Financial Reform Will Create Massive, Intrusive Bureaucracies

by Dave Blount | May 3, 2010 2:48 pm

It may take decades to discover all of the malignancies tucked away in the thousands upon thousands of pages of unread leftist legislation Comrade Obama & friends have been ramming through into law. Here[1]‘s something that’s already come to light in their “comprehensive” attack on the financial sector:

A little noticed section (Section 152, page 63) of the Obama administration’s Financial Reform bill would create a new 1,000-employee office within the Department of the Treasury, the Office of Financial Research, which is raising alarm bells among Senate GOP staff, who say the entity would have broad powers to invade the privacy of American citizens and monitor their finances and financial activity at a level never before allowed by the federal government.

The OFR is a companion entity to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), which is also proposed in the legislation (section 1001, page 1030).

Under the bill’s current language, according the Senate Banking Committee sources, the OFR under the new federal law would be allowed to collect any financial data it chooses, whether from individual citizens or businesses. Under the language of the bill, the data center can collect and maintain “all data necessary” to monitor the financial system. Wall Street executives are also concerned, because of the kind of “competitive intelligence” such an entity could collect.

Knowledge is power — especially when Big Government is becoming a competitor to the very industries it regulates.

“In real time, this office could be monitoring how an investment bank creates sole purpose entities and moves funding around for deal-making, real estate purchases, that kind of thing,” says an executive with J.P. Morgan Chase. “That’s not the kind of information anyone would want to have being shared, particularly if the government could in some way be a competitor. And the way things are going with financial institutions, that’s increasingly a real possibility.”

“As we read this legislation, the CFPB could mine for whatever data they want, bank card activities of a subset of American citizens, credit card debt and payment patterns, who is spending money on whatever,” says a Senate committee source. “And if the business community isn’t already scared out of their minds, they should be.”

Informed Americans who liked living in a free country have been scared out of their minds since November 2008.

Perhaps more chilling, the data collected by these new entities would not be protected or necessarily confidential. Rather, Senate staff believe in reading the bill introduced and negotiated by Sen. Chris Dodd, data collected by the offices could be shared with other government agencies, including executive branch agencies such as the IRS.

That’s right, the infamously corrupt Chris Dodd will be helping himself to your financial data. But you can trust him; he’s from the government, and he’s here to help.

By the way, employees of this agency will be exempt from General Schedule pay scales, which means their salaries will be stratospheric. A country run by moonbats is a great place to be a bureaucrat or a lawyer — but a lousy place to be anyone else.

chris_dodd.jpg
Dodd et al. will use your data as they please.

On a tip from Son of Taz. Cross-posted at Moonbattery[2].

Endnotes:
  1. Here: http://spectator.org/archives/2010/04/30/financial-regulatory-windfall
  2. Moonbattery: http://www.moonbattery.com/

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