Fanning the flames of controversy, on Wednesday, Congress moved to add the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to the Federal Government’s list of recognized vegetables.
The move comes on the heels of last week’s decision to categorize pizza as a vegetable when served in school cafeterias.
That decision, despite opposition from the Department of Agriculture, has encouraged members of the House of Representatives to broadly reconsider the government’s approach to classifying and defining vegetables generally. Congresswoman Diane Degette, a Colorado Democrat, has spearheaded the charge.
“If tomato sauce means we count pizza as a veggie when we serve it to our kids, we’re clearly of the mind that anything exhibiting any vegetative or vegetable-like characteristics of any sort merits inclusion,” Degette said in a conference call with reporters. “By that measure, when you look at the principal, fundamental qualities we all associate with the SEC – unresponsiveness, ignorance of the world around it, inability to act on its own behalf – there is no reasonable course of action but to count it as a vegetable too.”
In an impassioned appeal to her Congressional colleagues, Degette laid out her case for the SEC’s place on the list. In particular, she cited the agency’s failure to act on any of the dozens of pertinent leads related to Bernie Madoff’s $60B Ponzi Scheme, their complete and utter lack of understanding of the systematic risks posed by Credit Default Swaps and other sophisticated, debt-backed investment vehicles, and the more recent revelation that 17 senior level officials regularly used their office computers to watch pornography for as much as eight hours per day.
To bolster her case, Degette commissioned a study to scientifically compare the SEC’s response to a) conflicts of interest inherent in credit rating agencies; b) the Flash Crash of May, 2010; and, c) the over-leveraging of investment banks prior to the financial crisis of 2008, to the probable response of an average, garden-variety tomato. In each case, both the SEC’s and the tomato’s responses were found to be unduly slow, largely lacking foresight, and heavily skewed towards the advantage of large, institutional trading firms.
While initial predictions held that adding the SEC to the vegetable list would be subject to a hard partisan line vote, the measure passed the House of Representatives with broad approval.
A movement to add the Super Committee to the list is expected to be voted on next week.
