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Reuters reports: "The United States lost its top-notch AAA credit rating from Standard & Poor's on Friday, in a dramatic reversal of fortune for the world's largest economy." The new rating is AA+. In explaining their decision Standard & Poors cites both the decision by Republicans in Congress to turn the debt ceiling into a political football and the Republicans intransigence on tax increases. Some excerpts from the release:

Economic historians will look back on this era as a time when policy-makers damaged Americans' welfare with ideologically driven, self-inflicted wounds.

With an unprecedented sum of wealth held within the top one-tenth of one percent of the US population, we now have the most severe inequality of wealth in US history.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports today no jobs were created in August. Zero. Nada. Well, not quite. The strike at Verizon reduced the labor force by 45,000. Minnesota government employees returned to work, adding 22,000. So in reality, America added 23,000 jobs. Almost zero. In reality, worse than zero. We need 125,000 a month merely to keep up with population growth. So the hole continues to deepen. Since this Depression began at the end of 2007, America's potential labor force - working-age people who want jobs - has grown by over 7 million. But since then the number of Americans with jobs has shrunk by more than 300,000.

On Sept. 13, 2009, Bloomberg published an article about Joseph Stiglitz'a recent assessment of the economy, in which he maintains that the banking crisis is actually worse than it was in 2007. The "too-big-to-fail" situation has actually worsened.

Despite the Corporate media's overly optimistic and distorted reporting of today's employment report, the news was not good at all. The economy continues to lose jobs at a rapid rate. And without the multiple statistical manipulations used to concoct today's report, job losses in August would have been almost -300,000 or more.

How do they make so much money? Where does it come from? How can hedge fund firms with fewer than 100 employees make as much profit as firms with thousands of employees?

The obvious answer is that rich people have political clout-but can it really be so simple?

STOCKHOLM - Almost every developed nation in the world was walloped by the financial crisis, their economies paralyzed, their prospects for the future muddied. And then there's Sweden, the rock star of the recovery.

It's important, yes, and must be addressed. But by a wide margin, it's not the nation's most pressing economic problem. That would be the widespread and persistent joblessness that has plagued the labor market since the Great Recession began in 2008. Almost 14 million people - 9.1 percent of the labor force - were officially counted as unemployed last month. But that's just the tip of the iceberg. There were almost 9 million part-time workers who wanted, but couldn't find, full-time jobs; 28 million in jobs they would have quit under normal conditions; and an additional 2.2 million who wanted work but couldn't find any and dropped out of the labor force. If the economy could generate jobs at the median wage for even half of these people, national income would grow by more than 10 times the total interest cost of the 2011 deficit (which was less than $40 billion). So anyone who says that reducing the deficit is more urgent than reducing unemployment is saying, in effect, that we should burn hundreds of billions of dollars worth of goods and services in a national bonfire. We ought to be tackling both problems at once. But in today's fractious political climate, many promising dual-purpose remedies - like infrastructure investments that would generate large and rapid returns - are called unthinkable, in the false belief that they would impoverish our grandchildren. Yet there are other ways to attack unemployment that could garner bipartisan support. Perhaps the most promising is a payroll tax holiday.

OBAMAS DISTRUCTION OF US ECONOMY ALMOST COMPLETE

DEMOCRAT CONTROLLED SENATE SAYS DAM THE ECONOMY AND DEAD AMERICANS IN BENGHAZI

Hurting Pennsylvanias economy and killing thousands of jobs.

COAL, RAILROAD, TRUCKING & ELECTRIC POWER GENERATING JOBS LOST. THE ECONOMYS OF WEST VIRGINIA, PENNSYLVANIA, ILLINOIS, INDIANA AND OHIO CRUSHED. 50% OF ELECTRICTY COMES FROM COAL FIRED POWER PLANTS. THESE ARE THE PLANTS THAT GENERATE ELECTRICYT TO CHARGE ELECTRIC CARS.

Senate democrats have been holding everything up including job creation and the economy!

MEDIA TOO EXCITED ABOUT OBAMAS GAY MESSAGE TO BE WORRIED ABOUT ECONOMY OR JOBS.