Rant: Fighting catastrophe with bureaucracy

Before you work yourself up in a lather about President Obama's plan for an overhaul of financial oversight, ask yourself one question: Do you feel safer than you did eight years ago?
Yes, I hate to steal the key platform plank from the Bush 2004 campaign, but when all the right-wingers start ranting about more federal bureaucracy and the lefties start shining their Obama statues, they will be missing the fact that our current president is using the same tactics against the financial fallout that the former president did after Sept. 11.
President Bush's main response to the terrorist attacks that occurred early in his first term was the creation of the Homeland Security Administration, which took over aspects of government that were previously assigned to other agencies, such as the FBI and NSA, and federalized a massive private industry (airport security).
As a reaction to the financial industry's colossal failure, President Obama is now proposing to create almost the exact same thing: an agency that will take over some responsibilities from other agencies, specifically the Federal Reserve, and take away a lot of oversight that was formerly left to the self-policing strategies of the financial industry itself.
I am never one to advocate for more bureaucracy, as they typically leave Americans drowning in a sea of paperwork and confusing directions. But the Homeland Security Agency, minus the stupid color-coded warning system and "Save yourself with duct tape!" advice, has managed to streamline protection issues that were previously lost in the shuffle between different agencies and -- at least superficially -- made the airports safer.
In this case, it was obvious that there was a need for more stringent oversight of the financial industry, since the government now seems to own most of the firms involved in that business. And while the proposal would create a large new bureaucratic entity, it would also "merge the Office of Thrift Supervision and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to create a single agency to oversee banks with national charters (and) propose to eliminate a special charter for firms that specialize in mortgage lending," according to The Washington Post, so at least there is a reduction in other federal bureaucracies.
On the bottom line, we must realize that our financial structure failed completely, leaving the American people broke in some cases and on the verge in many others, taking away our jobs and our homes and out safety nets. Much as Sept. 11 showed us we are never safe from attack, the credit crisis showed us we can never be safe from financial doom; so, as Homeland Security was created to shield us as much as possible from terrorists, we should accept the Consumer Financial Protection Agency as a chance to protect us from malfeasance in the financial sector.