Tom Hayes: Not this time!

"For the first time ever, all five committees in Congress responsible for health reform have passed a version of legislation," President Obama said in his weekly radio address on October 17, 2009.

He went on to note that despite hurdles, "we are closer to reforming the health care system than we have ever been in history."

In response to massive lobbying and advertising efforts, the President said,

"They're filling the airwaves with deceptive and dishonest ads. They're flooding Capitol Hill with lobbyists and campaign contributions. And they're funding studies designed to mislead the American people..."

There are 6 health care industry lobbyists in D.C. for every single member of Congress. Combined, the special interests are spending over $1,000,000 every day to defeat reform, to keep things as they've been while close to 14,000 Americans a day lose their coverage, and over half of all personal bankruptcies are triggered by uncovered medical expenses.

In what may be the best turn of phrase yet in this battle for votes, Obama also noted,

"Every time we get close to passing reform, the insurance companies produce these phony studies as a prescription and say, 'Take one of these, and call us in a decade.' Well, not this time."

Read the transcript, or watch the video (below) and learn about the deceptive schemes and techniques being used by those who want you to tune out and stop listening so their profits and bonuses will remain undisturbed.

Got four minutes? Watch a quick video that sums up the President’s plan to provide security and stability to those who have insurance and coverage for those who don’t.

Thomas Hayes is a political analyst, journalist, and entrepreneur who contributes regularly to a host of web sites on topics including economics, politics, culture, and community.

Senator John McCain Has Not Overcome Keating Scandal

We hear a lot about the great Senator and Presidential Candidate John McCain and how he's beyond the point where he can be "bhttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifought" by lobbyists and hasn't taken an earmark. We also get very little information on Senator McCain and the Keating Five Scandal, I think in part because four of the five people involved were Democrats of otherwise great stature. But still, it's a part of history, and of the Keating Five, only John McCain is still in office.

What was the Keating Scandal?

The Keating Scandel is named for Charles Keating, who, during the 1980s was the Chairman of the Lincoln Savings and Loan Association of Irvine, Calif., and a big political donor. So much so that five Senators -- Alan Cranston (D-CA), Dennis DeConcini (D-AZ), John Glenn (D-OH), John McCain (R-AZ), Donald W. Riegle (D-MI) -- received $300,000 in contributions from him and McCain himself received $112,000 by 1987 from Keating.

This power enabled Charles Keating to buy their influnce such that when the Federal Home Loan Bank Board (FHLBB) -- which regulated savings and loan association activities -- worked to curb the 80s trend toward risky investments, which caused the collapse of the Lincoln Savings and Loan Association, which Keating ran. When the FHLBB and its head, Chairman Ed Gray, moved to investigate the Lincoln matter, McCain and the other four Senators asked Gray to step back from any meaningful study of Lincoln.

When that news was revealed by Grey it set off a round of connect-the-dots inquiries, all of which found that:

In October 1989 The Arizona Republic reported that in addition to campaign contributions, 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 Corporation (parent of Lincoln) jet. Three of the trips were made during vacations to Keating's opulent Bahamas retreat at Cat Cay. McCain also did not pay Keating for some of the trips until years after they were taken, after he learned that Keating was in trouble over Lincoln. [3] Lincoln Savings and Loan's collapse is said to have cost taxpayers $3.4 billion

The final outcome was that investigator deemed McCain's involvement to me "minimal." But as we've recently learned The Keating Five matter has not really altered John McCains' close association with people who are major contributors to his campaign, partcularly Federal lobbyists.

This video shows that McCain has had as many as 59 lobbyists raising money for his Presidential campaign including Vicki Iseman, with whom it was rumored he had a "relationship" and the now famous Charlie Black:



What does all of this mean? It means that McCain is still to this day in a great position to be directed to shape government policy by corporate interests in much the same way as he was in the events that lead up to the Keating Five scandal.