Who’s the criminal ? Pretty Boy Floyd or Fitch ?
In the calculus of human suffering I wonder if the actions of Standard and Poor’s, Fitch or Moody’s outweigh the actions of al-Qaeda. When private credit rating agencies nod, nudge and hint the world economy into mass unemployment, homelessness, wage depression, soaring staple prices then terrorism might be better understood otherwise, or additionally, to planting bombs and indiscriminate slaughter.
Woody Guthrie‘s ‘Pretty Boy Floyd‘, written in 1939, observes that,
“Some will rob you with a six-gun,
And some with a fountain pen.”
Woody Guthrie
It is the death warrant of whole livelihoods that the pens of credit rating agencies are deployed to sign. Credit rating agencies are possibly the most unaccountable, most powerful, most anti-democratic institutions of our times, and all perfectly legal. (See the late great Peter Gowan on the historical rise of the new global credit economy in which the credit rating agencies have become kingmakers).
Woody Guthrie concludes,
“And as through your life you travel,
Yes, as through your life you roam,
You won’t never see an outlaw
Drive a family from their home.”
Footnote : It is worth recalling that Woody Guthrie was the composer and lyricist of “This land is my land’, now an anthem appropriated by the anti-democratic, nationalist right in the US. But Woody Guthrie was a Communist in the ‘Wobblies’ tradition. He’s reputed to have said, “Where three communists meet, the fourth one ought to be a guitar player.“
Morfoubey 