From: Stuart Heady Suicide Note Blames Keating 5
To: News Junkies for Obama
From Daily Kos this morning. Worth remembering, worth repeating:
Just released: Keating 5 victim's suicide note. Blame.
by DorothyT [Subscribe]
Thu Oct 02, 2008 at 08:12:14 AM PDT
In 1990, Anthony Elliott was one of several hundred of the 17,000 Lincoln S & L bondholders who met weekly at a park in L.A. to support each other. They knew by that time the role that John McCain and the rest of the Keating 5 played in their losing their savings. And they were angry.
Anthony Elliott was 89, a widower, living in a small house that he'd arranged to leave to a children's charity when he died. He was bereft when it appeared that when he lost his savings, he would also lose his house and his modest legacy to the children.
Anthony lowered himself in his bathtub and cut his wrists with a straight razor. He left this suicide note in his typewriter, written on Thanksgiving Day, 1990.
"There is nothing left for me of things that used to be. My government is supposed to serve and protect, but who? Those who can gather the most savings from retired people. . . . It takes billions to fill the pockets of spendocrats. I've had enough of this waring (sic) world."
DorothyT's diary :: ::
Thanks to serendipity I was at the Common Cause office in L.A. when a call came from the bondholders asking if someone could help them better organize and get their message out. To this day, I feel their fear in my gut. They had the raw material in their group to be role models for how victims can claim justice, and eventually, some recoveries through the courts (years later). Many of them were empowered by letting their anger overtake their fear.
The Lincoln S&L victims' eventual partial recoveries came too late for Anthony Elliott. For me he is the symbol of what John McCain and the rest of the Keating 5 did. His powerful suicide note was not deliberately squelched. Worse, his suicide note was quickly forgotten and lost to us for 18 years.
Was I overreaching when I used the word "Blame" in the subject line? The L.A. police didn't think so:
"An elderly Burbank man who was distraught over losing $200,000 -- his life savings -- in the Lincoln Savings & Loan collapse killed himself, leaving behind a suicide note that blamed the crisis and the federal government for his woes, police said Wednesday."
Source for suicide information is available on L.A. Times archives for a fee ("Victim of S&L Loss Kills Self," Nov. 29, 1990, written by Michael Connelly).
For at least three years, McCain and the rest clearly obstructed the government minions, the lowly federal examiners who were trying to do their jobs and ring the alarm bells. Lincoln should have been seized years earlier, protecting Anthony Elliott and the other Lincoln clients, plus the American taxpayer.
There's only two main things you need to know about Lincoln S&L.
First, what the federal examiners found even before Keating started the fraudulent practice of selling bonds out of his Lincoln branches (illegal, Glass-Steagall was the law at the time):
"...it looked like Lincoln wasn't properly underwriting its loans, wasn't getting the right appraisals, was recording fake profits, had loaned too much money to certain individuals, and was engaging in file stuffing, back-dating documents, and creative accounting to hide this chicanery..."
Second, how Keating used the Keating 5:
"This delay (3 years since the examiners found gross problems and the regulators seized Lincoln) was orchestrated by Keating, through a masterful and unabashed use of money. His chief emissaries were politicians and attorneys. For politicians, Keating preferred U.S. senators...Keating went shopping for souls, and in Washington he found a buyer's market...he got the most mileage out of the $1.4 million he steered to five U.S. senators...Keating's appointment calendar showed that between 1984 and 1989 he had at least 85 meetings with U.S. congressmen and senators about Lincoln Savings...12 times with McCain...
When Keating was asked if his financial support influenced support for his cause, he told reporters, "I want to say in the most forceful way I can: I certainly hope so."
Source: "Inside Job, The Looting of America's Savings & Loans" by Stephen Pizzo, Mary Fricker, and Paul Muolo, published in paperback in 1991 (Harper Perennial).
I had intended to fill this diary full of other political and regulatory digressions, but, really, all that we need to know is what happened to thousands of elderly people who experienced the Great Depression when young, worked hard all their lives, and saved cautiously as best they could for their old age, as illuminated in the story of Anthony Elliott.
Today we face financial meltdown in the wild west of Wall Street and investment banks and hedge funds throughout the world. This time, in addition to junk bonds of indeterminate value which wrap around your mortgages, we have trillions in "insurance products" that are simply Las Vegas style bets (credit default swaps), which we appear to be bailing out.
John McCain was in the thick of it during the S&L crisis, and he did nothing to ward this off. He still proudly calls himself a deregulator, knowing that the consequences of that philosophy in its extreme would see history repeat itself. And it is, on a breathtaking scale.
John McCain carries a burden of responsibility for killing Anthony Elliott's spirit and ruining his life at its end. I fear for others today.
No people ever recognize their dictator in advance... When our dictator turns up you can depend on it that he will be one of the boys, and he will stand for everything traditionally American. Dorothy Thompson, 1935.
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