Friday, April 23, 2010

The Regulators Need Regulating: SEC Execs Surfed For Porn During Economic Collapse


As Obama tries to go after Wall Street “fat cats” by giving the government more regulatory control, the very agencies that should have been minding the store in the first place were busy searching for porn. 
Associated Press: The SEC's inspector general conducted 33 probes of employees looking at explicit images in the past five years, according to a memo obtained by The Associated Press.
The memo says 31 of those probes occurred in the 2 1/2 years since the financial system teetered and nearly crashed. […] 
• A senior attorney at the SEC's Washington headquarters spent up to eight hours a day looking at and downloading pornography. When he ran out of hard drive space, he burned the files to CDs or DVDs, which he kept in boxes around his office. He agreed to resign, an earlier watchdog report said.
• An accountant was blocked more than 16,000 times in a month from visiting websites classified as "Sex" or "Pornography." Yet he still managed to amass a collection of "very graphic" material on his hard drive by using Google images to bypass the SEC's internal filter, according to an earlier report from the inspector general. The accountant refused to testify in his defense, and received a 14-day suspension.
• Seventeen of the employees were "at a senior level," earning salaries of up to $222,418.
• The number of cases jumped from two in 2007 to 16 in 2008. The cracks in the financial system emerged in mid-2007 and spread into full-blown panic by the fall of 2008. 
 California Rep. Darrell Issa, the top Republican on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, said it was "disturbing that high-ranking officials within the SEC were spending more time looking at porn than taking action to help stave off the events that put our nation's economy on the brink of collapse." 
Before Obama and the Democrats give government more responsibility over Wall Street, shouldn’t they first get the regulators in order? What is the point in setting all these new regulations if the regulators are better suited for life in a frat house?

This story, like so many we have all heard before, is just more proof that the big government socialist model is ineffective. Just think, horny incompetents like the ones at the SEC will soon be involved with your health care.

7 comments:

Fuzzy Slippers said...

But Clifton, that's why we need ANOTHER multi-billion dollar agency. More porn surfers are just the ticket to "protect the consumer," right?

Libbies are totally incompetent. We HAVE an agency and laws and regulations that are aimed at protecting us from what happened. But when they fail, don't do their jobs, the "obvious" solution (to liberals) is to set up yet more government, more laws, more regulations . . . when the first ones all failed. Oh, and let's not dismantle those and REPLACE them, no no no, we need a whole separate boondoggle to sink money in that will also not do its job. Why should it? The solution is always to set up more bs agencies, not to punish the ones that fail or fire the morons who didn't do what they were hired and are being paid BIG money (our BIG money) to do. Grrr.

Clifton B said...

Fuzzy Slippers:

Exactly. The other problem is that some of these companies are simply ignoring all the rules, as was the case with Enron. When companies do that, making new rules are meaningless. What should be done is massive enforcement of the old rules.

I still have not been able to read all the stuff in Dodd's bill. Something tells me when I do, I will find the same kind of control freak junk that is in ObamaCare.

Anonymous said...

When was the last time the regulators were able to do anything exploding in their face when all the signs were there?

Never.

Why are we funding an agency that has so far failed every SINGLE time even when the signs are written on their face? People had been complaining to SEC about Madoff YEARS before but they simply ignored the warnings [as documented in the new book "No One Would Listen"].

If a private sector does this, it would be criminal. If SEC does it, it's a policy?

2nd-Anonymous

Clifton B said...

2nd-Anonymous:

This is the thing I do not get about expanding government. There are constant examples on almost every level where government fails to produce results. So what sense does it make to keep giving it a bigger and bigger role in our lives. It makes no sense to me.

By the way, I like how you took the name 2nd Anonymous! Pretty cool!

trinity said...

These people obviously have far too much free time on their hands. It's time to weed out the chaff.

Osumashi Kinyobe said...

What? Asking the Obama administration for accountability? What crazy talk is that?

Janelle said...

Folks, there are serious problems in D.C. and government. Phone sex, internet porn, sexual harassment of interns, many examples of adultery, some spouse abuse, tax cheating, bribery, extortion, drug and alcohol abuse and on and on. Here's my second solution, if the first of voting them all in and out on a regular basis doesn't work for you, Send every one of them a package of ex-lax and their heads will cave in.

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