Standard & Poor's Can Eat My Shorts!

Standard & Poor's, one of the "Big Three" investment ratings companies (the others are Moody's and Fitch) yesterday downgraded the credit rating of the U.S. government. For the first time ever, S&P did not give America its top-of-the-heap AAA rating. The stated reason? The lengthy, ugly and unnecessary fight over raising the debt ceiling. Didn't we go through all this shit specifically to avoid the dreaded downgrade? (Yes.)

Let's review. Who turned a routine legislative exercise into a near-disaster? The Republicans, especially the moronic Tea Party faction. Reagan and both Bushies increased the debt limit scores of times, without incident. Obama tries it once, and they want to twist off his nuts.

And who is Standard & Poor's? They, along with Moody's and Fitch, are quite simply Wall Street whores. They make money by doing what Wall Street tells them to do. They are supposed to objectively assess risk/return, but Wall Street first gives them both the question and the answer. These are the same lapdogs who for years blithely handed out AAA ratings to the Street's sliced-and-diced subprime mortgage-backed "collateralized debt obligations". And these completely shitty CDO's were, in large part, what caused the markets to crash in late 2008, resulting in the worst recession since 1929. In any rational world, these so-called "ratings agencies" ought to have zero credibility. Zero.

And what about Wall Street, the owners of these obedient lapdogs? Wall Street is the Land of Republicans, real Republicans, the truly wealthy kind who believe any nickel you might have is one they, by rights, ought to have. And what do obscenely wealthy genuine Republicans despise more than anything? A Democrat in the White House. And OMG, he's half-black to boot! Even worse!

So am I saying that the big-money R's would stage-manage a faux crisis over a non-issue and enlist sluts like S&P to do their down-grade bidding and intentionally trash the economy in a bald-faced attempt to unseat a black Democrat President and install a friendly, white, look-the-other-way Republican in the Oval Office?

You're goddam right I am!