FIDDLED WITH PORNO WHILE WALL STREET BURNED

The Security Exchange Commission is supposed to be the nation’s watchdog over the financial industry. The SEC is another example of your tax dollars at work. It fiddled while Wall Street burned. And how did the SEC fiddle? By letting three dozen of its staff watch pornography all day while on the job.

Bob Schieffer sure hit the nail right square on the head with his closing comments on the April 25 CBS program Face the Nation. Here is a transcript of what he said about the SEC’s oversight of the financial industry:

BOB SCHIEFFER: When the financial crisis hit in 2008, I wondered where the Securities and Exchange Commission was. That’s the watchdog agency that’s supposed to keep an eye on Wall Street. Was the agency just asleep at the switch? Well, no. As we found out last week, they were wide awake at the switch. At least, nearly three dozen of them were. They were wide awake downloading pornography from the internet.

Now here’s my question: an inspector general’s report showed that some people at the SEC were spending as much as eight hours a day watching porn. How many days like that does it take before the boss notices the guy hasn’t turned in any work? Does anybody ever ask what’s that guy in the corner doing over there?

In a classic bureaucratic response, the agency says that as the media reported back in February, their own investigators were already on this case. In other words, this is all old news. Sorry, I don’t think so. And the agency notes those who got caught have already been disciplined or quote, "Are in the process of being disciplined." In other words, they’re just now getting around to punishing them? Why is that?

In its press release, the agency also stressed that it won’t, quote, "Allow transgressions of the very few to bring discredit to thousands of hardworking colleagues." That’s certainly reassuring, which begs another question. Why not just release the names of the guilty and tell us exactly what their punishment was? Then we’d know for sure who the innocent people were. Reading that press release, I’m still not sure the agency gets it at all and won’t until some more people get fired over there and not just those people looking at the dirty pictures.