What Your Mother Told You Is Coming True Grand Scale, Good-bye S&P

Every Mother in the world tells her children that they cannot spend more than they have. We all learn to save and to control our expenditures so that we will have something "put aside" for a "rainy day." 
Well, somebody forgot to tell the world's governments what every mother's child knows. They have been spending without thought to tomorrow and without saving for a rainy day. That day is here and we now see the result.
Who is to blame? I really don't think it matters very much. Some elected officials will lose at the next elections. Some monarchs in the Arab world will tighten their belts - no new 747s, no new cars...and no more towers to the sky, except for the ones already underway. China will try to manipulate its economy out of the troubles it created by trying to spend itself to world economic dominance. Europe will revert to nation states, letting the Euro find its natural level in the countries that can support its presence, and the other European countries will go back to their old currencies. Will they be chastened, finally, to save a little and not to live on borrowed funds that the rest of the world can no longer afford? We hope so because there is no more money to bail them out.
And America? My guess is that she will come out still leader, still the backstop for the world's economic and social problems, still the "hope on the hill." But, even in America, people will learn to live with less, to love frugality, and to expect less of their government that can only give what their citizens pay as taxes in the first place.
This will all be wrenching and we will feel often that the end of the world is near. It isn't. But, we must change so that our world doesn't become again the barbarous one of the Dark Ages after the fall of the Roman Empire.
Standard & Poor's??? My guess is that they are "chopped liver" as New Yorkers would say. Consigned to the garbage heap of financial history because their overbearing pride and hubris made them take that one step too far. No one can dictate to the entire world. No one can cause the damage S&P has caused in the past three days. No one is above the law of common sense and reason. No one is Hitler, so to speak.