Maybe financial fraud is the only "industry" we have left

Every time Barack Obama makes a few of the right moves, he does something to remind liberals (real liberals) of why they should hate him. If you haven't read Matt Taibbi on Obama's JOBS act, do so now. (Incidentally, JOBS is an acronym for "Jumpstart Our Business Startups.")

Ostensibly, the law makes it easier for startup companies (particularly tech companies, whose lobbyists were a driving force behind its passage) to attract capital by, among other things, exempting them from independent accounting requirements for up to five years after they first begin selling shares in the stock market.

The law also rolls back rules designed to prevent bank analysts from talking up a stock just to win business, a practice that was so pervasive in the tech-boom years as to be almost industry standard.

Let that sink in. Obama is scuttling protective regulations that were in place during the Bush years. Who's the "socialist" now?

There's just no benefit that the JOBS Act brings to an honest startup company. In fact, it puts an honest company at a severe disadvantage, because now it has to compete against other, less scrupulous companies that can simply make their projections up on the backs of envelopes.

The JOBS Act seems like it will invite a replay of the disastrous tech-stock bubble of the late nineties...

Obviously, this act will unleash all sorts of shadowy investment schemes. Remember Jonathan Lebed and his pump-and-dump flim-flammery? Though he had gained an unsavory rep even as a teenager, Lebed still managed to use no less a venue than FOX News to push his National Inflation Association scam.

The JOBS Act is designed to Lebedize the economy.

I don't think that's an unintended consequence. I think that's the idea.

Maybe the powers-that-be have given up on the notion of a sustainable and steady economy based on manufactured products. For perhaps a quarter-century now, we've been lurching from one absurd, artificial boom to another. Obama can't fix that. Even if the necessary radical solutions were politically possible -- and they were, for a brief period in 2009 -- this guy ain't no FDR.

The best Obama can hope for is to kick the can down the road. Hence, the JOBS Act: Let's clear the way for yet another variation of tulip mania. A new bogus boom. Let's pump some money into the economy and make people feel good for a few years.

If the Dems are very lucky, the boom will happen on Obama's watch and the inevitable bust will occur on a Republican's watch. That'll be good for the brand name.

The funniest aspect of the whole thing? JOBS Act defenders think we no longer need cops on the economics beat because we now have -- I'm trying not to laugh as I write this, even though holding it in is painful -- Facebook.

(Excuse me while I burst into a fit of Frank-Gorshin-as-the-Riddler hysterics.)

While soliciting investment funds online has triggered fears of fraudulent schemes, the law’s backers said the greater availability of information through social media sites like Facebook would allow would-be investors to conduct their own background checks, making it difficult for such schemes to succeed.

I like the response offered by War Is A Crime:

The SEC long ago abandoned its regulatory mandate. Under financial industry insider Mary Schapiro, it's in safe hands. Her job just got easier. The bill eliminates SEC reporting requirements for enterprises with annual revenues up to $1 billion.

Their business model is grand theft. They're crime families, not legitimate enterprises. They make money by stealing it. They wreck economies, communities, and households. Corrupt politicians let them. They're bribed to go along. As bad as things are, they're getting worse.

This country's structural problem remains: We don't make anything. Wall Street won't rebuild our manufacturing base. They say they will, but they won't. The Streeters would rather make quick, big bucks selling cleverly packaged pieces of blue sky.

We can't go back to a makin' stuff economy without government intervention, and such intervention goes against our programming.

Other nations understand what a country must do to claw its way into the front ranks. Toyota would still be making nothing but looms -- freakin' looms -- if the firm had never received massive backing from the Japanese government in the '50s and '60s. In the '50s, conventional thinkers in Japan were aghast at the government's insistence on investment in automobiles, since everyone knew that Asia would never produce a car that people in the west wanted to buy. Fortunately for the Japanese, that "wisdom" was ignored. That's how Toyota became what it became.

The same story applies to all the other successful Asian concerns making autos and electronics. They didn't attain success by trotting down Ayn Avenue.

Asia had a great advantage: Friedman, Rand and Hayek didn't live there and weren't much read there. Japan and South Korea were not constrained by ideological correctness; they could do whatever worked. If we really want to destroy China, we should airlift in a billion copies of Atlas Shrugged, the greatest psychotoxin yet designed by the mind of man.

(Hm. Maybe spooks employed by our rivals have covertly funded the Ayn-mania currently besetting this country...? That scenario would explain much.)

In today's America, libertarians control the propaganda. The undisguised intent of libertarianism is to transform this nation into history's largest failed state, allowing the wealthiest of the wealthy to buy up whatever is left at fire sale prices. That's what the oligarchs did to Russia; that's what our own oligarchs plan to do here.