bobquasit | Fingerprints

I wrote a question over on Askville about the new bill in Congress to establish a national fingerprint registry. It turns out that it's specific to the financial industry, at least for now; it's not for the entire population. Still, the ramifications are troubling. It's possible that anyone who takes out a mortgage will be required to supply their fingerprints.

But practically nobody over on Askville seems to be worried about a national fingerprint registry. "If you don't have anything to hide, what are you worried about?" was a common comment. I won't reproduce the entire thread here (you can read it for yourself over at Askville if you want), but here's my latest comment. It's very long.

The problem, I think, is cyclic. And the stock market crash this morning is a good example of cyclic behavior. In the 1920s there was virtually no government regulation or oversight of the financial sector. Banks could fail, and did. When they failed, the savings and checking accounts in those banks magically disappeared.

After the crash of 1929, a number of reforms were instituted. Regulations were put in place to give depositors security; the government effectively insured that bank accounts couldn't disappear (at least up to the first $100,000, if I remember correctly). At the same time, the government protected itself by regulating the financial industry and forcing them to handle their funds responsibly.

Decades passed, and the system worked well. Whole generations were born and lived in a world in which banks were sober, secure institutions, and the money deposited in them was as good as, well, "money in the bank".

Over time, people forgot. They forgot the chaos, the total collapse that can and DOES happen when greed and wealth run amok. So starting around 1980, big business and big money found a new religion: deregulation. They pushed and pushed to eliminate as much regulation as possible. This new crusade didn't only apply to the financial sector, mind you; the same thing was done to food, drugs, product safety, the environment, mining, and pretty much anything else that had the potential to make more money by eliminating "wasteful" regulation.

Deregulation was gladly passed by a corrupt Congress, grateful for buckets of cash from industry lobbyists. In addition to deregulation, the agencies entrusted with oversight were themselves corrupted; more and more often, regulators and inspectors were hired from the very industry that they would now be overseeing. Blatant conflicts of interest were routinely overlooked, and the financial sector could rest easy in knowing that they could do practically anything without fear of oversight.

And now we're seeing the result. Massive, systemic failure. This is just the beginning, mind you; there's a lot more to come. We can only hope that a modern FDR will come along to give America the re-regulation and honest enforcement that the country so desperately needs.

Even so, it's a virtual certainty that industry will forget the lesson again in about a hundred years or less (assuming we all survive this, of course). They'll press for deregulation, enjoy a few decades of obscene wealth, and then be amazed all over again when everything comes crashing down on top of them. The sad thing is that it's the poor and working class who will pay the greatest price.

The same thing applies to privacy and government abuse of its power to spy on its citizens. People have forgotten about the "red squads", about unchecked wiretapping, about the FBI's files on people for the "crime" of being against the war. We forget that the government put 110,000 American citizens in internment camps for no other reason then their ancestry, and that most of them lost their life's savings and their homes. We've forgotten.

We've forgotten why the Founding Fathers wrote the 4th Amendment in the first place.

We trust the government - and big business, which is entangled with the government on a scale which we've never seen before - with all sorts of personal information about our lives. They have the "right" to record and listen to all of our phone calls. They have the "right" to record and examine all of our internet activity. They have the "right" to create massive data-mining operations that record your every transaction, every credit card or debit card purchase, every bill you pay, even your medical records - all of it. They can put it all together and learn things about your life that will shock you. And they can share all that information with anyone or any organization they choose. And no one, no one, has the right to oversee what they're doing or even know the full scale of it. It's all, officially, secret.

We're just lucky that whistleblowers have revealed as much as they have, although they've inevitably been punished for coming forward.

Do you really believe that the government isn't abusing their incredible new powers? Apparently many people here do. You trust George W. Bush and the people in his administration with every bit of information about your life and that of your family, even though those people have proven over and over again that they are neither competent nor honorable. You're putting your head in the mouth of a blood-maddened shark and trusting that you'll be just fine.

Or maybe you just feel that it's too late to do anything about it, and you're hoping that the shark will be kind. Perhaps you're right; perhaps it is too late to change things. But I think it's safe to say that the information being recorded about us all IS being abused, both by the government and by business, and we will discover those unimagined abuses to our horror, sometime within the next decade or two.

I could go on about (for example) the use of agents provocateurs in anti-war groups. Or about the police raids on the houses of protesters before the RNC this year, by FBI agents and policemen who wouldn't show warrants and called each other by code names such as "The Executioner" and "The Terminator". But I realize that this would be a waste of time.

Sorry, I didn't mean to go on at such length. It's just that I feel as if I'm watching the nation head right over a cliff, and everyone seems to be closing their eyes and hoping for the best. It's a sad thing to see.

They're all so trusting of the government, even though it has proven that it can't be trusted...it's really painful.