor people; they don’t focus as much on the way that these bad loans were bundled into bad bonds and sold on the market without transparency.

Mr. McCain also criticized Mr. Obama’s policies on taxes, in language similar to last month’s first debate, with a few new fillips. But fact-checking organizations have already repeatedly dismissed the bulk of the accusations he made as inaccurate or exaggerated.

Just as in the debate, for example, Mr. McCain accused Mr. Obama of voting to raise taxes on people making as little as $42,000 a year. But that vote was in favor of a non-binding budget resolution that would have allowed the tax cuts President Bush pushed through Congress in 2001 and 2003, which mainly benefitted the wealthy, to expire. It was not a tax increase and as a resolution, it did not have force of law. In addition, it was meant to be supplemented by other legislation which would include middle-class tax breaks.

Mr. McCain was absent from the Senate, out on the campaign trail, when both votes were taken. But the Obama campaign has noted in e-mailings to reporters that he, like Mr. Obama, voted for another, related piece of legislation, an amendment that contained essentially the same budget projections that Mr. Obama had earlier endorsed.

This article also takes on McCain’s lies about Obama’s health care plan.

But Senator McCain is not in a position to throw stones.

First, McCain is trying to backpedal on his previous claims that he made a mistake with the Keating Five scandal:

Here is a video about it: (here)

McCain’s backers have memory problems too.

In a conference call with reporters, attorney John Dowd was asked about a specific part of the Keating Five inquiry, the fact that Cindy McCain and her father had invested in a Keating strip mall.

“It was part of the inquiry, but it did not — John was unconnected to that and unaware of it at the time, and did not participate in it,” Dowd said.

Really?

“Sometime in 1986, I was told by Mr. Delgado, who was Executive Vice President of my father-in-law’s company, that they were going to invest in a shopping center and that the investment — the project — was being put together by a subsidiary of American Continental,” McCain said. “He later told me that they — that that had happened. And I had no interest in it and just noted in passing that this investment took place.”

The attorney asking the question during the hearing? John Dowd.

Video:

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Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)

• John McCain’s Lying: will it matter?
• John McCain Sinking Like a Rock!
• John McCain’s Desperate Stunt
• “Obama to Hit McCain on Keating Five” (via Politico.com)