Somewhat obscured by the Chicago gun ban case was the Supreme Court also struck down a part of the Sarbanes Oxley Act of 2002.
If you’ve ventured at all into the “Who owns Big Radio” part of the web site, you quickly pick up my opinion that Sarbanes Oxley has a lot to do with the collapse of the radio business and its takeover by private equity firms funded by anonymous pools of (probably foreign controlled) money.
Sarbanes Oxley was well intentioned, as most laws are, but has had enormous unintended side affects. Its purpose was to hold the management of publicly traded companies (like Worldcom, Enron, Adelphia) accountable for their responsibility to act in the best interests of their stockholders and not deceive investors with phony accounting gimmicks or operate the company like it is their own private slush fund.
The problem is that accounting can be very subjective. The one that killed radio is “How much is my FCC license worth?”. Now imagine that the answer to that question carries a jail term if you answer it incorrectly. Accountants to protect their butts then forced the rule to be “when it doubt, write it down”.
But Sarbanes Oxley doesn’t apply to privately owned corporations. My strong belief is that one of the motivations for “going private” was to get out from under the threat of criminal prosecution over accounting differences of opinion – pushing companies like Clear Channel into the waiting arms of PE firms.
The Supreme Court (with the same 5/4 majority) that the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board – the group created by the Act needs a mechanism by which the government can remove and replace members. The Court ruled that in order to solve the problem of an unaccountable non-government agency with government legal authority – that the SEC can pick the members of this board, and that solves the problem.
Oh, you mean to say that goverment regulations caused a major dislocation in an industry that now can only be “cured” by another set of regulators? By the time these damn lawyers get done “protecting” the public from the consequences of dealing with lawyers, we will be communicating with tomato cans & strings!
Look at the gulf mess and the Arizona boarder. The locals can’t even protect themselves because of red tape!
“Government is not the solution to our problems, government is the problem.” RWR
One of these days, I need to read “State of Fear” by Michael Crichton. My memory is the basic premise is that governments prosper by inducing a sense of fear in people, then offering to protect the people if they’ll just give the government more money and power and control.
That’s why I harp so strongly trying to encourage people think of the government as the rescuer of last resort. The “peanut butter” scare a couple years ago and last years H1N1 flu scare are just recent examples.
It wouldn’t be too hard to backtrack and figure out that the problems that Sarbanes Oxley was trying to “fix” were the result of other government actions trying to “fix” something.
To jackkeats I say: AMEN, Brother!
It always blows me away they ALWAYS exclude large chunks of the pie when they pass any legislation: i.e.- “Sarbanes Oxley doesn’t apply to privately owned corporations.”
My first thought: discriminatory, so therefore illegal.
Also, what really steams my clams is when they pass a law (like ObamaCare) that excludes THEMSELVES from it. We need a Constitutional Amendment that any law passed by Congress must apply to them and they cannot exclude themselves nor enhanse their benefits over anyone else’s rights.