Obama bank bill says SEC free to view porn 24/7, Soros to complete takeover of SEC as global warming enforcer-taxpayer no longer allowed FOI dox

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7/28/10, "SEC says new financial regulation law exempts it from public disclosure," Fox Business News, by Dunstan Prial

• "So much for transparency.

Under a little-noticed provision of the recently passed financial-reform legislation, the Securities and Exchange Commission

no longer has to comply with virtually all requests for information releases from the public, including those filed under the Freedom of Information Act.

• The law, signed last week by President Obama, exempts the SEC from disclosing records or information derived from "surveillance, risk assessments, or other regulatory and oversight activities." Given that the SEC is a regulatory body,
  
• the provision covers almost every action by the agency, lawyers say. Congress and federal agencies can request information, but the public cannot.

That argument comes despite the President saying that one of the cornerstones of the sweeping new legislation was more transparent financial markets. Indeed, in touting the new law, Obama specifically said it would “increase transparency in financial dealings."

• The SEC cited the new law Tuesday in a FOIA action brought by FOX Business
  
  Network. Steven Mintz, founding partner of law firm Mintz & Gold LLC in New York, lamented what he described as
  

• “the backroom deal that was cut between Congress and the SEC to keep the SEC’s failures secret. The only losers here are the American public.”

If the SEC’s interpretation stands, Mintz, who represents FOX Business Network, predicted “the next time there

• is a Bernie Madoff failure the American public will not be able to obtain the SEC documents that describe the failure,”
  

referring to the shamed broker whose Ponzi scheme cost investors billions."...

• Reference: 4/29/10, Freedom of Information Act documents were the only way taxpayers (who pay SEC salaries) had of finding out that even high level SEC employees were spending enormous amounts of time viewing porn. And that not one person has been fired as a result. Now it will be illegal for us who pay SEC salaries to know what they are doing on the job:

Washington Times: "The (SEC) attorney had looked up sex websites nearly

• 300 times, also over a two-month period. But his job appeared safe, too,
  

• after SEC management proposed a one-day suspension, records show.

Details about the sanctions are contained in reports to Congress and records obtained by The Washington Times through the Freedom of Information Act. They are among several cases raising fresh questions

• about the SEC's recent pledge to fire employees caught looking at pornography on the job."...

2/10/10, George Soros Global Warming pressure group Ceres (Soros 'Equity Shareholder") praises new SEC rules regulating existence of and regulations based on so-called man made climate change (a giant fraud that automatically criminalizes Americans and requires them to pay billions to the climate mob, ed):

• 2/10/10, "SEC guidance a boost for carbon disclosure," by Climate, Inc.

"On January 27, 2010 the SEC voted to issue interpretive guidance on disclosure requirements of climate risks in SEC filings. The SEC stressed that the interpretive releases do not create new legal requirements but are intended to provide clarity and enhance consistency on existing requirements. Nonetheless, the issuance of guidance indicates the

• growing focus of the SEC on climate change disclosure and the need for companies to expand and improve their environmental disclosure.

Till now the SEC had not called for any specific disclosures regarding climate change nor provided interpretative guidance regarding the application of existing disclosure requirements for “material risks” to climate change-related matters.

• The SEC sent a signal that it was preparing for future action when in a briefing released July of 2009 it included “Environmental, Climate Change and Sustainability Disclosure” on the list of possible refinements of the disclosure regime for the Investor Advisory Committee.

As the SEC explains in its release, existing regulations require a company to disclose information related to risk factors and call for management discussion and analysis. The new guidance on those rules emphasizes that when assessing potential risks, companies should consider the impact of existing climate change legislation and regulation,

• international accords or treaties on climate change, indirect consequences of regulation or business trends, for example new risks for the company created by legal, technical, political and scientific developments, and the physical impacts of climate change.
  

This appears to be an impressively comprehensive assessment of

• investor risk associated with climate change.

• Ceres proclaimed this action to be the “the first economy-wide climate risk disclosure requirement in the world”.
  

The guidance follows a petition sent to the SEC in 2007 by a group of investors, state agencies and environmental advocates, led by Ceres, urging the SEC to issue guidance on climate-related impacts. Ceres has long pursued a strategy

• of exerting leverage on companies by institutionalizing information disclosure of value to investors. Ceres initiated the Global Reporting Initiative and, more recently,
  

the (Ceres group) Investor Network on Climate Risk. The Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) mechanism has become the most prominent mechanism for corporate carbon disclosure, though the value of the information to investors is unclear.

• Moreover, CDP-style data has not been integrated into formal SEC reports. According to two major studies released last year by Ceres, Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) and the Center for Energy and Environmental Security (CEES)
  

climate-related disclosure “continues to be weak or altogether nonexistent in SEC filings of global companies with the most at stake in preparing for a low-carbon global economy.” The SEC initiative responds to repeated investor requests for formal guidance on the

• climate-related disclosure companies should be providing in securities filings."...

Global warming does not exist, but the SEC can now freely advance it without fear the US taxpayer will know anything about it. Thanks again to phony hack Scott Brown. ed.

• Fox Business story via Hot Air