Het Neoliberale Geloof 10

'The Race to the Bottom Goes Global.

The Big Boys of Financial Crime.
By RALPH NADER

It is clear, in the midst of a seven year corporate financial crime wave, that the business moguls and their academic apologists, who make up the Committee on Capital Markets Regulation (CCMG) have no sense of irony. It is not enough that the CCMG's new report is recommending less law enforcement and accountability after years of Republican regimes addicted to de-regulation. The Big Boys want to make lower standards overseas an argument for starting a race to the bottom, in order for the U.S. financial markets to remain "competitive."
Here are some of CCMG's thirty-two recommendations, expected to be the goal of a big lobbying effort on the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Congress next year:
1. Limit how and when state enforcement agencies can pursue cases of financial fraud on investors. This is designed to take care of any future Eliot Spitzers, who take their oath of office seriously instead of ceremoniously. Quite properly, the Governor-elect, present New York Attorney General Spitzer reacted, saying: "To eviscerate the power of the one set of regulators who did anything is absurd."
2. Governments should sue the corporations themselves only as a last resort and instead concentrate on the culpable officials in the company. That will give rise to all kinds of escape hatches and internal scapegoating by clever corporate attorneys. They do demand that companies pay the legal expenses of the accused, however.
3. Make it more difficult to convict defendants by requiring proof of actual knowledge of the specific fraud, which makes it easier for executives to get off the hook for criminal negligence. The "I didn't know" defense is to replace "you should have known."
4. Weaken the post-Enron Sarbanes-Oxley law, including not applying the key section 404 on internal accounting controls to foreign companies if they have to "meet comparable standards" in their home country. What are "comparable standards?" This is a recipe for delay and loopholes. The record of "equivalency negotiations" under NAFTA and the World Trade Organization is enough to give rigorous pause to this slippery move.
5. Stricter cost-benefit analysis to any new SEC rules than is now in place. This it the time-dishonored technique of producing endless delays in issuing any rules a device that has devastated updating or declaring new health and safety standards in the consumer, worker and environmental areas. A corporate law firm's gold mine.'

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http://www.counterpunch.org/nader12022006.html