The model goes like this: deregulate markets & assets, pump up a balloon, reel-in the suckers, loot the assets, crash those markets, buy up ruined competitors at pennies on the dollar, collect gov't bailout money for the rest. If you're in at the start, you make an ungodly fortune (that gets offshored to tax havens) and end up owning everything worth owning. It's been the same game and players for a couple decades.
The S&L crisis was all about oil, junk bonds, and deregulation that allowed the two to mix. That volatile brew is still actively bubbling over,and taxpayers are still paying $30 billion annual installments toward the trillion dollar bailout.
Here's how you got stuck paying the bill, courtesy of the Bush family and John McCain.
In the mid-1980s, world oil prices plunged which set off a long series of bankruptcies and financial takeovers when overvalued Texas and southwestern land prices collapsed. The financial panic of 1988 also followed the “reform” of federal banking rules that had allowed bank managers to trade in risky new derivatives and junk bonds.
This tidal wave of bankruptcies in the oil patch created a huge buying opportunity for anyone with ready cash. The problem was, these were hard times on Wall Street after the sudden panic sell-off on October 1987. But, someone did step in once prices were sufficiently discounted. Huge bank holding companies scooped up looted banks and S&Ls (along with their land deeds and oil rights), bought out for pennies on the dollar after they went belly-up. The federal government even subsidized many of these purchases. The American taxpayer was left with an estimated $1 trillion bailout cost. The epicenters of this late 20th Century white collar crime wave were in Houston and Phoenix, home base for two highly ambitious GOP politicians. One was named George H.W. Bush, and the other John McCain, III.
McCain and BCCI, the Bush Bank
Before he was selected to as Ronald Reagan’s 1980 running mate, George H.W. Bush had a short and little-known career as an international banker. That effectively started in 1976, while Bush was still CIA Director, a post he held for part of the Nixon and Ford Administration. In the final months of the Ford presidency, Bush made a deal with the newly-appointed head of Saudi General Intelligence Directorate, Prince Turki al-Faisal. The two spy chiefs agreed the CIA would look the other way while the Saudis ran their own global operations. In exchange, the Saudis financed the sort of black ops that had been banned by the Democratic Congress after Watergate and the Church Committee hearings. The arrangement was called “The Safari Club” , and the funding mechanism for this was the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, “BCCI”. See,
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/7/8/146 ... ;
http://www.saudiembassy.net/2006News/State ...
Newly-elected President Jimmy Carter fired the CIA Director. In early 1977, Houston banker Joe Allbritton appointed Bush to direct his First International Bancshares (dba, First Interbank) and its London and Luxembourg affiliates. According to Kevin Phillips, Bush’s bank was among the first outposts in America for BCCI.
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0111-0 ... In the early 1980s, Allbritton followed G.H.W. to Washington, purchasing Riggs Bank, installing brother Jonathan Bush as a Director.
Riggs closed in 2004 after being fined $25 million dollars for violation of federal money laundering and anti-terrorism laws. Riggs had catered to high-end foreign customers and the diplomatic trade in Washington, as well as having “a relationship” with the CIA.
http://www.slate.com/id/2112015 / After 9/11, the bank was found to have transferred money from Saudi Embassy accounts that ended up supporting two of the 9/11 hijackers, Flt. 77 leaders Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khaleed al-Midhar after their arrival in the U.S. See,
http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/b ...
Know Your Banking Customer: Salem Bin Laden
Meanwhile, back in Texas, First Interbank merged with Jim Baker’s Republic Bank, in which the Saudis had taken a stake with the 1978 purchase of the bank’ headquarters building by members of the Bin-Laden and bin-Mahfouz families. The merger of these two Texas banks several years later created the largest regional financial institution in the U.S. Infused with capital from Saudi Arabia, First RepublicBank went on a massive bargain buying binge in the Southwest oil patch.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2004/mar/3 ...
This Saudi-financed merger of the Bush bank with the Baker bank created the nation’s largest bank holding company, and soon the largest bank failure, resulting in a $1 billion tax-payer funded bailout in 1987. This was to become a pattern for the trillion dollar rip-off to come. See,
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html ...
McCain's Role in Covering Up the The Trillion Dollar Bank Heist
It’s been said that the American people didn’t become very angry about the S&L crisis because the explanations given for what caused it were too complicated for many to comprehend. That seems to have set a pattern for financial scandals to follow. Nobody dared tell the American public – although the 1992 Kerry Commission report came close -- that their financial system was being looted by a well-funded, highly-organized global criminal organization with ties to half a dozen of the world’s most powerful intelligence services, including elements of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. They didn't name CIA Headquarters, "The George H.W. Bush Intelligence Center" for nothing. See,
http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/1992_rpt/b ...
Buried in all this muck is the thread running through all these financial scandals – from Keating to Silverado to First RepublicBank to BCCI to Enron -- has been corrupt management, corrupt officials, corrupt intelligence operatives, and corrupt auditors. See,
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/92jan/st ...
As the group’s scams became more sophisticated and wide-ranging, the price tag for bail-outs escalated. The federal rescue of Neil Bush’ Silverado S&L cost the taxpayer $1.3 billion. The price tag for Charles Keating’s Lincoln Savings & Loan bailout eventually reached $2.6 billion.
http://www.slate.com/id/1004633 BCCI was termed “the $20-billion-plus heist.” (Beatty, Jonathan; S.C. Gwynne. The Outlaw Bank: A Wild Ride Into the Secret Heart of BCCI Beard Books (1993)). Finally, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) estimated that Enron fleeced ratepayers of $30 billion, creating the 2001 California energy crisis. On November 15, 2005, FERC settled with Enron’s receivers for a mere $1.5 billion.
http://www.ferc.gov/industries/electric/in ...
The Keating S&L scandal was part of a now-familiar pattern of transnational commodities price-fixing, land grabs, stock-price rigging, fraudulent audits, financial panic, and public bailouts, all carried out by an overlapping cast of characters with ties to foreign and domestic intelligence agencies. Amidst the financial panic of 1986-88 that followed the drop of a barrel of oil from $39 to $13, many of these banks and S&Ls (and their land deeds and oil rights) were bought out for pennies on the dollar. More than a thousand deregulated financial institutions went belly up and were looted. Deregulation allowed crooked bank managers to cash in on the junk bond craze that was sweeping Wall Street. Banks and S&Ls issued unsecured notes and plots of land and traded them in circles with other institutions to ring up the notional value to support cash-out loans for themselves and their partners.
This is precisely the sort of round-robin games that Neil Bush, Director of Silverado S&L played with Charles Keating and his partners, Saudi European Investment Corp’s board and officers – Roger Tamraz, Tolat Othman, Abdullah Taha Bakhsh, Abbas Gokal -- along with other BCCI players. All told, the S&L scandal left the American taxpayer holding the tab for an estimated $1 trillion bailout. See, Steven Wilmsen: Silverado: Neil Bush and the Savings & Loan Scandal, p. 81;
http://www.netmagic.net/~franklin/SS1.html ;
http://72.14.205.104/search?q=cache:IpskRJ ... ;
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/getc ...
It was during this period that the Saudis and Gulf states leveraged their earnings from American bank acquisitions through junk-bond mills, and then moved on to the 1996 Chemical-Chase and Citi banks consolidations in New York.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html ... Today, Prince Alaweed’s Kingdom Holdings owns a substantial and growing share of Citicorp, the largest bank in America, along with a portfolio of the nation’s largest financial, technology and media corporations. A similar process of slash and burn acquisition of the U.S. financial industry is now going on with the collapse of the U.S. mortgage and derivatives markets. See,
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/week ... ;
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/11/business ...
A major figure in the Keating S&L case was Carl Linder, known as the “father figure” to junk bond king Michael Milken, and the single largest purchaser of Milken’s junk bonds.
http://www.motherjones.com/news/special_re ...
“Lindner, a wealthy businessman from Cincinnati, Ohio owned the American Financial Corporation (AFC). In 1976, Keating bought a subsidiary of AFC called American Continental Homes from Lindner, which Keating later renamed American Continental Corporation (ACC). ACC embarked on several ambitious real estate development projects, mostly in Arizona and Colorado. To finance its activities, ACC set up its own in-house mortgage company and was a pioneer in creating the type of financial package and instrument known as the ‘mortgage-backed security.’” See,
http://law.jrank.org/pages/3505/Charles-Ke ...
To recap, the context of the Keating S&L scandal was manipulation of world oil prices following the 1979 Iranian revolution and a loosening of regulatory oversight that set off a wave of bank failures across the American oil patch. Into this mix enters BCCI’s global raiders and junk bond traders, who cash cow the giant bank holding companies and leverage their assets into a play to take over the American banking industry. Finally, to top it off, the Bush presidency and elements of U.S. intelligence engage in a massive cover up of these global financial mechanizations in an effort to protect their international partners. It’s in this context that one needs to re-examine the role of John McCain in the Keating S&L scandal. McCain has always been a conciliator and clean-up specialist – in the case of the Keating S&L, the purpose was to protect a group of junk bond salesmen and Arab bank raiders, but, most of all to shield the Bush wing of the CIA and corrupt lawmakers – and put an attractive, all-American face of “reform” on cleaning up the mess afterwards. This is precisely the coverup routine McCain repeated twenty years later in the Abramoff case.
McCain and Enron
Throughout his career, McCain has been an enthusiastic champion of financial industry deregulation as a member of the Senate Commerce Committee from 1997-2001 and 2003-2005. McCain voted, according to a Washington Post financial columnist, with his “campaign's general co-chairman and domestic policy adviser, former Texas senator Phil Gramm. The Politico's Lisa Lerer reports that not only did Gramm author the 1999 legislation that repealed Glass-Steagall, the New Deal law restricting the speculative activities of banks, but after Gramm left the Senate, he lobbied Congress on behalf of the Swiss bank UBS when the banking lobby wanted Congress to overturn state laws restricting predatory lending and the issuance of mortgages to prospective home owners who could not afford them.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte ... McCain, like Gramm, has been a supporter of the “Enron Loophole” that allowed Amaranth Advisors hedge fund, a commodities futures trading company, to attempt in 2006 to corner the natural gas market, a criminal violation for which the fund was recently handed a $300 million fine.
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2008/051908a ...
McCain also has a direct connection with Enron, having received money in campaign contributions from Ken Lay’s Death Star. "We're all tainted by the millions and millions of dollars that were contributed by Enron executives," John McCain told CBS' "Face the Nation" Sunday. McCain then acknowledged receiving $9,500 from Enron in two campaigns.
http://www.time.com/time/business/article /... Gramm’s wife, Wendy, was on the Enron Board of Directors, and Gramm was the architect of much of the “reform” while he chaired the Senate Banking Committee, including a move to exempt electronic trading of electricity from regulatory oversight. According to Time Magazine, Gramm and his wife were at the forefront of many of the illicit practices that led to the firm’s massive ripoffs and ultimate collapse:
On Jan. 14, 1993, in the final days of the first Bush administration, Wendy Gramm – as chairwoman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission – pushed through a key regulatory exemption removing energy derivatives contracts and interest-rate swaps from federal oversight.
That was a major financial boon to Enron, where Wendy Gramm landed five weeks later as a member of the board of directors. She also became a member of the audit committee that signed off on another one of Enron’s fraudulent schemes, partnerships that hid the company’s growing debt.
McCain claims that his role in Keating was merely to help out a local constituent in dealing with Washington bank regulators. McCain, his current wife, and father-in-law were, in fact, Charles Keating’s business partners in a Phoenix shopping mall, received in excess of one hundred thousand dollars in campaign contributions from Keating, and accompanied Keating on his private jet to his private resort in the Bahamas on multiple occasions, gifts which McCain did not report until they were discovered. Yet, McCain, hand-picked as Barry Goldwater’s successor, got a slap on the wrist from the Senate Ethics Committee when this came out in the Keating-Five inquiry.
A second Senate panel wasn’t so sanguine. The 1992 Kerry Commission report concluded that the Keating affair was far more serious than a mere domestic banking scandal: “the financial dealings of BCCI directors with Charles Keating and several Keating affiliates and front-companies, includ(e) the possibility that BCCI related entities may have laundered funds for Keating to move them outside the United States.”
http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/1992_rpt/b ... Out of the five Senators accused, only McCain and Glenn ever ran again for office, with McCain the sole survivor.
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