SEC, Allen Stanford's Ponzi, and More Of The Same from the GOP

(10:56:00 AM)
Watching C-Span while we pack to head back from the funeral and our so-called vacation. SEC IG H.David Kotz testifying and answering questions at Dodd's Senate Banking Committee, about the R. Allen Stanford Ponzi scheme. The two salient points of his examination are that the SEC office in Texas figured lout this was a Ponzi scheme in 97, 99, 02, 04 and 05, before the SEC actually brought action in 08 & 09, and that the Texas office did not get news to the DC Main Office until the 2005 examination.
I don't know who was running the SEC office in texas in the mid-90s. Normally, I'd expect a Democratic appointee. But with the Gingrich revolution changing a lot of rules in Washington, and the Republicans owning both houses, so any appointee (Barrett, head of Enforcement in that office, as they just said,) was probably picked to clear the hurdle of Republican expectations about enforcement: Don't do any enforcement.
This was exemplified by the appointments of first Harvey Pitt and then Chris Cox as heads of Junior Bush's SEC in Washington. And Kotz's testimony implies that, had Madoff not confessed to his crimes, the SEC probably would not have done anything about the Stanford fraud. Sen. Jim Bunning, and Key Bailey Hutchison are shocked, shocked I say, that the people they voted to appoint to these offices were completely incompetent.
This is all of a piece with the GOP's attitude towards enforcement of almost any laws or rules that Big Money is subject to: First, avoid passing any regulations. Second, appoint or permanently hire and place chairs and staff that are explicitly opposed to enfocement, or are untrained in the regs to be enforced. Third, reduce or eliminate funding for the agencies that do enforcement. And finally, denigrate that function of government and anyone who would perform that function as the law requires and the legislators expected when they passed the rule. Remember, 'original intent' is valid for a 250-year-old Constitution, but not for the 40-year-old Clean Air Act, or the 1937 creation of the SEC.


And if you'd like this kind of quality operation to continue in government, sign up to the GOP's new Pledge to America, another repackagingof the same old crap, including the enforcement attitude I remarked on above.
Jon Stewart did a fun analysis of that Pledge, an analysis that only works as a video. Watch.
(11:25:36 AM)