So, I'm minding my own business on Ecch (Twitter), and I reply to an Ecch
(Tweet) which notes that self regulation does not work.
I respond with a line that I have been using for some time, I say that, "Self-Regulation is to Regulation as Self-Importance is to Importance."
It gets a fair number of likes, which amuses me, because I am insecure and I
need validation.
Self regulation is to regulation as self-importance is to importance.
— Not the Apartheid Emerald Heir Pedo Guy/MG Saroff (@40_Years) January 24, 2024
I think that it's important to savor life's little victories, and this one is exceedingly small.
Then I discover that journalist, S.F. author, activist, and IP and privacy activist Cory Doctorow quoted me in the conclusion of today's post on Pluralistic, his ad free and tracker free blog. (slightly reformatted to fit my style or lack thereof, Doctorow puts out "naked" links in order to demonstrate that there are no URL shenanigans)
One of the weirdest aspect of end-stage capitalism is the collapse of auditing, the lynchpin of investing. Auditors – independent professionals who sign off on a company's finances – are the only way that investors can be sure they're not handing their money over to failing businesses run by crooks.
………
Attentive readers will have noticed that there is an intrinsic tension in an arrangement where someone is paid by a company to certify its honesty. The company gets to decide who its auditors are, and those auditors are dependent on the company for future business. To manage this conflict of interest, auditors swear fealty to a professional code of ethics, and are themselves overseen by professional boards with the power to issue fines and ban cheaters.
Enter monopolization. Over the past 40 years, the US government conducted a failed experiment in allowing companies to form monopolies on the theory that these would be "efficient." From Boeing to Facebook, Cigna to InBev, Warner to Microsoft, it has been a catastrophe. The American corporate landscape is dominated by vast, crumbling, ghastly companies whose bad products and worse corporate conduct are locked in a race to see who can attain the most depraved enshittification quickest.………
And of course, crooked auditors were behind the Enron fraud, a rare instance in which a fraud triggered a serious attempt to prevent future crimes, including the destruction of accounting giant Arthur Andersen. After Enron, Congress passed Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX), which created a new oversight board called the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB).
The PCAOB is a watchdog for watchdogs, charged with auditing the auditors and punishing the incompetent and corrupt among them. Writing for The American Prospect and the Revolving Door Project, Timi Iwayemi describes the long-running failure of the PCAOB to do its job.
For example: from 2003-2019, the PCAOB undertook only 18 enforcement cases – even though the PCAOB also detected more than 800 "seriously defective audits" by the Big Four. And those 18 cases were purely ornamental: the PCAOB issued a mere $6.5m in fines for all 18, even though they could have fined the accounting companies $1.6 billion
………
But though these improvements are decidedly moderate, they are grounded in a truly radical break from business-as-usual in the age of monopoly auditors. It's a transition from self-regulation to regulation. As @40_Years on Twitter so aptly put it: "Self regulation is to regulation as self-importance is to importance".
Needless to say, I'm going to be feeling smug about this for about a week.
After that, I'll probably go back to uninformed and very poorly written rants.
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