The Real News Network weekly report from William Black Black Report: Majority of Wall St. Money Now Goes to Romney covers a few different subjects.

One topic of the conversation is that the credit rating agencies are again becoming the enablers of Wall Street fraud.

What the credit rating agencies discovered, though, was that they were the key to making Wall Street possible to make their fortunes. And so they learned to negotiate, and they became not just credit rating agencies; they became advisers on the same deal that they were rating, despite the obvious conflict of interest. And so they would structure the deal to ensure that it would get a AAA rating and it would get a AAA rating even though the great bulk of the loans backing it were fraudulent liars’ loans. And so a chart of income for the rating agencies looks like, you know, an incredibly steep ascending hill, and they made an absolute fortune.

They got embarrassed, but you’ll note that they didn’t get sued successfully, and, of course, they didn’t even get threatened with prosecution. So that embarrassment period where they supposedly tried to toughen up their act only lasted around a year. And what they found was whoever was toughest lost business to whoever was weak—again, this race to the bottom or Gresham’s dynamic, in which bad ethics drives good ethics out of the professions. And the result is that they’ve pitched, you know, thrown to the curb the only guy at Standard & Poor’s—which is the biggest of the rating agencies—who was their symbol of trying to be tougher.

What really irks me about this is that one of the fundamentals of my investing strategy depends on a selection of S & P A-rated companies. I have to be extra vigilant about believing anything from S & P. Since they did this before, I guess this is not anything new with them.

The article by Matt Taibbi Greed and Debt: The True Story of Mitt Romney and Bain Capital is the one mentioned in my previous post Matt Taibbi: The Secret to Mitt Romney’s Fortune? Greed, Debt and Forcing Others to Foot the Bill.

Sometimes it is hard to find a quote that really captures the essence of the article so that the reader will be enticed to follow the link to the article.  In this case, Matt Taibbi has provided just what I am looking for.

But what most voters don’t know is the way Mitt Romney actually made his fortune: by borrowing vast sums of money that other people were forced to pay back. This is the plain, stark reality that has somehow eluded America’s top political journalists for two consecutive presidential campaigns: Mitt Romney is one of the greatest and most irresponsible debt creators of all time. In the past few decades, in fact, Romney has piled more debt onto more unsuspecting companies, written more gigantic checks that other people have to cover, than perhaps all but a handful of people on planet Earth.

I know that the real Romney fans will not be able to process this information.  I just hope that there are enough voters whose minds are still open.

Perhaps we can turn Mitt Romney’s prominence on the political stage to good use.  If people start to understand how he made his fortune, there might be a great enough outcry to make these practices illegal.   It seems to me that it is against the law already for a person to declare bankruptcy just after taking steps to hide assets from the bankruptcy judge.  Since Mitt Romney believes that corporations are people, I don’t understand how he gets away with stripping assets from a company, raiding pension funds, borrowing money in the company’s name, and then putting the company into bankruptcy.  Certainly any bankruptcy judge should be able to see the fraud that was committed and insist that the stolen assets should be reclaimed for the benefit of the people from whom the money was stolen.

Maybe instead of going to the White House, Mitt Romney will go to jail. If any of the Republican favorite “Three strikes and you are out” laws get applied, Romney could get a life sentence as a habitual criminal.

I hadn’t finished reading the article when I picked out the quote above. I am still making my way through the article and the quotable paragraphs keep piling up. I hardly know which one to choose. Here is another, and I am not sure either of these are the best ones.

This business model wasn’t really “helping,” of course – and it wasn’t new. Fans of mob movies will recognize what’s known as the “bust-out,” in which a gangster takes over a restaurant or sporting goods store and then monetizes his investment by running up giant debts on the company’s credit line. (Think Paulie buying all those cases of Cutty Sark in Goodfellas.) When the note comes due, the mobster simply torches the restaurant and collects the insurance money. Reduced to their most basic level, the leveraged buyouts engineered by Romney followed exactly the same business model. “It’s the bust-out,” one Wall Street trader says with a laugh. “That’s all it is.”

Ok, Ifinally finished all 5 pages of the article, and I will leave you with the concluding paragraph.

Obama ran on “change” in 2008, but Mitt Romney represents a far more real and seismic shift in the American landscape. Romney is the frontman and apostle of an economic revolution, in which transactions are manufactured instead of products, wealth is generated without accompanying prosperity, and Cayman Islands partnerships are lovingly erected and nurtured while American communities fall apart. The entire purpose of the business model that Romney helped pioneer is to move money into the archipelago from the places outside it, using massive amounts of taxpayer-subsidized debt to enrich a handful of billionaires. It’s a vision of society that’s crazy, vicious and almost unbelievably selfish, yet it’s running for president, and it has a chance of winning. Perhaps that change is coming whether we like it or not. Perhaps Mitt Romney is the best man to manage the transition. But it seems a little early to vote for that kind of wholesale surrender.

The Atlantic has the story The Real Mystery of Paul Ryan’s Marathon Time.

Executive summary: the mystery in this case is why someone just stepping into the spotlight of national attention would risk telling an (a) entirely unnecessary and (b) very easily disprovable lie. It doesn’t make “normal” political sense, where you lie to get out of a jam, or because you think you can’t be caught. Now the details:

As you may be able to tell from my recent posts, I am coming to the conclusion that the Romeny/Ryan ticket is headed by a couple of con men.  Now this evidence of possible pathological lying by Ryan.

Am I ashamed of piling on?  No way.  If they can accuse Al Gore of lying when he said something that was true, I can surely say they are lying when they actually are.

The article above has a link to an article in The New Yorker Lie or Mistake? Paul Ryan’s Marathoning Past.

I particularly liked what one person posted as a comment.

from a post on another comment board “Forgetting whether your marathon personal best is over 4 hours or under 3 hours is like forgetting whether your spouse is a man or a woman.”