If you’re wondering why it’s getting so much harder to get ahead financially, or even keep your head above water, there’s a reason. It’s a combination of conservative ideology, which says the government shouldn’t do anything except feed the military, and corporate “marketing” strategies which, sheltered by that ideology, have gone out of control. The problem of identity theft is a case in point.
A typical outrage: TransUnion, one of the three large credit reporting bureaus, just reminded us in yet another article on identity theft that it will do us the favor of selling us unlimited rights to view our credit information—information that really belongs to us, not to TransUnion—for $14.95 a month. Meanwhile the risk of identity theft is exponentially increased because these agencies have this information and give it to potential lenders and other parties without our consent or even our knowledge (unless, of course, we pay to find out). Even to keep them from doing that—to put a freeze on our data—we have to pay a fee.
The credit reporting bureaus ought to solve this problem for us free of charge. In the best of all possible worlds, they should be dismantled. In the real world, they ought to be prohibited from giving our information to anyone without our authorization. That would curb growing abuses such as prospective employers checking people’s credit ratings, and credit card companies hiking interest rates on customers who have had problems staying current with other loans that are none of the credit card company’s business.
Instead, TransUnion and the other credit bureaus have taken what belongs to us in the first place, and is now trying to sell it back. That gambit characterizes the age: take what belongs to people, individually and collectively (from personal information to water and plant DNA), and sell it back. Another tactic at work here is the refusal of the large corporations, with the passive or even active support of the government, to solve at no charge the problems they’re responsible to solve, which forces us as individuals to solve them by buying something. The strategy’s not new; it’s as old as the automakers’ buying up public transit systems like the Holyoke Street Railway and shutting them down so people would have to have cars, and older. But with the growth of technology it’s achieved new levels of refinement. The corporations are exuberant: no problem is a problem if it creates a new market! The individual, harassed by a growing gaggle of charges, can’t keep up.
