The Securities and Exchange Commission watching Americans getting screwed. Link
WASHINGTON – Senior staffers at the Securities and Exchange Commission spent hours surfing pornographic websites on government-issued computers while they were being paid to police the financial system, an agency watchdog says.The SEC’s inspector general conducted 33 probes of employees looking at explicit images in the past five years, according to a memo obtained late Thursday 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.
It was written by SEC Inspector General David Kotz in response to a request from Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa.The memo was first reported Thursday evening by ABC News. It summarizes findings of past inspector general probes and reports some shocking findings:
Now if only the top criminals at Goldman Sachs had been doing the same thing.. the Economy may have been spared.
However, the top criminals at Goldman Sachs seem to enjoy greed more than porn unfortunately.
Oooh, 16 people out of the entire SEC were getting porn.
Porn is no more of a problem than people at work (like me) wasting time on dvorak.org. If you’re not doing your job, it doesn’t matter what you’re wasting your time on.
#1. i entirely agree.
@#2
Oh no they enjoy porn as much as anyone.
It is just they can pay for the performance of it in person with them as the star.
Cursor_
SEC watched porn while taxpayers got fucked.
Show me that the gov paid for the porn or that the horny bastards were watching porn during work hours. Otherwise, no story.
#1 Agree. Good time for the banking industry and their Republican lackeys to pull out a red herring.
The sheeple will be more interested in porn surfers at the SEC than why banks need stiff new government regulations (pun intended).
You have got to love Government. Pass more legislation against Wall Street. But do nothing to solve your own inept problems right in your own back yard. All these government agencies created to protect us seem to be asleep at their desk or doing other things at their desks other then protecting us.
We need a few posts about the SCANDAL that is wallstreet and unfettered capitalism and the Repuglican “Party.”
Weird what with JCD’s interest in the subject that it doesn’t get more play here.
Still the psychotic talk about our need for “sophisticated financial instruments.” ITS LEGALIZED GAMBLING WITH LEAD WEIGHTS ON THE WHEEL!! Plain and simple. Within that rigged house rule, yes, the marks who enter the casino can make some money at the edges. Being wise, informed, educated has precious little to do about it. More like a blindfolded frog hopping across the freeway. Send thousands into the stream, a few will always get to the other side.
#9 Thank you for proving my point!
Oh, PLEEEEESE!!
“…The problem with capitalism is capitalists!” Who doesn’t know that?
The problem here is that a few people (perhaps many people) were NOT doing their job. The fact that they were watching porn on company time is relatively meaningless. The point is, THEY WERE NOT WORKING!
The fact that “porn” has ANYTHING to do with this story only tells me some moral-moron (probably a christian or one of those derivatives) can’t stand the fact that other people “think” differently than they do.
#14–RonR==Nothing is wrong with capitalist==they are acting just as capitalism would want. “The marketplace” itself under capitalism is supposed to weed out the malefactors and cheats. The great distress and disruption this uregulated acitivity caused by the short sighted and fraudulent greed of the wielders of capital are all an unfortunate but necessary part of capitalism.
You show your feathers by even suggesting that fraud should be regulated by some governemtn authority and you fall over the cliff when you say the people not doing their jobs, be implication, were the government regulators===and that certainly was and is the truth.
So==the problem is not capitalism, it is failure of regulation. And hence my new nom de flame.
Hey, I don’t know why we have to bring down Porn, associating it with these scumbags. If it weren’t for porn, the internet would continue to be nothing more than a nerdy student tool. Now I know some of you ‘smartasses’ are gonna wanna disagree. But I was there, I was sysop/owner of a BBS before the internet, I also helped to set up some of the first ISP’s here in Spain, and I can tell you without any hesitation or doubt Porn is what made it all happen.
All this proves is that the SEC is too cheap to put up proxy servers. It also proves that there are a few more folks, along with the bankers, that need to be lined up against the wall. It isn’t necessarily the one handed surfers but the fact the SEC has them proves agency isn’t suited to do it’s job.
Every organization with over 10 employees has this same problem.
I read the full article but couldn’t get a sense of how widespread is this problem.
31 cases/investigations in 2.5 years? Wikipedia says the SEC has 3,800 employees. Is that a lot or a little compared to other similarly sized organizations? I honestly don’t know.
Does anybody?
My gut feeling say this is yet another ginned-up fake scandal by right wingers to undermine America during a Democratic administration.
Odd.. I think… how, so far, no-one has twigged to the fact that this report CAME OUT IN 2008!!
In other words, the previous Admin. was sitting around masturbating and congratulating themselves on how “good” they were while their employees were turinig a blind-eye to their jobs… so they could sit around masturbating…
Good joke, eh?
>> Random Troll said, on April 23rd, 2010 at 6:48 pm
>> Odd.. I think… how, so far, no-one has twigged to the fact that this report CAME OUT IN 2008!!
This reminds me of the bogus “climate gate” that game out just ahead of Copenhagen climate talks.
It seems pretty obvious that this is timed to come out ahead of banking regulation to undermine the public’s confidence in the regulators.
Maybe they got confused with Playboy’s “Girls of the SEC” pictorial in October 2007.
It’s Obama’s fault! Oh wait…
Hey bobo!
Check yourself into a mental health clinic because you are INSANE! You babble on and on about total bullshit! That quote was PART of a famous quote which OBVIOUSLY went completely over your head. So here it is in it’s entirety:
“The only thing wrong with communism is communism. The only thing wrong with capitalism is capitalists.”
If you don’t get the subtle humor there then you probably shouldn’t be blogging (or voting). My only point in partially quoting that was that where capitalists are concerned, at least they CAN watch porn. (Maybe you might like watching “Meet the Press” a little more often rather than go to church.)
My original comment still stands – the problem here is that those workers were NOT working. It’s just that simple. And just why “porn” (notice the quotes?) has a damn thing to do with this “story” (notice the quotes again?) is highly suspect.
#25–Ron==thanks for the full quote, I did miss the humor that on careful re-reading still eludes me. Or maybe you think partial quotes are humor per se? I think you are actually looking for a different word/concept there.
My comments, as yours, remain in full force including the full or partial quote.
I guess you fail to see the humor in putting the issue into the context of the economic model fully playing out. Or maybe, precious little about the subject is humorous at all?
Considering the SEC acts as if it’s strapped for people to investigate the banks. Then I can’t really spare even the 16 porn addicts it has, not doing productive work. But is this blaming the SEC personnel, rather than the Bush Admin. preventing them from investigating the banks, for not doing their jobs? Just as they were probably told to keep hands off Enron, before their collapse.