Under Attack, Credit Raters Turn to the First Amendment

Under Attack, Credit Raters Turn to the First Amendment

Editor's note: This is the first of three articles by the Investigative Fund on the credit rating companies.

For two decades, the nation's top credit rating agencies have managed to fend off a crackdown from Washington by relying on a surprising ally - the First Amendment.

Despite their key role in the most recent economic calamity, the three big bond raters--Standard & Poor's, Moody's and Fitch--seem poised to do it again. With help from two of the most storied constitutional lawyers in the country, the raters have successfully argued that when they make a mistake -- say, awarding the top triple-A grade to a multibillion-dollar bundle of bonds that later default -- they cannot be sued or held accountable.

That's because ratings are opinions, the agencies claim, protected by the constitutional right to free speech.

A Huffington Post Investigative Fund examination of court filings, congressional testimony and Securities and Exchange Commission documents illustrates how the companies have repeatedly invoked that right to free speech to dodge government regulation and court action. The raters have never lost a courtroom battle to a disgruntled investor, not even in the Enron scandal. Enron enjoyed high grades on its bonds just four days before it filed for bankruptcy in 2001.

Critics of the rating companies argue that they are misusing the Bill of Rights to protect a flawed but highly profitable business. ....

� Americans, Their Smiley-Face Facade, and Reality������� : Information Clearing House - ICH

Americans, Their Smiley-Face Facade, and Reality : Information Clearing House - ICH

Whenever I think of the smiley-face icon, I think of Wal-Mart because of its once-ubiquitous ad campaign. And when I think of Wal-Mart, I think of crappy wages and insecure employees who probably live paycheck to paycheck. That metaphor -- the happy face fronting a world of worry -- is the subject of a new book, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking has Undermined America , by social commentator Barbara Ehrenreich.
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Between 1979 and 2007, the top 1 percent of American households saw their share of all pretax income nearly double, while the bottom 80 percent had their share fall by 7 percent. Ehrenreich quotes The New York Times , saying, "It's as if every household in the bottom 80 percent is writing a check for $7,000 every year and sending it to the top 1 percent."

Every working stiff in the bottom 80 percent should be outraged and politically motivated to force change. But if everyone is convinced of the convenient nostrum that our own attitude controls how much we are paid, then workers won't band together to demand a larger share of our national prosperity.

This positive-thinking message is a kind of opiate that has been particularly effective on the white-collar corporate workforce. Ehrenreich documents how corporations hire motivational speakers to convince laid-off workers that their job loss is "an opportunity for self-transformation." Somehow, she says, white-collar workers have accepted positive thinking as a "belief system" that says a person can be "infinitely powerful, if only they could master their own minds."

On the surface, prosperity gospels and positive-thinking companies appear harmless with their treacly "Successories products" of posters and coffee mugs, but they have subversively helped make each of us an island. They have convinced Americans that each individual has control and power over the conditions of their life, when that is largely not the case. Access to decent health care at a reasonable price is not a matter of individual effort. Neither is securing decent wages, pensions, safe working conditions or job security. Workers demanded those rights through collective action in the 20th century, and we are losing them now by taking an "every man for himself" approach to work.

The ultimate irony is that even with the booming positive-thinking industry, Americans are not among the happiest people.

International surveys put us behind places such as Denmark and Switzerland, where the social safety net is stronger.

It seems that happy thoughts don't alter the reality of American life, with all its attendant risks to middle-class living standards. Behind the smiley-face facade, we are privately worried, and we have reason to be.

Our Media Need a Fair and Balanced Doctrine | Media and Technology | AlterNet

Our Media Need a Fair and Balanced Doctrine | Media and Technology | AlterNet
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A fair and balanced discussion of unfair and unbalanced rightwing corporate domination of the media is difficult to wage across a rightwing corporate-dominated media. So, it seems, the new stewards of the public's own airwaves -- the Executive Branch -- decided it was largely easier to quit than to fight. Once again, the only industry specifically recognized by explicit guarantees in the U.S. Constitution would go unprotected again. The corporate masters of that industry would have free reign, while the values meant to be protected by our founders would continue to disappear, nearly as quickly as a paragraph on Obama's White House website.

Freedom of the press would continue instead as freedom for America's wealthiest corporations to dominate it to their own self-serving advantage, for the foreseeable future.

After forty years, Ronald Reagan's dissolution of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 had succeeded in embedding neither fair nor balanced voices like Limbaugh on the airwaves, without meeting the responsibility of offering any voices of opposition.

That damage to a free press was compounded exponentially with Bill Clinton's disastrous Telecommunications Act of 1996. Sold with the promise of bringing more competition to the airwaves, the act resulted [PDF] in anything but, with just five or six media conglomerates ultimately taking ownership of virtually all broadcast licenses across the nation.

The result would be a Limbaugh Nation. Opposing and/or diverse voices all but disappeared. The few progressive voices allowed on air would be ghettoized, by the same corporate conglomerates, onto low wattage stations, or simply done away with all together.

The promised competition in the marketplace never occurred. Where it does today, in the few markets where a progressive voice is allowed a level playing field against a right-winger, the progressive often wins the day. progressive Stephanie Miller, for example, is heard in about 40 markets, where she regularly beats right-winger Laura Ingraham in the same time slot in the morning. Yet Ingraham is carried by nearly 350 affiliate stations. Many of those stations are owned by just a few companies, yet for some reason, they'd rather have the corporatist-friendly Ingraham on as many stations as possible, despite Miller's better ratings. So much for fair competition.
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In 1856 Abraham Lincoln told fellow Republicans: "Our government rests in public opinion. Whoever can change public opinion, can change the government."

He was right. And after decades of allowing little more than one viewpoint to reach the public across our airwaves, opinion has become so skewed to the right that changing either government or public opinion has become nearly impossible. How else to explain angry "tea party" mobs suddenly infuriated by "big government" and "violations of the Constitution" by Obama and the Democrats, after eight years of virtual silence from those same mobs, despite a Republican-dominated government which ballooned government spending to record levels, while blatantly violating section after section of the U.S. Constitution? ....

Daily Kos: CNN severely compromises itself, but is really, really sorry and stuff

Daily Kos: CNN severely compromises itself, but is really, really sorry and stuff

Greg Sargent at The Plum Line (thanks to the work of Media Matters) has the goods:

The CNN contributor, a well-known GOP consultant named Alex Castellanos, is best known for producing the racially-charged "Hands" ad, has repeatedly appeared on the network attacking the Dem health care plans and the public option, which is strongly opposed by the insurance industry.

Castellanos’s consulting firm, National Media, also happens to be the ad buyer that placed over [one million dollars] of TV advertising for AHIP, according to ad buy info obtained by Media Matters. AHIP’s most recent [one million dollar] ad buy attacks the health care plan as a threat to Medicare.

So the guy is taking a fat commission on millions of dollars worth of ad buys from AHIP, but there he sits on CNN's "Situation Room" just about daily, giving us all his cool, dispassionate analysis of... the health care bill, from inside his regulation, Very Serious^TM pundit's suit, with nary a word about this severe and glaring conflict of interest.

And while I have your attention, let me reemphasize something Sargent pointed out:

The CNN contributor, a well-known GOP consultant named Alex Castellanos, is best known for producing the racially-charged "Hands" ad....

Price Waterhouse and Big Tobacco ... "grossly exaggerated" and "one-sided analyses" were so "flawed" as to produce "patently unreliable results."

Tim Dickinson: Price Waterhouse and Big Tobacco

There's a big scary new study out today from the health insurance lobby and PriceWaterhouseCoopers purporting to show that the Senate Finance Committee's reform bill -- funded by new excise taxes on "Cadillac" health plans -- would cause future health insurance premiums to spiral out of control.

Before this genie gets too far out of the bottle, just consider the track record of such industry-funded excise tax "research" by Price Waterhouse.

In the early 1990s, Price Waterhouse did similar handiwork on behalf of Big Tobacco, serving up allegedly hard data to bolster arguments that a new excise tax on tobacco (a proposed mechanism to fund Clintoncare) would destroy hundreds of thousands of good American jobs.

Dire predictions. But a subsequent review of Price Waterhouse's methods by an independent team at Arthur Andersen, revealed that Price Waterhouse's "grossly exaggerated" and "one-sided analyses" were so "flawed" as to produce "patently unreliable results."

To wit:

"The PW Report relied on methods and assumptions that create false and misleading results."

and:

"There are serious methodological problems and errors of omission (one-sided analyses likely to lead to misinterpretation) in ... the PW Report"

my favorite part:

"The PW Report... attributes 161,601 mining and construction jobs to the tobacco industry. This is approximately equal to the entire employment of the coal mining industry. ....

Pew Study Finds Wall St. and Capitol Dominate Financial News - NYTimes.com

Pew Study Finds Wall St. and Capitol Dominate Financial News - NYTimes.com

A study to be released Monday of financial news coverage this year found that government, Wall Street and a small handful of story lines got the bulk of the attention while much less was paid to the economic troubles of ordinary people.

The study, by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, also found that when the stock market rebounded from its lows and pitched battles in Washington ended, the news media turned their attention away from economic coverage.

Reviewing almost 10,000 reports from Feb. 1 to Aug. 31 in newspapers, on news Web sites, on the radio and on network broadcast and cable television, Pew found that almost 40 percent of economic news reports dealt with the trials of the banking and auto industries, and the federal stimulus bill passed in February.

Unemployment and the housing crisis accounted for 12 percent. And, the study said, “stories that tried to explicitly examine the broader impact of the economic downturn on the lives of ordinary Americans filled 5 percent of the economic coverage.” ...

Another War in the Works

Another War in the Works : Information Clearing House - ICH

By Paul Craig Roberts

September 29, 2009 "Information Clearing House" --- Does anyone remember all the lies that they were told by President Bush and the “mainstream media” about the grave threat to America from weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? These lies were repeated endlessly in the print and TV media despite the reports from the weapons inspectors, who had been sent to Iraq, that no such weapons existed.

The weapons inspectors did an honest job in Iraq and told the truth, but the mainstream media did not emphasize their findings. Instead, the media served as a Ministry of Propaganda, beating the war drums for the US government.

Now the whole process is repeating itself. This time the target is Iran.

As there is no real case against Iran, Obama took a script from Bush’s playbook and fabricated one.

First the facts: As a signatory to the non-proliferation treaty, Iran’s nuclear facilities are open to inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency, which carefully monitors Iran’s nuclear energy program to make certain that no material is diverted to nuclear weapons.

The IAEA has monitored Iran’s nuclear energy program and has announced repeatedly that it has found no diversion of nuclear material to a weapons program. All 16 US intelligence agencies have affirmed and reaffirmed that Iran abandoned interest in nuclear weapons years ago.

In keeping with the safeguard agreement that the IAEA be informed before an enrichment facility comes online, Iran informed the IAEA on September 21 that it had a new nuclear facility under construction. By informing the IAEA, Iran fulfilled its obligations under the safeguards agreement. The IAEA will inspect the facility and monitor the nuclear material produced to make sure it is not diverted to a weapons program.

Despite these unequivocal facts, Obama announced on September 25 that Iran has been caught with a “secret nuclear facility” with which to produce a bomb that would threaten the world. ...

...

The US media, even the “liberal” National Public Radio, quickly fell in with the Obama lie machine. Steven Thomma of the McClatchy Newspapers declared the non-operational facility under construction, which Iran reported to the IAEA, to be “a secret nuclear facility.”

Thomma, reported incorrectly that the world didn’t learn of Iran’s “secret” facility, the one that Iran reported to the IAEA the previous Monday, until Obama announced it in a joint appearance in Pittsburgh the following Friday with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and French President Nicolas Sarkoszy.

Obviously, Thomma has no command over the facts, a routine inadequacy of “mainstream media” reporters. The new facility was revealed when Iran voluntarily reported the facility to the IAEA on September 21.

Ali Akbar Dareini, an Associated Press writer, reported, incorrectly, over AP: “The presence of a second uranium-enrichment site that could potentially produce material for a nuclear weapon has provided one of the strongest indications yet that Iran has something to hide.”

Dareini goes on to write that “the existence of the secret site was first revealed by Western intelligence officials and diplomats on Friday.” Dareini is mistaken. We learned of the facility when the IAEA announced that Iran had reported the facility the previous Monday in keeping with the safeguards agreement.

Dareini’s untruthful report of “a secret underground uranium enrichment facility whose existence has been hidden from international inspectors for years” helped to heighten the orchestrated alarm.

There you have it. The president of the United States and his European puppets are doing what they do best--lying through their teeth. The US “mainstream media” repeats the lies as if they were facts. The US “media” is again making itself an accomplice to wars based on fabrications. Apparently, the media’s main interest is to please the US government and hopefully obtain a taxpayer bailout of its failing print operations. ...