Will We Ever Learn Our Lesson?

If you found out that one of the current Presidential Candidates was being investigated for mortgage fraud or was found to have received questionable loans from a now defunct mortgage company, how would you feel about that?  What would that say about our current state of politics?  What would that tell hard working Americans that play by the rules and get nowhere?  What would that say about the level of corruption in American?

A story on Inman about favoritism being shown to Senators and other political figures by Angelo Mozilo, former CEO of Countrywide reminded me of a similar situation that occured during the last financial crisis in the banking industry.

During the Savings and Loan Crisis of the late 80's and early 90's, there was an investigation into five US Senators who had met with Charles Keating.  Keating owned an S&L in California and was trying to prevent it from being seized by the government.  After meeting with the senators, Keating's S&L was allowed to operate for 2 more years, went belly up and cost taxpayers $2.6 Billion.  The five senators were investigated by the Senate Ethics Committee and were known as the Keating Five.  One of these senators was none other than Sen. John McCain, current Republican nominee for President. 

The Ethics committee somehow determined that the campaign contributions and other perks given to McCain by Mr. Keating were no big deal.  They said that all Sen McCain was guilty of was poor judgement.  Sounds like a great prospect for President of the United States.  Problem is the voters picked him. 

It shows that not only do we not learn from our mistakes, we continue to repeat them over and over again.  And the current system is designed to perpetuate these mistakes, over and over again, at the expense of the taxpayers.  But the taxpayers are the voters, so we have nobody to blame but ourselves.

I can just see a senator that received a special loan from Indymac or Washington Mutual or Countrywide being elected President in 2020, during the next mortgage crisis.