The Associated Press
Republicans are stepping up their criticism of the Securities and Exchange Commission following reports that senior agency staffers spent hours surfing pornographic websites on government-issued computers while they were supposed to be policing the nation's financial system.
California Rep. Darrell Issa, the top Republican on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said it was "disturbing that high-ranking officials within the SEC were spending more time looking at porn than taking action to help stave off the events that put our nation's economy on the brink of collapse."
He said in a statement Thursday that SEC officials "were preoccupied with other distractions" when they should have been overseeing the growing problems in the financial system.
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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.
The memo provides fresh ammunition for Republicans who suspect the timing of the SEC's lawsuit last week against Wall Street powerhouse Goldman Sachs Group Inc. News of the suit came as the Senate prepared to take up a sweeping overhaul of the rules governing banks and other financial companies.
The memo was written by SEC Inspector General David Kotz in response to a request from Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa. It summarizes past inspector general probes and reports some shocking findings:
- A senior attorney at the SEC's Washington headquarters spent up to eight hours a day looking at and downloading pornography. When he ran out of hard drive space, he burned the files to CDs or DVDs, which he kept in boxes around his office. He agreed to resign, an earlier watchdog report said.
- An accountant was blocked more than 16,000 times in a month from visiting websites classified as "Sex" or "Pornography." Yet he still managed to amass a collection of "very graphic" material on his hard drive by using Google images to bypass the SEC's internal filter, according to an earlier report from the inspector general. The accountant refused to testify in his defense, and received a 14-day suspension.
While I'll say it's a little disturbing that someone would spend eight hours a day looking at porn, it's not all that suprising and (GASP) it's not that big of a fucking deal. Is it really a logical step to take that because 31 dudes at the SEC like to whack off at work we shouldn't let them have more oversight over Wall Street.
Mind you this is the same Wall Street that just collapsed our economic infrastructure all in the name of greed and irresponsibility. Take Goldman Sachs pretty boy "Fabulous Fab" (his nickname, not mine) Fabrice Tourre. He was one of the main perpetrators of the practice of selling properties that were intended to fail to Goldman Sachs customers while making money off short selling the products. In emails Tourre sent to his many women he said, "Even though the whole system is about to crumble at any moment, I still sell widows and orphans I met at the airport financial products that are pure financial masturbation which nobody knows how to price. But sadly enough we in this country can be tricked to care less about the multi-million dollar playboy stealing our money with financial masturbation than the government employee who masturbates at his desk chair. So who's stroking who in this country.
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And before you say I'm just some liberal, Jon Stewart loving nutbag ranting, I'll remind you my opinion on matters of sex in politics are pretty consistent. When Michael Steele and the RNC were taking heat for going to a lesbian bondage club I didn't react with outrage. We may need a better form of campaign finance reform in the U.S. but this incident didn't make me think that any more than I had before. But ultimately its the RNC's business what they do with their money. It's our business as Americans what Wall Street does with our money and even if we've got a few dudes whacking it at the SEC, I'd like our government to have more power to make sure we don't get screwed by people like Fabulous Fab again.
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