Standard & Poor's predatory policy agenda. Hint: They don't have your interests at heart.

[Karmadillo]

This is how the elite imposes its agenda on us. All of this crap is in the service of the austerity agenda. Sitting back and letting corporate politicians fight your battles for you is probably not going to lead to a postitive outcome.

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/08/matt-stoller-standard-poor%e2%80%99s-predatory-policy-agenda.html

Sunday, August 7, 2011
Standard & Poor’s Predatory Policy Agenda
By Matt Stoller, a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. He is a former financial services staffer to Rep. Alan Grayson.(on Twitter at @matthewstoller)

While it’s useful to think of the ratings agencies as incompetent, or as greedy, it’s important to remember that they have an actual policy agenda. They weren’t just wrong in rating subprime tranches of toxic dreck AAA. They were also pivotal in actively creating the policies that led to the financial crisis.

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It ended with a warning: “Standard & Poor’s will continue to monitor this and other pending predatory lending legislation.” In other words, any states that might have been considering strengthening their predatory lending laws as Georgia did should beware.

<edit>

Of course, on a larger level, this is not an American story, it’s just the latest iteration of the liquidation of society by international investors. As just one more example, Naomi Klein wrote about S&P and Moody’s being used by Canadian bankers in the early 1990s to threaten a downgrade of that country unless unemployment insurance and health care were slashed. Incidentally, there was an aggressive high end tax cut campaign going on at the time.

The current austerity wave in the US is the same play. The goal of S&P is to ensure that there is a bipartisan set of spending cuts to social programs that benefit ordinary people. That their “downgrade” is being taken seriously by Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, John Boehner, Bob Reich, Dick Durbin, and most American political leaders shows that they share this goal. S&P is just doing the lobbying work.

more...

[mmonk]

1. People at the center of the collapse tend not to.

[chill_wind]

2. K & R

[Coyote_Bandit]

3. And

neither the Congress or the President have proven to be my champion either.

[monmouth]

4. S&P owned by McGraw Hill, whose CEO is a backer of Romney..n/t.