Your Privacy Could Be a Thing of the Past
Do you really want your insurance agent, bank loan advisor or stockbroker to have a list of the movies you’ve rented, the medical tests you’ve taken, the gifts you’ve purchased and the minute details of your credit history and net worth? That’s what can happen if this Congress and president get their way with landmark legislation permitting insurance companies, banks and stockbrokers to affiliate and thus merge their massive computerized data bases. This will permit surveillance of your personal habits on a scale unimaginable even by any secret police agency in human history.
Your life will be an open book, to be plumbed and exploited for profit, thanks to financial industry deregulation about to be passed with massive congressional support and the blessing of President Clinton.
Lobbyists for the financial oligarchs defeated a crucial amendment to this legislation proposed by Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.) that would have required bankers, stockbrokers and insurance agents to get consumers’ permission before sharing what should be personal information about you.
Any congressional representative who votes for this bill thus is denying you your basic right to privacy and ensuring that the most intimate details of your life can be freely bandied about throughout our wired world for gossip if not solely for profit.
When it comes to serving the interests of the banks, insurance companies and stockbrokers that represent the most important source of campaign money for Republicans and Democrats alike--$145 million in the last two years--there is but one political party. That’s the bipartisan party of political greed representing corporate conglomerates, and it has no qualms about skewering the ordinary consumer.
Once again, everyone who mattered--except consumers--was taken care of when the big congressional deal was cut last week in a closed back-room conference committee meeting. The scam brokered at 2 a.m. eliminates the firewall that has existed for 66 years between your bank, your insurance company and those who trade your securities. The newly formed conglomerates handling everything from credit card bills to medical records would be allowed by this legislation to freely exchange the details of your personal profile, accurate or not, and without your permission.
Given the immense databases of information that now can be rapidly searched and exchanged, no detail of your personal life will be off limits to those who snoop for profit. That cross-referencing to all aspects of your life is what the lobbyists paid for.
“I would say it’s probably the most heavily lobbied, most expensive issue” that Congress ever has dealt with, said Ed Yingling, the chief lobbyist for the American Bankers Assn. Yingling told the New York Times, “This was our top issue for a long, long time. The resources devoted to it were huge, and we fought [for] it tooth and nail.”
Yingling isn’t kidding about those “resources,” $163 million on financial industry lobbying in the past two years, much of it to the major congressional players. Christopher Dodd of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee, received $325,124 between 1993 and 1998 from the insurance industry, which gave the committee’s chairman, Phil Gramm (R-Texas), even more--$496,610. Gramm also got $760,404 from the securities industry and $407,956 from the bankers.
The bipartisan toadying to the industry lobbyists is a disgrace. “I’d say this is about consumers versus big business,” Shelby said. He added, “This is an issue that won’t go away. We won’t let it go away. People are going to be raising hell about it more and more and more.”
It is a shame that Shelby’s is such a lonely voice of alarm. But there is still time for voters to demand to know where their legislators in Congress stand on this surrender of the basic right to privacy. It also is not too late to pressure the White House to veto this bill if it does not contain the Shelby privacy amendment.
The leading presidential candidates in both parties--Democrats Al Gore and Bill Bradley and Republican George W. Bush--all have obtained massive contributions from the financial industry. This issue is the best litmus test of whether any of them can muster the gumption to bite the hand that feeds them. If they can’t, when it comes to the most decisive consumer issues, it doesn’t really matter which one becomes president.
