McGraw and Hill and Standard and Poors

http://www.mcgraw-hill.com/site/our-businesses/financial-services
Excerpt:

Standard & Poor's

Empowering Investors and Markets for 150 yearsStandard & Poor's (S&P), a part of The McGraw-Hill Companies (NYSE:MHP), is the world's foremost provider of credit ratings. With offices in 23 countries, S&P is an important part of the world's financial infrastructure and has played a leading role for 150 years in providing investors with information and independent benchmarks for their investment and financial decisions.
A global leader in credit ratings and credit risk analysis, S&P provides objective and independent opinions on credit risk. S&P's public ratings are disseminated broadly and free of charge to recipients all over the world on http://www.standardandpoors.com/. S&P's worldwide ratings organization builds upon its extensive knowledge and deep insight through its focus on sectors, type of debt, and geographic location. Analytical teams assess issuers and debt obligations of corporations, financial institutions, insurance companies, states and municipalities, and sovereign governments, and provide insight into the credit risk associated with securitized instruments.
Globally, S&P rated more than $4 trillion in new debt and published more than 870,000 new and revised ratings in 2009.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_Corporation  (This sounds very much like the Bilderbergs meeting?)  ...cal
Excerpt:
Annual conference
News Corporation organises an annual management conference, discussing media issues related to geopolitics. Attendees include News Corporation executives, senior journalists, Politicians and Celebrities. Previous events were in Cancun, Mexico, and the Hayman Island off the coast of Australia. The events are private and secretive, there are no records available for the agenda or talks given at the conferences, and no uninvited journalists are permitted access.^[36]
The 2006 event in Pebble Beach, California was led by Rupert Murdoch. According to a copy of the agenda leaked to the Los Angeles Times and other media accounts,^[37] issues discussed related from Europe to broadcasting and new media, terrorism to the national policy.^[38] The event included speeches from Rupert Murdoch, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Bono, Al Gore, Senator John McCain and Bill Clinton while Israel's President, Shimon Peres, appeared on a panel named "Islam and the West". Other notable attendees included Newt Gingrich and Nicole Kidman.

[edit] Political donations

In anticipation of US midterm elections, News Corp. donated $1 million to the Republican Governors Association in June 2010. The move was criticized by Democrats who said this was evidence of News Corp's media outlets conservative leanings (see Fox News Channel controversies). The Democratic Governors Association also criticized the donation and demanded more transparency in the reporting by News Corp companies. DGA head Nathan Daschle wrote to the chairman of News Corp company Fox News, Roger Ailes: "In the interest of some fairness and balance, I request that you add a formal disclaimer to your coverage any time any of your programs covers governors or gubernatorial races between now and election day."^[39]
Around the same time, News Corp. also donated $1 million to the United States Chamber of Commerce. The Chamber aggressively supported the Republican effort to retake Congress in 2010.^[40] This donation and an earlier $1 million contribution that News Corp. made to the Republican Governor's Association led media critics to question whether the company had crossed an ethical line for a media company.^[40]

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=The_McGraw-Hill_Companies
Excerpt:
The McGraw-Hill Companies is a textbook publisher based in New York City and according to Hoovers is "one of the world's largest producers of textbooks, tests, and related materials, serving the elementary, secondary, and higher education markets. McGraw-Hill is a leading supplier of financial and business information services, providing indexes and ratings for both domestic and overseas markets through Standard & Poor's. In addition, it publishes BusinessWeek magazine, as well as trade journals and other industry content (Aviation Week, McGraw-Hill Construction). The firm also creates professional training and development materials, and operates nine TV stations (four ABC affiliates and five Azteca America affiliates)."
Top competitors are Houghton Mifflin, Moody's, and Pearson. ^[1]

http://newyork.construction.com/features/archive/2009/06_C_UnitedNationsHeadquarters.asp
Excerpt:

Feature Story - June 2009

United Nations Headquarters $1.9 billion It took more than a half century for the United Nations headquarters – with its sleek Secretariat tower and its General Assembly recognizable across the globe – to get its first major overhaul. And now with work under way, the goal is to keep the campus in operation until the $1.9-billion renovation is done in 2013. So far, the multi-pronged campaign – which will renovate about 2 million sq ft of office and public spaces in five buildings, while also renovating, fitting out or building another 1.1 million sq ft of swing space and parking garages – is keeping to a revised schedule approved by the UN’s 192-member nations in 2007. It broke ground last year.

http://spitfirelist.com/news/mcgraw-family-owners-of-s-p-are-longtime-intimates-of-the-bush-family/
Excerpt:

McGraw Family (Owners of S & P) are Longtime Intimates of the Bush Family

Posted by Dave Emory ⋅ August 9, 2011Post a comment  Email This Post  Print This Post

Tags  9/11, Bush, Bush Family, Bush-George H W, Bush-George W, Bush-Prescott, Collapse, Harriman, JFK, Russ Baker, Wall Street

COMMENT: Stan­dard and Poor’s is owned by pub­lish­ing giant McGraw-Hill. In the wake of S & P’s down­grade of U.S. bonds’ rat­ing from AAA (for the first time in his­tory), it comes as no great sur­prise that the McGraw fam­ily are long time asso­ciates of the “Fam­ily of Secrets.”
This multi-generational asso­ci­a­tion goes back to the 1930’s, when Joseph and Per­me­lia Pryor Reed (daugh­ter of Bush/Walker asso­ciate   Samuel Pryor), estab­lished Jupiter Island as a play­ground for the North­east­ern power elite.
McGraw-Hill chief Deven Sharma worked for Dresser Indus­tries, now a divi­sion of Hal­libur­ton and a long time jewel in the Bush/Harriman cor­po­rate tiara. Dresser was George H.W. Bush’s first real job after his grad­u­a­tion from Yale.
One must won­der, also, who was the “mys­tery investor” who made the bet­ter part of a $bil­lion on the downgrade?
Sim­i­lar prof­i­teer­ing took place upon the occa­sions of the JFK assas­si­na­tion and 9/11. The Bush milieu was deeply involved in the events of 11/22/1963 and 9/11/2001.
“Read­ing Between the Lines” by Stephen Met­calf; The Nation; 1/10/2002.
EXCERPT: . . . . While crit­ics of the Bush Administration’s energy poli­cies have pointed repeat­edly to its inti­macy with the oil and gas industry–specifically the now-imploding Enron–few edu­ca­tion crit­ics have noted the Administration’s cozy rela­tion­ship with McGraw-Hill. At its heart lies the three-generation social min­gling between the McGraw and Bush fam­i­lies. The McGraws are old Bush friends, dat­ing back to the 1930s, when Joseph and Per­me­lia Pryor Reed began to estab­lish Jupiter Island, a bar­rier island off the coast of Florida, as a haven for the North­east wealthy. The island’s orig­i­nal ros­ter of socialite vaca­tion­ers reads like a who’s who of Amer­i­can indus­try, finance and gov­ern­ment: the Meads, the Mel­lons, the Paysons, the Whit­neys, the Lovetts, the Harrimans–and Prescott Bush and James McGraw Jr. The gen­er­a­tions of the two fam­i­lies par­al­lel each other closely in age: the patri­archs Prescott and James Jr., son George and nephew Harold Jr., and grand­son George W. and grand­nephew Harold III, who now runs the fam­ily pub­lish­ing empire.
The amount of cross-pollination and mutual admi­ra­tion between the Admin­is­tra­tion and that empire is strik­ing: Harold McGraw Jr. sits on the national grant advi­sory and found­ing board of the Bar­bara Bush Foun­da­tion for Fam­ily Lit­er­acy. McGraw in turn received the high­est lit­er­acy award from Pres­i­dent Bush in the early 1990s, for his con­tri­bu­tions to the cause of lit­er­acy. The McGraw Foun­da­tion awarded cur­rent Bush Edu­ca­tion Sec­re­tary Rod Paige its high­est educator’s award while Paige was Houston’s school chief; Paige, in turn, was the keynote speaker at McGraw-Hill’s “gov­ern­ment ini­tia­tives” con­fer­ence last spring. Harold McGraw III was selected as a mem­ber of Pres­i­dent George W. Bush’s tran­si­tion advi­sory team, along with McGraw-Hill board mem­ber Edward Rust Jr., the CEO of State Farm and an active mem­ber of the Busi­ness Round­table on edu­ca­tional issues. An ex-chief of staff for Bar­bara Bush is return­ing to work for Laura Bush in the White House–after a stint with McGraw-Hill as a media rela­tions exec­u­tive. John Negro­ponte left his posi­tion as McGraw-Hill’s exec­u­tive vice pres­i­dent for global mar­kets to become Bush’s ambas­sador to the United Nations.  . . .

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=John_D._Negroponte
Excerpt:
Despite his complicity in supporting Nicaraguan death squads during the Iran-Contra affair and his support of the brutal military dictatorship of General Gustavo Alvarez Martínez in Honduras, Negroponte's Senate confirmation as U.S. Ambassador to Iraq went smoothly.

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Diana_Villiers_Negroponte
Excerpt:
Diana Negroponte "is an adjunct faculty member at Fordham University. She has studied and taught at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. In the 1980's and again in 1997, Mrs. Negroponte practiced international trade law with Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker. She also worked with the American Chamber of Commerce in Mexico City in preparation for the North American Free Trade Agreement.