Now the IRS is championing corporate America’s agenda to profit from your personal information – All of it!
 
“The Internal Revenue Service has proposed a new rule that would let tax preparers sell or share a client's tax-return information with third parties, as long as they got the client's consent.” 

Without a hint that it is joking, the IRS says the existing prohibitions against sharing confidential data with outside parties restricts taxpayers control and their direct use of their own tax return information as they see fit.  Talk about unconscionable spin from our government.  But that is what it has come to under this Bush Regime.

In other words, H & R block can, with your permission, share you with the world of marketing and database firms.  Once the data is in their hands, it is global public information.  You have lost any semblance of control over it.

Not that you have any control anyway.  The scandals surface daily about this database company or that credit card company losing millions of records with everything from your SS# to account numbers complete with PIN numbers.  Or retailers that are keeping that kind of information, gleaned from your transactions at the checkout counter, in clear violation of the law.  Or credit clearing houses doing the same, and then losing it.  Or even your bank notifying large numbers of cutomers that its security has been breached and that their accounts could be raided.

You are an open book out there in Ethernet land, and to say that the keepers of your information, even the legit ones, are not cavalier in their handling of it is spin worthy of the Bush Regime.  Now we have, as Lou Dobbs puts it, “the best government that money can buy” siding once again with its Corporate constituency to farm and market this vast crop of American Consumers.

Here’s a real and present danger.  Some tax preparers outsource your tax preparation, and there is no current restriction on that.  “The IRS provided no comment beyond the proposal and a press release, which heralded a provision that would prohibit tax preparers from sending tax returns overseas without the customer's consent. Some U.S. companies have started outsourcing tax prep work to places like India.”

How do you spell sheep to be sheared?  Try the great mutton headed “A-v-e-r-a-g-e A-m-e-r-i-c-a-n C-o-n-s-u-m-e-r”.

It’s scary.  You are what your personal information in The System says you are in this consumer society.  There is seemingly no way that you can escape exposure and slicing and dicing for commercial and, even criminal, purposes.  And those folks come from a different universe of cleverness when it comes to taking advantage of what the Average American would see as information of no real consequence. 

Congratulations United Sheep of America (USA).  Welcome to the great American U.S. Corporate Slaughter House.  You have become a globalized market and now big business backed by Big Government is well on the path to marketing you in the global economy.

I got my first whiff of this issue on the Lou Dobbs Tonight show (16:00 local time on CNN) for Wednesday March 22, 2006, but upon researching the subject I found that the news of it is at least a couple weeks old, and the proposed travesty itself older yet. 

You just don’t know what these yahoos in our government will come up with next, or already have for that matter.