The awful truth about the role of the credit rating agencies in bringing about the financial panic and great recession is out. The credit rating agencies were not journalists or newscasters or issuers of mere opinions, as they like to suppose in order to evade responsibility for their malfeasance. They were imposters, advertising agencies in disguise, and the dealers who hawked the poisonous securities they rated were fraudsters. Figuratively speaking, fool\u2019s gold was stamped as pure gold by expert assayers who intentionally put their heads in the sand and their asses in the air and became the prospectors\u2019 prostitutes.

More civilly speaking, the credit rating agencies deliberately gave risky asset-backed securities high, investment grade ratings so the toxic assets could be lawfully invested in by regulated investment institutions, whereupon the rating agencies collected handsome fees for their government-sanctioned seals of approval. Again and again the credit rating agencies disregarded their duty to do due diligence, abandoned common sense to cultivate ignorance, conveniently

and fraudulently evaluated the risk associated with the securities, and employed worthless mathematical models to inflate values in order to make tons of easy money for themselves, knowing all along that a great deal of damage was eventually bound to be done to a great number of people. The rating scheme itself was insane, but the people involved were

logical enough: If someone called a spade a spade, she would be fired, but if he called it a diamond, he would be overworked yet make a bundle.

By golly, the rating agencies were selling ratings and sinners were snapping them up as if the ratings were catholic indulgences. With plenty of money around to be had on loan, who would not like to buy a good credit rating? As long as the Ponzi scheme is kept up and enough people do not get wise enough to cash out all at once, everyone may come out a winner and go to heaven, or so it seems if you have enough faith in the numbers on your fraudulent statements.

After all, Bernie Madoff was giving people what they wanted. That peculiar smile on his face after he got busted was over the irony of it all, that the fools do not want to know that capitalism is inherently corrupt and that its financial system is fraudulent and depends on faith in money if not Mammon. No one is without sin, and even the worst sinner, who is naturally the highly respected and envied person at the top of the heap, may be redeemed, along with the poor folk who bought into the home ownership dream and took out mortgage loans they could never afford to pay off unless the value of their homes kept going up. We might not feel very sorry for the subprime victims who did not read or could not understand the convoluted terms of the adhesion contracts they were signing, but now literally innocent people are losing their jobs and have to default on their prime obligations because of the colossal confidence game fomented in the highest ranks of society. Naturally the anarchist would claim

that no one with a social security number is innocent enough to be spared the busting consequences of the BOOM.

Your average creditworthy breadwinner had never heard of investment grade securities backed by pools of subprime mortgages, but now she and he has had its meaning driven home in the form of unemployment and foreclosure. Yes, now they know about the malfeasance of the credit rating agencies, and they would have justice done unto them, for the negligent,

fraudulent misrepresentations by the credit rating agencies are at the heart of the financial calamity that brought our advanced civilization to its economic knees to pray to big government for salvation, as did Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson when he took to his knees to plead with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Where there was some tangible collateral, like real estate, its value had been artificially inflated, thanks in part to the willful negligence and unmitigated greed of the elite who control all three branches of government. Those so-called branches of the United States government are really one, just as the father, the son, and the holy ghost are one god. The distinctions made in the latter are logically absurd, for three cannot equal one, nor can absolute power be logically divided. To wit, the figmental branches of government are an artful illusion governed by a continuously colluding power elite whose conspiracy belies the popular notion that the singular government is a democratic multiplicity. As for the mainstream corporate press, the so-called forth