Downgrade
Standard & Poor’s has a helluva nerve, downgrading the US’s credit rating. The US should have downgraded S&P, not to mention the other credit-rating companies, all of whom were at the very least complicit in the financial crisis the country went further into debt to get through, bailing out all those crooks at Goldman Sachs, for example, whose products S&P etc. rated.

Repuglicans have a helluva nerve offering any rebuke when it was their gamesmanship that put the country on the brink of default, all so they can keep the top 1% of the country from having to pay their fair share of tax.

China’s got a helluva nerve opening their yap to tell us to spend less on the military (although we damn well should), when they’re not going to do anything but buy more debt anyway, let alone adjust their own currency to reflect their economic realities.

This whole debt monster debate should be a non-starter. Debt itself isn’t bad, and government debt is often a good thing. If we can get out of Afghanistan and Iraq sooner rather than later and avoid getting in a new war, we’d start saving all kinds of money. Let the Bush tax cuts expire and we’d actually start getting some revenue back. Then maybe we could spend something on jobs creation, something neither the military nor the tax cut-beneficiaries are doing much of, at least not internally. (The military seems to be doing a helluva a job on creating jobs for illegal arms merchants and drug smugglers, and those tax cut magnates are sending jobs overseas as fast as they can, to China, among other places.)

Let’s do something right about the financial services sector. Call it revenge, and why not, but it couldn’t be so hard to put something in place to ensure that the credit rating agencies are required to be independent of the products they rate. There are valid ways to create non-compete clauses in employment contracts. Something similar could work. How about a five-year moratorium on employees of financial management companies being employed at a ratings agency? No funds to be managed by an agency engaged in issuing ratings? And let’s put some teeth into the regulations we have and start enforcing them.