Defenders of high payday loan rates resort to intimidation
Barb ShellySomeone broke into a car in Springfield last week and stole 5,500 signatures that volunteers had gathered for initiative petitions to cap payday loan rates and raise Missouri’s minimum wage. The organizer whose car was broken into told others on his team he had thought he was being tailed.
Besides constituting a pretty serious crime, the theft left the grass-roots organizers backing the two initiatives short of time and short of the number of signatures they needed to gather in the Springfield area to have a shot at getting the issues on the ballot. The Springfield region has been the toughest area for petition gatherers.
“Opposition blockers down there have been screaming in the faces of our canvassers and voters to intimidate people from signing,” said Molly Fleming-Pierre, an organizer with Communities Creating Opportunities in Kansas City.
Volunteers from around the state, including pastors and church staffers, traveled to Springfield to try to make up the difference.
“I have about six inches of southern Missouri sweat on me right now from wearing out my shoe leather going door to door,” Fleming-Pierre said in an e-mail. “Our people were taunted, mocked, bullied, and verbally assaulted down there. Sometimes it was nine big burly guys to one young female canvasser — trying to kick her off a site. She stayed. One of our pastors had the opposition blockers screaming in her face for nearly 30 minutes that she was a liar. Tails would follow our people, texting their blockers when our people would set up to canvass so that the intimidation was always mobile.”
Who was doing this? Hard to tell. A shadowy though well-funded group called Missourians for Equal Credit Opportunity is opposing the payday loan initiative, but there is no way to show at this point if that group paid someone to coordinate the strong-arm tactics used in Springfield. Missourians for Equal Credit Opportunity previously paid a Texas law firm to send letters to churches in Kansas City and elsewhere, falsely implying they could lose their tax-exempt status by collecting signatures for the payday loan reform initiative.
Hoping to confuse voters, opponents of the payday loan reforms have also been circulating competing petitions that relate to payday loan practices but don’t cap interest rates. They also are in court hoping to stop the legitimate initiative from getting on the ballot.
Deceptive and strong-armed tactics are all the more reason Missourians should support efforts to cap annual interest rates on payday loans at 36 percent.
Volunteers in Springfield recouped their needed signatures, Fleming-Pierre said.
“They went door to door in public housing, door to door on the FEMA trailers, went to the streets and talked to people.” Among those people, she said, were tornado victims who fell into a payday loan trap.
“When the blockers stopped shouting long enough to get close, the people almost always signed our petitions,” Fleming-Pierre said.
The deadline for turning in petitions to the Missouri secretary of state is Monday. Organizers for both the payday loan and minimum wage initiatives say they expect to have more than enough signatures to clear the bar, although the payday loan effort still faces legal challenges.
Michael Middleton
1 year, 1 month agoAll these accusations and you back it up with what sort of proof? So this lone female surrounded by nine intimidating burly guys never called the police? Hmm…
George Hunsucker
Northland
1 year, 1 month agoANOTHER “fact filled” column… I am waiting for one of these on anti-smokers doing the persecuting—oh, that’s right, they already are causing businesses to close, aren’t they?
Ken Bussanmas
1 year, 1 month agoIt’s so nice to have people prove an opinion writer’s point just by hitting the “send” button.
It’s not an investigative news piece, George, it’s an op/ed (opinion / editorial) piece and as such isn’t required to include 3 pages of sources and footnotes. You took full advantage of this when you claimed anti-smokers were persecuting people and closing down businesses. Show me evidence of that happening from sources that aren’t connected to tobacco companies and then we’ll talk about that.
As far as this campaign goes - what’s wrong with capping the amount of interest on any loans, payday or otherwise? A bad economy leads people to take some desperate measures just keep the lights on at times and those desperate people are welcomed with open arms by the payday, title loan (now THERE’S a ripoff) and pawn industries, all of them willing to “approve” you (the only criteria for approval seems to be that the “applicant” is breathing at the time the loan is made) for some high interest, short term cash. Once they’ve got suck…er…client on the hook, those firms then hide behind intentionally confusing and often contradictory company policies, most engineered to keep clients from ever being able to pay off the principal loan amount. It’s a huge moneymaking business with almost no regulation so it’s easy to understand why the people running these businesses would resort to threats, lies, intimidation, etc.
There ARE some good people and companies out there who will work with their customers and provide a service. We never hear about these firms because nobody’s complaining about them. Instead of trying to bully the other side, why not locate and promote these companies as representative of your industry?
Oh, yeah, that’s right - BECAUSE THEY’RE NOT RIPPING PEOPLE OFF. Showing a business being successful and not screwing over the general public on an hourly basis would really just make people ask more questions, wouldn’t it?
Richard L Wagner
1 year, 1 month agoWhere are the people with the petitions for this initiative? I would sign 100 x, if I could.
Amanda Torbet Houser
1 year, 1 month agoWow. This isn’t news, this is advertising. And do you know who the real suckers are? The lot of you who actually buy this load of crap. Ladies and gents, this is MECO making a last-ditch effort to squeeze out donations for their socialist agenda. They know they can’t qualify their petition (due as much to public disinterest and a mismanaged campaign as to these protestors/blockers), so their coordinators are playing the ‘it’s not my fault’ card. Good grief, no petitions were ever stolen, no one has ever screamed at anyone (really, ask yourself what good that would do), and nobody was tailed or threatened. Protestors are, however, standing against this special interest group & telling the truth: the petition being circulated was deemed by our appointed judges to be deceitful and misleading and MECO has been ordered to cease the collecting of signatures, which they are apparently ignoring. Don’t be fooled just because you saw it in a headline on the Internet by a bought journalist. Think about what they are saying and why they would want to. But even if it eludes you, I’ve told you this from firsthand experience with both sides because I think the only ones being screwed here are the voters.
Johnathon Busby
1 year, 1 month agoPayday lenders use and abuse the least educated and most desperate segments of our society. If you calculate their “fees” into a percentage of money loaned, they’re committing usury. It’s indecent. Now, they seem to have called out professional goons (likely people on their staff, since they engage in a legal form of theft in the first place).
Ray Cyst
1 year, 1 month agoBut no one makes anyone borrow money at these rates. People have the right to be stupid.
Mark Hastert
1 year, 1 month ago“People have the right to be stupid.”
Read more here: http://voices.kansascity.com/entries/payday-loan-defenders-resort-intimidation/#storylink=cpy
…and desperate enough to fall prey to these Shylocks. If you don’t have ready access to credit and your car breaks down, or your kid breaks an arm, or any other unforeseen emergency I guess they can count or Ray, or Amanda or George for a little Christian compassion. They won’t loan you any money but they’ll feel real bad for you…
Ray Cyst
1 year, 1 month agoWhen the rates are capped at 36%, the Shylocks will disappear and there will still be no place for the people you describe to get money. We’ll see if this law makes it better. And Mark, what is your solution?
Ray Cyst
1 year, 1 month agoBorrowing $293 (the average payday loan) for two weeks at an effective rate of 431% (average) yeilds a profit of $43. At the capped rate, it is less than %5. This would include all fees - all costs. Who is gonna make a high risk loan of almost $300 for $4 profit?
Michael Morales
1 year, 1 month agoMaybe it was all the business owners who do not want to see Minimum wage increased. That effects there profit margin just as much as payday lenders. For everyone who bashes payday go give someone 300 dollars who has never paid anyone before and is in such a bad place there kids might not eat. Over 40% of those loans never pay back. If you want a 36% rate cap put people in Jail if they do not pay there bills!