Is anyone at all surprised to find out that the Chairman, President, and CEO of the company that owns and operates Standard & Poor’s is a frequent and big money contributor to the Republican Party and to their candidates, causes, and PACs? This includes money to the National Republican Congressional Committee, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, George W. Bush, and Mitt Romney. But no money to Obama or the Democrats.
Of course, from now on he’ll probably use a shell company so we can’t figure things like this out.
UPDATE: Today (Aug 11) is “Money is not speech” day. To see what you can do to help, see http://storyofstuff.org/dollarsordemocracy/.
7 Comments
This was all discussed in “Inside Job” Moodys and S&P are taking money to rate things;hence the high ratings for the toxic mortgages. Other countries believed the ratings and bought in. Moodys and S&P are responsible for the destruction of Europe. Am I the only one who has watched “Inside Job”? It started in 1999 with the bank deregulation. Took nine years to destroy our country. The professors in Harvard and other places are teaching bank deregulation while sitting on the boards of the companies that are destroying our country. Please someone else watch this. As it says on the cover:”The film that cost over $20,000,000,000,000 to make” It ties all we have been hearing since the bank deregulation together.
What is frustrating about this whole thing is that the public reason for S&P’s downgrade was justifiable (Congress can’t get their act together, creating unnecessary risk in the ability of the US to manage its debt). But because there is some persuasive evidence that the downgrade was in some part politically motivated, people now have an excuse to not pay attention to the fact that Congress is very close to mucking it up big time.
The good thing is that the bond markets (as of this morning EST) seem to have largely ignored the S&P. Hopefully that holds.
Not surprised at all…will it be like ’77 when Reagan took office, the hostages were released…when they shoehorn a R president in, will we get our AAA back?
There all a bunch of wealthy losers.
Yep… just as I suspected.
EBD: On your recommendation, I looked for “Inside Job” at our library and found there were six folks ahead of me in the line. I then went to Netflicks and got it there — thought you’d like to know that some people are looking at it besides you 🙂
I just moved it to the head of my Netflix queue, on your recommendation. Hopefully will watch it soon.
Hee, Hee, Hee! I get it firrrst!