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Economy Tanked While Government Surfed Porn
unixan writes "In a report by the SEC Inspector General that smacks of fiddling while Rome burns, 33 recent ethics investigations all showed that the government employees responsible for keeping an eye on the economy were instead obsessed with surfing porn — while the economy was tipping over. One cited example: '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.'"
Wow, talk about bureaucracy. There's no way I would have gotten away with downloading that much on a work connection, even if it was Linux ISOs or legal, harmless data. How did these guys get away with it for so long? Let's say this guy had a 500 GB hard drive...then stacks of DVDs at 4.7 GB each...that's a lot of smut a day. My network admins would have been knocking on my office door. Once they found out what it was, I'd never find a job again.
Something tells me the network admins for that government department must have been doing the same thing, or were incompetent, or playing WoW (or maybe some hellish combination).
These poor bastards are going to be burned at the afraid-of-sexuality stake, instead of the do-your-damn-job-instead-of-goofing-off stake. They deserve to be fired like any other idiot who goofs off, but I'm sure they're going to be charged with sex crimes of some sort.
"Sorrow is better than laughter, for by sadness of face the heart is made glad." [Ecclesiastes 7:3]
He didn't have to personally hire them but whatever happened to "the buck stops here" mentality. Is Bush personally responsible? No, but it happened under his administration and as head of the administration he has take that responsibility. Katrina wasn't Bush's fault personally but the guy he let run FEMA certainly screwed up majorly. Over the last 2 administrations (including Clinton), businesses have persuaded the government to give them more free reign and less oversight. I believe that has led us into the situation that exists now.
After the Great Depression a number of regulations were put into place to prevent this kinda of meltdown like banks could only be banks and not investment firms. One of the reasons that some banks failed in the 1929 crash was that they were lending and speculating against the Stock Market instead of being a repository of their customer's money. Under Clinton, this restriction was lifted (Glass-Steagall).
In the 90s and 00s, the economy was great. Alan Greenspan and the free market could do no wrong. The free markets would police themselves. As early as 1993, a lone regulator named Brooksley Born warned that secretive, unregulated derivatives would bring down the market. She was the head an obscure agency named the Commodity Futures Trading Commission which was in charge of overseeing derivatives. For her, it wasn't so much that these derivatives were unregulated but they that fought all attempts at any disclosure. That piqued her curiosity.
But her ideas about regulation clashed with Greenspan, former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, and former Assistant Treasury Secretary Larry Summers. She was a Washington outsider and she was a female in a world dominated by men. Together with their banking allies, they worked to remove any power her agency had by having Congress strip her tiny agency of its function.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.