Economy Tanked While Government Surfed Porn 405
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.'"
Re:Look Around You, Look Around You, Look Around Y (Score:5, Interesting)
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).
"Porn" isn't the problem, it's just goofing off. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Look Around You, Look Around You, Look Around Y (Score:3, Interesting)
When I was interning at the VA I noticed that one of the public computers for the vets to use had spyware on it. IT was contacted, ran their one program, but the spyware was still there. They said that's all they can do. Government IT people don't go crazy by not realizing that their marching orders are insane. Also have no undergrad at all probably doesn't help.
One wonders... (Score:4, Interesting)
In this case, was the SEC basically just incompetent, or was their incompetence tolerated, abetted, nurtured by those who really didn't want them to find anything?
After all, in retrospect, it is fairly obvious that much of the apparent prosperity of the last decade or so was a bubble. Consumer spending based on imaginary wealth provided by homes appraised for large numbers, GDP numbers based on rampant construction of housing stock that nobody could actually afford to live in, various quite sophisticated flavors of financial chicanery and shell-gaming on Wall Street. Now, if you suspect that you are in a bubble, you have the option of trying to pop it before it gets any bigger, which provides the best long term outcome; but generally involves having it burst in your face, or riding it, and hoping that you can make it out of office/retire/move to a new job/cash out a big stack/etc. before it bursts. If you aren't excessively burdened in the ethics department, the latter is pretty sensible.
In situations where you cannot, for political reasons, eliminate a regulatory body outright, there are various ways of quietly gutting it. Just cutting its budget usually helps, appointing an incompetent crony to mismanage it also works pretty well(and rewards a crony), I suspect that allowing incompetence to fester probably works to.
Did the SEC manage to fuck up on its own, or was it permitted and tacitly encouraged to, since an SEC was needed; but nobody really wanted it to find anything?
Re:Look Around You, Look Around You, Look Around Y (Score:4, Interesting)
Wrong. One of them *has* surfed porn at work at some point. They are not doing it necessarily right now. Times were different a few years ago when internet traffic was not routinely monitored and we had offices where no one could see our monitors.
Hell, I worked in a small office where the owner routinely mailed porn to everyone who worked there. I was asked about how I felt about porn when I interviewed there (in '96).
Re:Look Around You, Look Around You, Look Around Y (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah this is shocking given the typical government network is locked down to the Nth degree. When I contracted on site for the Dept. of Health they actually cut me off from the network because I used torrent to download a Linux ISO. I violated policy and it cut off soon after the download started, and the jack went dead. It wasn't just "you can't surf the internet anymore". It was "VIOLATER! KILL HIM!" and I got dressed down soon after. So they closely monitored it.
Re:Look Around You, Look Around You, Look Around Y (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Anti economic reform FUD (Score:4, Interesting)
yes, it's Bush's fault.
After all, he would have personally hired all of these people.
Oh wait,
These aren't appointed people, these are people hired by the SEC itself which has an HR department which is run by people who AREN'T appointed either.
stop trying to blame everything on one person.
regardless of who it is.
Re:Anti economic reform FUD (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Just in case it wasn't crystal clear (Score:3, Interesting)
Granted she isn't quite old enough to have seen every American president, but Helen Thomas [youtube.com] has seen quite a few. She also thought Bush to be the "worst ever."