For all the right's supposed hatred of "activist judges," conservatives immediately flocked to the courts in search of magistrates willing to casually overturn the work of elected officials. In the case of the proxy access rule, Wall Street convinced its two favorite lobbying arms, the Business Roundtable and the Chamber of Commerce, to sue the Securities Exchange Commission over a technicality, claiming that the agency had not done a proper cost-benefit analysis before it instituted the new rule. In an appropriately loathsome touch, the Chamber's legal team was led by one Eugene Scalia, son of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. The younger Scalia, who looks like the product of a twisted test-tube experiment that crossed his father with Ari Fleischer, pitched a federal appeals court on the idea that the proxy access rule was "arbitrary and capricious," and that the SEC hadn't spent enough time studying the rule's effects on "efficiency, competition and capital formation."Having worked for 9 months handling environmental compliance, I am amazed how easy businesses have it. Whatever they are complaining about doesn't mesh with reality. In the end, regulations are at worst job neutral, because people have to be hired to comply with them. The fact is, most businesses probably have too many people handling those matters since most businesspeople don't understand the regulations.
In fact, the agency had produced 60 pages of cost-benefit analysis and had spent, according to SEC chief Mary Schapiro, some 21,000 man-hours working on the bill and studying its effects. Still, the court wasn't impressed. In his opinion, presiding judge and Reagan appointee Douglas Ginsburg peed all over Dodd-Frank, vacating the rule, which he dismissed as "unutterably mindless." With striking chutzpah, considering that he was ruling in a case brought by the mother of all specialinterest lobbies, Ginsburg also denounced the shareholder rule as a gift to special interests, particularly "unions and government pension funds."
Almost immediately after the win, the gloating Scalia issued a thinly veiled threat to regulators, letting them know that any attempt to implement more limits on Wall Street would likely result in the same kind of lawsuit. "I would hope the agencies are taking to heart the potential consequences for Dodd-Frank rules," he chirped.
Saturday, May 12, 2012
The War On Dodd-Frank
While Dodd-Frank is a pretty shitty, business friendly law, you'd never know it by the hysterics coming from the business lobby. Now they are beating the crap out of it so that it is completely pointless:
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Easy? I hope for your sake you are doing them correctly. The government has a way of punishing companies severely for not following the letter of the law. Forget to sign a form; you get a fine; turn something in late; another fine. The list goes on and on. You need to go thru an audit sometime. They will find things just to make a point. I have seen them fine a company huge dollars for a cement retention curb being a quarter inch too low in some spots. Don’t let that high opinion of yourself get in the way of paying attention.
ReplyDeleteWhat high opinion of myself? I said when it comes to environmental regulations, businesses have it easy. Our company has a 70-year old boiler which is only required to meet pollution control standards put in with the original Clean Air Act. That seems pretty easy to me. As for the EPA, it is so poorly funded that enforcement is very difficult. I called the local air pollution control agency with a question about the Boiler MACT rule. The area source rule (which applied to us) had gone into effect, but the major source rule was postponed. I had missed a deadline for submitting the initial notification. The lady told me to send it in (there hasn't been any fine) , but as for the next part of the rule compliance, she wasn't sure how it would apply to us, but they didn't have the staff or funding yet to handle it anyway. That requirement has been postponed for at least a year. Some regulators are extremely difficult to work with, but in my experience, the vast majority are helpful and work hard to do a very difficult job.
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