SEC Was Busy Watching Porn While The Economy Went to Shit
So it turns out over the past five years the SEC has conducted 33 separate probes into “employees looking at explicit images” according to the Associated Press. And apparently 31 of them have occurred since the financial system went down in flames. Nice. Where was Mary Schapiro on that one? Jeez.
Anyway, Sen. Chuck Grassley (the dude who helped out Sen. Blanche Lincoln by voting “yea” to get her derivatives bill out of the Agriculture Committee and onto the Senate Floor) decided to asked SEC Inspector General David Kotz to write up a memo about all of the smut at the SEC, and then proceeded to do the responsible, logical thing and leak it to the press. ABC News first reported such scandalous findings as:
One senior attorney at SEC headquarters in Washington spent up to eight hours a day accessing Internet porn. When he filled all the space on his government computer with pornographic images, he downloaded more to CDs and DVDs that accumulated in boxes in his offices.
An SEC accountant attempted to access porn websites 1,800 times in a two-week period and had 600 pornographic images on her computer hard drive.
Another SEC accountant attempted to access porn sites 16,000 times in a single month.
In one case, the report said, an employee tried hundreds of times to access pornographic sites and was denied access. When he used a flash drive, he successfully bypassed the filter to visit a “significant number” of porn sites.
Sigh.
I mean, it’s not like the guys (sorry, that’s sexist– I’m sure it wasn’t only men) at the SEC aren’t the only ones in the world who have ever watched porn at work. The AP mentions a 2006 study that says something like 16 percent of men admit to having done it– and I’m guessing the number is even higher than that.
So the pols can wring their hands and lament the state of the nation as much as they want, but it’s not like their colleagues haven’t been caught in airport bathrooms soliciting sex or sending sexually explicit instant messages to former congressional pages… I mean, I know it’s not quite the same and I can’t say one is any better than the other, but I digress.
According to the AP,
The number of cases [of porn viewing by the SEC] jumped from two in 2007 to 16 in 2008. The cracks in the financial system emerged in mid-2007 and spread into full-blown panic by the fall of 2008.
There might be a little “Who came first? The chicken or the egg?” thinking here, but I’m not much of a philosopher. Did the rise in porn usage by the SEC result from stress from the imploding economy? Or did the SEC’s increased use of porn mean they were spending less time actually doing their jobs and therefore less time monitoring what was going on in the financial world and OMG! The SEC caused the recession!
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