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.