Uh-oh, it looks like Florida Rep. Dan Webster has gone off the rails again. His latest concern is that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, AKA the one agency tasked with keeping the bankers in line in a government otherwise tasked with fulfilling their every need and whim,
is like the Gestapo.
"So this is far more than the NSA. Far more than their metadata, which only collects phone numbers but not names, far more because they have no re-authorization, far more because there is no appropriation restrictions placed on it. This is more than just NSA-style, this is more Gestapo-style collection of data on individual citizens who have no clue that this is happening.
He
seems to be talking about the
National Mortgage Database, an effort to build, well, a database of mortgage information, including information about the lender, borrower, borrower's credit profile and updated payment history. This is deemed necessary because of the revelation that the banks themselves are Goddamn Bad At knowing which of them owns what mortgage, as we all learned in spectacular fashion not all that long ago. Having someone, somewhere keep a valid list would seem to be a pretty good bit of consumer protection, but, alas, the more pressing federal concern is to
monitor the mortgage market in aggregate, lessening the chance for regulators be caught off guard by similar industry-wide bungling in the future. The information it contains about borrowers is intended to be anonymous.
The database will not contain personally identifiable information and appropriate precautions will be taken by the agencies to ensure that individual consumers cannot be identified through the database or through any datasets that may be made available to researchers or the public.
How you get from there to Full Gestapo Alert Level Twelve is one of the mysteries of the modern Republican Party. How you even get from there to "worse than the NSA" is a stumper, too, assuming that Dan Webster has been paying any attention at all to the NSA revelations of late. In his defense, he probably isn't.
I think we need a whole new federal agency tasked with determining what the hell these people are going on about. I'm dead serious, it can work out of the Congressional Budget Office and their task will be to establish a database of what the hell Dan Webster and other legislators are going on about, on any given date, and some guesses as to why they are going on about it, and what percentage of what they are going on about has any relationship to reality as we know it. Then you'd have a whole sub-office in that office dedicated strictly to Gestapo, Nazi and Hitler comparisons, and those poor staffers would deserve every bit of federal pay coming to them.