During the Financial Meltdown, Where Were the Regulators? Jerkin' Off?

Uh, YES THEY WERE!

I've debated about posting this because it is such easy pickins'. But considering Bill Black's testimony yesterday, a cheap, sleazy shot (pun intended), sounds like a good idea.

SEC staffers watched porn as economy crashed:

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.

ABC News:

The investigation, which was conducted by the SEC's internal watchdog at the request of Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, found 31 serious offenders over the past two and a half years. Seventeen of the offenders were senior SEC officers with salaries ranging from $100,000 to $222,000 per year.

Gawker.com is naming names and giving the details.

Yet this story of 6 figure people jerking off all day long on the job is not unique. Surveys estimate at least 16% of people are porno surfing, compulsively, on the job. Even worse, the percentage of corporations doing big brother monitoring. So, the percentage of sex addicts busted at the SEC, taken in context of the rest of America....well, I think you can find similar numbers pretty much anywhere there is a screen big enough to hide behind and sometimes, not even that!

But it leads to another burning question. There are so many people who are ethical, hard working and they just get the shaft on a daily basis (metaphor intended). Imagine you are working, hard, (ok, enough already), for some guy who surfs porno on the job 8 hours a day. He's making 6 figures, you're making $24k a year and can't make rent. Now who has the bigger excuse to go into a sex addiction as a way to cope with stress?

Meritocracy is clearly dead in America.

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Zero Hedge has a piece

Folks, this is going to make the Sunday Morning Comics, absolutely. Zero Hedge.

Freudian

I's the Sig Freuds, not the Sig Heils that will get you.

Burton Leed

PRC(China) Expropriates All Proprietary Software

NTTimes:
By MICHAEL WINES

BEIJING — China is expected to issue regulations on Saturday requiring technology companies to disclose proprietary information like data-encryption keys and underlying software code to sell a range of security-related digital technology products to government agencies, American industry officials said on Friday.

But they said it remained unclear how vigorously Chinese officials would enforce the new rules, which already are watered down from a sweeping proposal first raised in 2007. Both the American and European technology industries have contended that the rules are unworkable and that they amount to trade protectionism.

One concern is that the rules will allow the leak of crucial foreign technologies to Chinese competitors who are seeking to build a technology industry on a par with the West.

The European Union’s chief trade official, Karel De Gucht, said in a visit to Beijing this week that the rules had “no real base in reality,” and urged the Beijing government to overhaul them.

The regulations, set to take effect on Friday, largely affect sales of network routers, smart cards, firewall software and other products involved in protecting digital data. They would require software and equipment from both Chinese and foreign companies to meet new technology standards before being certified for sale to government agencies.

To be certified, companies apparently would have to give government-connected testing laboratories encryption algorithms, software source code and design specifications that, for many of the products, are regarded as sensitive trade secrets.

In interviews, American industry officials argued that the rules not only sought details well beyond what was needed to certify the products, but that there were few safeguards to protect the proprietary information from outsiders.

“Even if you’re not talking about the really sensitive stuff, it’s not clear yet how product information will be protected or secured while it is running through the testing process,” John Neuffer, a vice president at the Information Technology Industry Council, a trade group based in Washington, said in a telephone interview.

“China asks for companies to go through testing labs that are essentially state-owned, government-owned,” he said. “That’s the sensitive part.”

The regulations are part of a long-running argument between Western technology companies and the Chinese government over the West’s access to Chinese markets. In the last month, China averted another dispute by rolling back a second plan aimed at giving Chinese companies an advantage in government technology purchases.

But foreign companies still contend that the latest regulations will grant Chinese companies an unfair edge in government sales, a comparatively small but growing part of the market here.

They also worry that the disclosure rules will enable Chinese competitors to copy Western technology. When the 2007 certification proposal was first introduced, some Chinese officials cast it as part of a broader campaign to help the nation’s computer-technology companies gain ground against more advanced Western competitors.

In negotiations, Chinese officials have argued that the United States imposes similar disclosure requirements on many advanced technologies. Mr. Neuffer and others said, however, that except for some military and national security technologies, American certification procedures are far less rigorous and are conducted in testing labs independent from the government.

Other foreign critics have called the regulations an example of trade protectionism, in that they would set standards for selling goods to Chinese governments that Western companies find difficult to meet. Many Chinese technology companies have agreed to abide by the rules.

In Beijing, an American industry expert who has negotiated with the Chinese government on the issue said that most American companies were likely to abandon sales to the Chinese government rather than turn over trade secrets. That expert declined to be named because of the sensitivity of the talks with the Chinese.

American industry officials also have argued that the new rules would gut their technology exports, because few other nations would purchase technology whose essential security secrets had been shared with the Chinese government.

Publicly, the United States government has taken a muted stance on the dispute. Nkenge Harmon, a spokeswoman for the United States trade representative in Washington, noted in a statement that the Chinese first planned to apply the rules to all technology purchases, but later scaled them back to apply only to purchases by local, provincial and national governments.

“We were pleased with that decision,” her statement said. “Since then, the U.S. has continued to ask China to follow global norms in this area, and we are continuing those discussions.”

Burton Leed

Must Read are open threads

where comments can go that you don't know how to categorize.

That's the "Must Read Posts" which are links and blurbs of other sites/articles.

I wrote up this awhile ago, but I will try to put together a China's latest post up along with more on currency manipulation today.

Thanks for the heads up the are "issuing rules". I'm telling ya, China is out to kick the U.S. ass, it's always been and it's as simple as that.

Portraits of a Failed State

There are over 30K Rigs in the Gulf. One of these had to fail. The root cause of this was Cheney's secretive Energy Task Force which created and tolerated this atrocity.

It took a Supreme Court filled with the henchmen of the Oligarchy to keep the proceedings of the ETF secret as Executive Privilege, and a corrupt Minerals Management Agency which gave away leases, deregulated drilling, and
put Big Oil in charge.
In other words, Cheney
gave Big Oil everything it wanted. No species can foul its habitat and survive.

Turn to Manufacturing and witness an an economy whose employment base was half the workforce in the 1950's and now is 5 percent of the workforce.

Witness the pathetic attempt to 'reform' banking. Too-Big-Too-Fail
was excluded, along with derivative transparency, any no restoration of Glass Steagall.

History shows that when a ruling class carries on with this degree of ineptness and brutality, the ruling class falls from power.

Burton Leed

"Financial Reform" has been a huge disappointment

But then I've been tracking on this since the beginning. But for Obama to claim this this will stop the next financial crisis, that's simply not true.

But the ruling class isn't failing from power, they just got more of it.

China Has Stood Up

Mao's words in Tienamen Square in October of 1949. In the original model, there would be factory floor councils. Taken away. But now the Chinese workers themselves have recreated the workers councils on the shop floor.
BTW in 1990 Michael Camdesus of the IMF destroyed the shop floor councils in Russia as his first act of 'reform'.

NYTimes.
"Labor Disputes Spread in China"
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/11/business/global/11strike.html?ref=busi...

Burton Leed

The history, motivations and patterns of the IMF

We need a good, statistically good, referenced overview post on the IMF, their current motivations and their past behaviors. I have a lot of material, but it's just in bits and pieces, not a great overview. It sure seems they are busy using all of these crisis, not to demand global financial reform to stop contagion, rip-offs and undermining sovereign nations....instead it seems to be a major worker/labor attack as well as a major attack on any retirement funds.