Newscoma

It is the sixth of October. For those of you who don’t know about the Keating Five, well, you are going to be inundated with information on it today.

Go read about it here and educate yourself about it in an article written nine years ago from the Arizona Republic. I have an excerpt but I encourage you to read the whole thing.

In spinning his side of the Keating story, McCain adopted the blanket defense that Keating was a constituent and that he had every right to ask his senators for help. In attending the meetings, McCain said, he simply wanted to make sure that Keating was treated like any other constituent.

Keating was far more than a constituent to McCain, however.

On Oct. 8, 1989, The Republic revealed that McCain’s wife and her father had invested $359,100 in a Keating shopping center in April 1986, a year before McCain met with the regulators.

The paper also reported that the McCains, sometimes accompanied by their daughter and baby-sitter, had made at least nine trips at Keating’s expense, sometimes aboard the American Continental jet. Three of trips were made during vacations to Keating’s opulent Bahamas retreat at Cat Cay.

McCain also did not pay Keating for the trips until years after they were taken, when he learned that Keating was in trouble over Lincoln. Total cost: $13,433.

This is what the news is talking about. I deliberately picked this story that was written nearly a decade ago to stay away from the election spin from both sides of the aisle you will be reading and seeing today.

With that said, I learned today of a small business that lives month to month. On Wednesday, they will have to pay $7,000 dollars in taxes. It’s a cycle. There are no bailouts. There are accountants involved, there has been responsibility taken. There is no credit line. These people work seven days a week. This family business is struggling here in Hoots. They had been paying their tax bill every month for nine years, but it’s never enough.

This small business has no money to buy influence because those are apparently the rules. The Keating Five is just one example of privilege and excess.

So, as you can see, when I see pork money attached to the bailout, the fact that I’m reorganizing the business I work for (a different business than the one mentioned above), looking at which lights to turn out to save everyone’s job and wondering the long-term impact of the actions of politicians last week, it’s disheartening.

I thought aspects of the bailout where needed from a global perspective but it’s the pork that makes me angry. There is no end in sight.

And then I read that some Wall Street execs are taking this “down time” to get facelifts.

Unbelievable.