When I had a site free media productions as one of two owners, I remember posting this classic article. If you really believe that business operates based on merit based measurements more than favors, this should take a cut at that view.
If things were actually the way you were taught they were, those employees would have been fired for more productive ones (before a public outcry). The red pill on big corporations.
SEC employees spent hours looking at porn sites on their work computers, according to an internal report.
(CNN) — As the country was sinking into its worst financial crisis in more than 70 years, Security and Exchange Commission employees and contractors cruised porn sites and viewed sexually explicit pictures using government computers, according to an agency report obtained by CNN.
“During the past five years, the SEC OIG (Office of Inspector General) substantiated that 33 SEC employees and or contractors violated Commission rules and policies, as well as the government-wide Standards of Ethical Conduct, by viewing pornographic, sexually explicit or sexually suggestive images using government computer resources and official time,” said a summary of the investigation by the inspector general’s office.
More than half of the workers made between $99,000 and $223,000. All the cases took place over the past five years.
“It is nothing short of disturbing that high-ranking officials within the SEC were spending more time looking at pornography than taking action to help stave off the events that brought our nation’s economy to the brink of collapse,” said Rep. Darrell Issa. The Republican is the ranking member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
“This stunning report should make everyone question the wisdom of moving forward with plans to give regulators like the SEC even more widespread authority,” he said. “Inexplicably, rather than exercise its existing regulatory enforcement authority, SEC officials were preoccupied with other distractions.”
Video: SEC staffers caught surfing porn
SEC spokesman John Nester said the employees involved have been disciplined or are being disciplined. Some have been suspended or dismissed, he said, adding that the SEC has further increased penalties for misusing government resources in recent months.
“We will not tolerate the transgressions of the very few who bring discredit to their thousands of hardworking colleagues,” he said.
The investigation came to light on the same day President Obama gave a speech in lower Manhattan, calling for reform in the finance industry.
On Capitol Hill, the Senate is working on a financial reform bill that would set up regulatory oversight of the financial industry’s practices with the goal of preventing another Wall Street meltdown like the one in 2008 that launched the U.S. recession.
The bill includes an “early warning” system intended to spot signs of crisis, as well as a $50 billion liquidation fund created with money from banks and other finance industry corporations to ensure an orderly transition in closing down failing entities. It was recently approved by the Senate’s Banking and Agricultural committees. The House passed its version of the bill in December.
The inspector general’s report includes specific examples of misuse by employees.
A regional office staff accountant tried to access pornographic websites nearly 1,800 times, using her SEC laptop during a two-week period. She also had about 600 pornographic images saved on her laptop hard drive.
Separately, a senior attorney at SEC headquarters admitted to downloading pornography up to eight hours a day, according to the investigation.
“In fact, this attorney downloaded so much pornography to his government computer that he exhausted the available space on the computer hard drive and downloaded pornography to CDs or DVDs that he accumulated in boxes in his office,” the inspector general’s report said.
That they fired some employees after a public outcry just proves my point. That’s actually hypocritical. You didn’t have a problem with it then, so why now? You either winked and nodded the other way or choose to not monitor. In actuality, firing them years later when there is a public outcry is actually an injustice because you sent the message that it was okay by not intervening earlier.
The more layers a business has, the more opportunities there are for someone on top to stab you in the back. The business will keep going on because people don’t take moral stands in business, they just collect their paycheck. Harvey Weinstein raped women and Jerry Sandusky raped children – the business kept going on because people just want their individual pay check. You want small business not big business.
I noticed this with message forums too. If you run a blog it doesn’t matter who is moderating.
Blue pill – Money doesn’t really matter that much in elections. We’re all Americans, the rich have a little more influence but not that much more influence.
Red pill – The owners of corporations manipulate elections strongly.
As you grow older, you learn that the more uncomfortable pill is usually the correct one.
Every economy has a role of government. If someone shoplifts it’s government that arrests them. There is no such thing as a free market that runs without the government. The question is what the government does.
In the 1980s, America decided that the role of Government isn’t to regulate and audit but instead to look the other way and then arrest blue collar criminals when inevitably the middle class falls apart because it’s not in the interest of corporate shareholders to have a middle class.
Boomers today still carry these attitudes with them and are still forming the lobbying and political power that prevents reversing the damage they caused.
You could throw someone in the middle of the ocean and then tell them it’s their “personal responsibility” to swim back. That’s what the boomer generation has done to the millennial generation.
It isn’t the people who marched at Charlottesville who should be blamed. They’re out of power. Who should be blamed is the economic policy makers who misdirect non-whites against people who are screaming from the sidelines.
What the heavily Boomer 1% has done, is essentially camouflaged corporate racing to the bottom through global outsourcing to third world countries underneath anti-racism and tolerance. They talk about white supremacism while they fire white workers.
If it’s true that someone like Lance Armstrong can be considered a hero and then found to be a cheat, it’s also true that heroes have been cheated. I’m talking about business, not biking. And for the record, my stance is that it wasn’t just Lance, it was all of them.
My stance on Armstrong is that he was the best in a dirty era, but I needed an analogy here.
The problem I’ve always had is that the people who made their way up the ladder before globalization destroyed it don’t give their own jobs away. They make sure the “high experience” jobs stay here. It’s really a mess to see how inefficient the modern office is because of all the insulating things boomers have done. They go out of their way to mess things up for millenials.
From the time I got out of college I noticed that boomers were consolidating their power in business and intentionally putting experience requirements in such a way that only other boomers could get the jobs. Requiring such an amount of experience that would be unlikely if you didn’t come up at a certain time when certain things trended.
I’m realizing it wasn’t just me. In all areas of society, they rigged things in a way to hold money and power and basically screwed the next generation. It’s not that they’re more competent it’s that they gamed the system to artificially keep too large a share of power. Then they talk about globalization, pluralism and inclusivity – which they use to justify using extremely cheap labor for the other jobs where the costs of housing is next to zero in third world countries.
The reason older and older people keep taking more and more political seats is that the powers that be have realized that our generations are going opposite ways. It’s not about being on the same trajectory but earlier in that trajectory. We’re going another path. They know it and they’re doing everything they can to delay it. The problem is I don’t want to be 50 years old when finally some things start to get fixed.
The free market, unregulated, global economy with full trust in the rich and no safety net has been tried and failed. we’ve all seen it fail and experienced its failures.
Video: SEC staffers caught surfing porn