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GOP taking kickbacks from loan sharks

Submitted by scharrison on Fri, 05/27/2011 - 12:31pm

Pay-to-play politics at its worst:

Interest rates for some small consumer loans would more than double under a bill that cleared the House banking committee Thursday — despite opposition from consumer groups and top commanders of the state’s military bases.

Colonel Sicinski just learned a harsh lesson that many advocates in NC have already learned: If you think you've won a victory changing the hearts and minds of Legislators, you're probably mistaken.

Backers of the bill say small lenders haven’t been able to raise their rates or fees since 1983, meaning they’re working on slim profit margins.

“We’ve been studying this for years. It’s time we provide them with relief,” said Rep. Harold Brubaker, an Asheboro Republican and influential chairman of the Appropriations Committee.

That argument might have carried some weight, if it weren't for this:

“The industry gave its money to the speaker’s team and now the industry’s legislation is moving forward, despite obvious problems. It’s too reminiscent of the pay-to-play system that got Speaker Jim Black in trouble.”

Hall detailed $140,370 in campaign donations from lenders that make small installment loans and their PACS that went to Republican candidates or campaign funds during the 2010 election cycle.

If they can afford to throw that much money at politicians, methinks the word "slim", as it's used to describe profit margins, is more along the lines of calling a fat guy "Tiny" than it is an actual summary of P&L ledgers.

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Comments

NCGOP! The Party Of The Loan Sharks

Submitted by Connie Mack Berry Jr on Fri, 05/27/2011 - 12:54pm.

No doubt Tony Soprano is running the GOP in North Carolina....

A little story to pass the time

Submitted by scharrison on Fri, 05/27/2011 - 1:42pm.

One night while I was stationed at Ft. Bragg, I was pulling 24hr Charge of Quarters (CQ) duty at my Battalion's barracks. For those of us who had wife/kids/house off-post, this was an especially tiresome task.

A few minutes before midnight, a battered and bloody Spec 4 literally crawled into my ground-floor office, spinning me a yarn about falling down the stairs and begging for an ambulance, which I was already in the process of calling.

As soon as I hung up the phone, it rang, and my Battalion Commander (light Colonel) instructed me to "Don't bother the MP's over this, I'll handle it." He also instructed me to "Leave it alone", which of course I ignored. Not only was I pissed off that a trooper in my charge could have been killed, the fact that the BC knew about this before I did led me to presume (rightly) that there was a hell of a lot more to the story than I was being told.

So, I set off on a little fact-finding mission. A handful of barracks rats (who didn't know me very well) thought the incident was funny, until they found themselves on hands and knees cleaning up the blood trail. When I finally caught up with the likely Specialist-tosser, the information stream began to flow. Only a little bit more cleanup was needed after that encounter.

So here's what I gleaned: The Spec 4 bought himself a car at a local lot, financed through a local shark finance company. He got behind on his payments, started hiding the car from repo men, bill collectors harassed anybody they could find (including a light Colonel, I might add), the Spec 4 borrowed money from several soon-to-be ex-friends to keep the bill collectors happy, and when he couldn't pay his fellow soldiers back, one of them tried to see if the Specialist could fly. He couldn't.

The bottom line: Stories like this are legion. I've seen troops go AWOL to escape these bad loans (the Spec 4 did three weeks later), I've seen marriages that withstood multiple deployments come apart under the stress of bad loans, and I've seen West Point officers lose their careers over them.

They don't provide a service, they provide a nightmare.