Most of what James Theckston describes is familiar – the financial incentive (and pressure from his corporate parent) for lenders to sign up subprime borrowers, even to those who qualified for prime loans; the racial and ethnic biases exposed by preying on the weak or uneducated; the unfairness of bailing out those Wall Street banks and doing nothing for the homeowners whose lives were ravaged.

If the rating agency’s entire argument was that the political system showed itself to be “less stable, less effective, and less predictable” during the debt limit debate, and that this failure of policymaking and institutional capability increases the chances of default, I don’t have much to argue about that. But, there’s a policy response for that. S&P could do exactly what Moody’s did and call for the debt limit to be extinguished, on the grounds that the legislative branch shouldn’t get to vote twice on funding, once when they appropriate it and another time when they decide whether or not the bill should be paid. If they really wanted to exert some influence on behalf of bondholders, they could have said that they would downgrade US debt further if the debt limit isn’t abolished within 90 days. Since the brinksmanship over the debt limit constitutes the biggest – perhaps the only – threat to paying off US sovereign debt, then the appropriate action for entities judging creditworthiness is to ask that the country in question eliminate the arcane and also dangerous practice.

But that’s not S&P’s only rationale.

Country Wide (or rather, its parent company Bank of America) has to pay an FTC fine for ripping off homeonwers in distress. A fine of only 2 ents per $100 dollars of its enterpise value. Cry me a river.

Many of the banks lack the proper paper trail to prevail in foreclosure and that judges are beginning to wake up to this, and sometimes even cancel mortgages outright, it is not surprising that the banks are beginning to realize that their own bad faith, their own shoddy dealing, their own rupturing of the social contract has put them in a position where they may not be in the driver’s seat on foreclosures much longer. No wonder the baks are starting to preach the gospel of mortgage modification.