-Caveat Lector-
"And just as he has done with his health-privacy "protection,"
Mr. Clinton will sign the bipartisan legislation, leaving you
naked to any prying eyes with an Orwellian statement about how
this protects your privacy."
Running Risks
N.Y.Times
Nov. 1,1999
William Safire
Washington -- Americans are unaware that Congress and the
president have just agreed to put us all at extraordinary
financial and personal risk. Senate Banking Chairman Phil Gramm
has struck a deal with Clinton Treasury Secretary Lawrence
Summers to knock down all fire walls between banks, insurance
companies and brokerage houses. Global financiers are given the
green light for ever-greater concentrations of power.
Few remember the reason for those fire walls: to curtail the
spread of the sort of panic from one financial segment to another
that helped lead to the Great Depression. But today's lust for
global giantism has swept aside the voices of prudence; generous
financial lobbies have persuaded our leaders that in enormous
size there is strength.
Not everyone has forgotten the adage of "the bigger they come,
the harder they fall." In a little-noticed speech to bankers
about the need for oversight of the growing "appetite for risk,"
Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan said that megabanks are becoming
"complex entities that create the potential for unusually large
systemic risks in the national and international economy should
they fail."
Fail? That's a word that has been all but stricken from
mergermania's vocabulary. It can only be used in the phrase "too
big to fail" -- where the American taxpayer would have to bail
out a failing multitentacled financial network lest it sink the
whole jerry-built global edifice. A few of us have no appetite
for assuming that risk -- which would be 10 times as costly as
the 80's S.&L. debacle.
But that's just a monetary risk that, come hard-to-imagine hard
times, would wipe out a decade's projected surplus. More
irreversible is a greater risk that we are assuming this month --
the much more imminent risk to our private lives.
We have already seen the veil over our health records ripped
away. The feckless G.O.P. Congress tossed that hot potato to
Clinton, who caved to the insurance and hospital lobbies. The key
word is consent. Instead of requiring written permission from
patients before confidential health records are shopped to drug
marketers or shown to prospective employers, Clinton's phony
"controls" put patients and doctors at a disadvantage.
As for financial privacy, the Gramm-Summers sellout makes your
bank account everybody's business. You will hear much huffing and
puffing about privacy protection as the fire walls are torn down,
especially about allowing you to object after the fact to the
handing-around of your personal records, like a plate of cookies,
to other companies.
Here's the catch: What happens when those "outside companies" are
not outside at all -- but are part of one great big family of
broker-banking-insurance ser vices? Then, without your consent,
the private information you write on your mortgage application,
with your tax return attached, goes to your insurance company,
which already has your health history -- and its snoops can also
see your investment behavior and what you've been buying with
your credit cards. Under Gramm-Summers, giant financial
conglomerates -- using other surveillance to protect against
fraud -- will know more about your money habits, your assets,
your diseases and your genetic makeup than your spouse or
paramour does, and probably more than you do.
And just as he has done with his health-privacy "protection," Mr.
Clinton will sign the bipartisan legislation, leaving you naked
to any prying eyes with an Orwellian statement about how this
protects your privacy. Listen for the word consent. Listen for
the word permission. You won't hear them, because that puts the
expensive obligation on the marketers and snoops to seek your
consent and alert you to their intrusion.
Instead, you will hear malarkey about how you will have control.
That code word means that you must search for invasions of your
privacy from punch-this-number telephone-answering computers and
impenetrable bureaucracies. Some "control."
Sheer size rules. We look to government either to regulate
monopoly or enforce competition. But as we have deregulated to
let the free market operate, government has failed to enforce
antitrust laws to maintain competition in media and now in money.
Today's result: mergermania, dangerous concentration of financial
risk, and the even greater risk to that part of our freedom we
call privacy.
=================================================================
Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh, YHVH, TZEVAOT
FROM THE DESK OF: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
*Mike Spitzer* <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
~~~~~~~~ <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
The Best Way To Destroy Enemies Is To Change Them To Friends
Shalom, A Salaam Aleikum, and to all, A Good Day.
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