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We’re starting off today with an issue most political bloggers — and journalists — might want to pay more attention to. Over the past several days, European countries have begun voting on whether or not to ratify the European Union’s constitution. Voters in France and the Netherlands have already voted it down, leading some blogs to weigh in on the subject.
One of the very few with anything worthwhile to say on the subject is Oxford, UK’s Robert Jubb, who writes in a long but worthwhile post:
Instead of being about the document itself, the referenda on the Constitution have become a Trojan Horse for malcontents of various shades. … The Yes campaigners have been hamstrung by the complexity involved. Opinion polls in France suggest that a significant reason behind the No vote of the French left was the suspicion that the EU is being taken over by an Anglo-Saxon, free-market ideology which threatens to sweep away much cherished and hard won state protections for individual citizens. In the UK, predominately right wing eurosceptics fear a Franco-German threat to our national identity and the transfer of power to Brussels. … It is evident that in none of the above cases is it the actual text of the Constitution that is being voted on. The Constitutional referenda have been hijacked.
Random Thoughts of a Swedish Expatriate seems to think that Western Europeans are acting out of simple selfishness: “Eastern Europe has had to accept the consequences of integration — their large enterprises being taken over by westerners and having most of the corporate profits go west. This is how it’s supposed to work — the West has liquid capital, the East has inexpensive labor; the deal is a win-win for everyone. But when there’s the slightest talk of giving up something, westerners aren’t that willing to live up to their end of the bargain.”
Over at the American Prospect‘s blog, Sam Rosenfeld is unhappy with President Bush’s choice for the next chief of the Securities and Exchange Commission, California Republican Rep. Chris Cox. As Rosenfeld says, Cox’s “trailblazing 1996 tort reform bill, the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act … weakened investor protections and limited the liability of accountants who blew audits and of others who were found guilty of fraud, made him an obvious choice for this administration. Let the rollbacks begin!”
As way of a little background, outgoing SEC chief William Donaldson, despite being a Bush family friend, wasn’t always a popular figure in the White House. Nor did he make many friends in the business world during his two-and-a-half year tenure when he tightened up regulatory requirements for American corporations in the wake of the Enron and Worldcom scandals. According to the New York Times, he also “battled for better oversight for mutual funds, and in March oversaw the SEC’s passage of a rule to ensure that investors get the best price for their stocks, even it that meant a slower trade execution.”
Larry E. Ribstein, a law professor at the University of Illinois, couldn’t disagree with Rosenfeld’s assessment more, writing, “Cox sponsored the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act — the first serious legislative attempt to reign in securities fraud suits, which the courts had let get out of hand. No doubt we’ll hear about how the PSLRA gave us Enron, etc., and how investors are now doomed — unprotected lambs, left to get fleeced. This is ridiculous. And it’s also worth noting that, unfortunately, securities litigation is thriving in the post-PSLRA period.”
And, finally, in the battle to keep kids away from Internet porn, PSFK reports that ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) has announced that it has approved a proposal to allow .xxx as a top level domain for pornographic sites. And that’s about all we have to say about that.
–Paul McLeary
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