While The Financial Markets Collapsed the SEC....Watched Pornography

Yesterday we touched on the issue of trust and how a recent Pew survey showed how the majority of Americans (about four out of five) do not trust the Federal government to fix any problems. On the heels of that revelation comes a Daniel Wagner Associated Press article on April 23, 2010, "SEC Staffers Watched Porn As Economy Crashed." The article summarized the results from the Security and Exchange Commission's (SEC) own inspector general and included the following findings from the inspector general's investigation:

• The investigation launched 33 different probes of SEC employees looking at pornographic images in the past five years.
• Thirty one of those probes occurred in the past two and half years, covering the time that the financial system nearly crashed and which led to the "Great Recession."
• The investigation concluded that some SEC staff people violated government ethics rules.
• A senior lawyer spent up to eight hours a day looking at and downloading pornography off of the Web, moving the images to discs after filling up the hard drive of his government computer with the downloads.
• An SEC accountant was blocked 16,000 times in a month from accessing pornographic websites. However, he found a way to get around the blocks in order to view pornography from work. If you assume he worked about 22 days a month and eight hours a day (176 hours a month) then, on average, he tried to access pornographic websites more than 90 times an hour.
• Seventeen of the investigated employees were termed to be at the "senior level," earning salaries up to over $222,400.

Let's review. the economy is crashing, banks and other financial institutions are collapsing, stock prices are plummeting and more than a few high ranking government employees, who are supposed to be responsible for watching dogging the U.S. financial system, are spending a substantial amount of their work day using their government, taxpayer funded computers to watch pornography. Maybe now the other 20% from the Pew survey who actually trust the Federal government will better understand while the majority of us do not.

The first scary thing is that this is just the SEC. I would assume that this problem is not just confined to SEC personnel, imagine how many other times across the full spectrum of government organizations that this type of wasteful behavior is going on. The second scary thing about this whole affair is that it is just another instance of government and the political class violating the trust that Americans place in their government institutions. How can we believe anything any politician says or believe any legislation that is passed will actually work when we hear stories like this? And when trust in your leaders goes away, faith in the entire concept of our government structure starts to erode away.

That is why several steps from "Love My Country, Loathe My Government" are so vital to implement as soon as possible. Step 1 called for a program that would annually reduce the budget of the Federal government 10% a year for five years. Critical to the success of that Step is a zero based, ground up approach to the entire organizational structure of the Federal government including interrelationships within that government organizational structure, the functions that are performed and the programs that are supported Hopefully, this approach would weed out this type of behavior, resulting in fired employees, smaller budgets, smaller government,and more effectiveness from the reformed, more nimble organizations that are created. No one can ever convince me today that there is not a tremendous amount of waste in the Federal government and this is just one prime example of wasteful use of taxpayer money. There is likely untold billions of dollars in savings by ferreting out these types of behaviors.

The second step would be Step 34 which would remove all Senate and House politicians that were sitting on Congressional committees and subcommittees that had SEC oversight responsibility. It is not enough to be a politicians and be outraged at this behavior after the fact. They should have been more involved and should bear some responsibility for this SEC scandal and Step 34 would ensure that happened by removing them from their committee posts.

I would hope that the first small steps to rebuild some trust between the government and the people it is supposed to serve, American citizens, would be to fire all of those involved at the SEC who have been proven to be wasting taxpayer time and resources on pornography. Without accountability their can be no trust.



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