Well, what do you know. As Karoli noted, Standard and Poor's decided to do their best to help push some austerity measures that Wall Street would love to see by scaring the crap out of everyone as she wrote about earlier here -- Standard & Poor's Is Playing Us For Fools.

And surprise, surprise, Rupert Murdoch's sock puppet over at The Wall Street Journal John Fund makes an appearance on C-SPAN's Washington Journal to scare the hell out of all of the viewers there as well that we must do something now to calm the fears of these masters of the universe or we're going to end up like Greece or Japan.

Never mind that we can't trust what political motives were behind the decision by S&P to come out with the statement that they did this week and Fund even admits as much and that the reasons are political, but he lays the blame on our politicians rather than the ratings agency potentially having political motives for their press release. He also says that Moody's might not be far behind. As Karoli noted in her post, they were just as culpable for contributing to the fall of the housing market and misleading investors as the S&P was.

I think Digby summed up pretty well what their game might be here -- Debt Ceiling: The Musical.

Fund also rattled off the usual Republican talking points about how we'd better lower the corporate tax rate in America or we're not going to see any jobs created here. Sorry John, but that ship has already sailed. If multi-national corporations that want to pass themselves off as still being "American companies" cared about job creation instead of a race to the bottom on wages, we'd have full employment in the Unites States right now. They don't. Until we start taxing them for outsourcing our jobs instead of having a tax code that rewards them for it, lowering their rate is going to do nothing but put more money into the top 1%'s pockets and lowering every American's standard of living.

I'm sure John Fund knows this since he's not a stupid man no matter how little he cares for the working class in America, but he's paid well to pretend he doesn't.