Not surprising, given that their entire business preys on the poor, but this is sick (and illegal):
COLUMBUS – Petition circulators for the national payday lending lobby illegally paid homeless men to sign referendum petitions for its campaign to undermine Ohio’s new payday reform law and have routinely misled voters by insisting that the referendum would lower interest rates – not raise them.
Voters from around Ohio took part in a Tuesday news conference to expose the illegal payments and the false information being used by the petition circulators.
Two residents of a Butler County homeless shelter, CHOSEN, joined the news conference by phone and said petition circulators showed up at the shelter and paid more than a dozen residents $1 each to sign – a practice banned under Ohio law.
Charlie Schirmer and Connie Smithers said word spread quickly through the shelter that cash was being offered to those who signed.
“What is at stake here is nothing less than the integrity of the petition-gathering process,” said Tom Allio, who hosted the press conference and chairs the Ohio Coalition for Responsible Lending. “Referendum leaders have a moral and legal obligation to ensure that those who work for them are properly trained, fully transparent and truthful in all their representations to signers. In fact, they should make such a pledge today.”
The referendum is being financed by the national payday lobby, which hopes to continue charging 391 percent APR on two-week loans. A success at the ballot would undermine the state’s new payday lending reform law, which caps interest at 28 percent annually. The new law is scheduled to take effect September 1.
www.end391.org
Full release in the extended [click to continue…]
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Update: I guess the McCain camp is a bit worried about this because they pulled it from the campaign website calendar! Whoops.
The straight talking maverick is at it again. He’s skirting campaign finance laws he used to support and built his maverick appeal on. This time in Ohio. It’s a shell game, really. Though legislation limits individual contributions to $2,300, McCain and his rich friends have decided to skirt a law with his name on it by creating a financing structure in conjunction with the RNC.
Tim at Blogger Interrupted has a fundraising email nailing the McCain camp on this. They are asking couples to give $50,000. They are then telling people how to go about getting around campaign finance laws which should limit a couple to $4,600. You wanna talk about arrogance and hubris. This is taking a law that you got passed, a concept that you’ve campaigned on and staked your maverick reputation on, and completely distorting it and laughing at it. Here is what they say do:
For Individuals-The first $2,300 to JM 2008, the next $2,300 to the Compliance Fund, the next $10,000 to the Ohio Republican Party’s federal account, and the next $28,500 to the RNC.
It’s not the first time they’ve done this. Not at all. It’s been a campaign strategy in the general from word go it appears.
Elizabeth Jones at the WSJ reported on this back in April:
The idea is to tap donors for more than the $2,300 limit set by campaign finance laws. Under legislation pushed by McCain in his role as a senator from Arizona, an individual can donate a maximum of $2,300 to a presidential primary campaign and the same amount to the general election campaign…
The new structure allows up to $70,000 in individual contributions by channeling the money into different McCain-centric funds.
HuffPo wrote about it on April 21st
Crooks and Liars on May 8th
This “hybrid legal structure”, as campaign manager Rick Davis calls it, probably is legal under the letter (and not the spirit) of McCain-Feingold. What does appear in question is if a candidate can explicitly ask people to skirt the law in an event invitation. I think this needs to be looked at. It certainly needs to be known.
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