The payday lenders must be scared. As if circulating their fake 18%-rate-cap petition and hiring out-of-state mercenaries to “block” South Dakota petition circulators isn’t enough, Lisa Furlong’s payday-lender front group is now circulating a very slick pamphlet urging people to “decline to sign” the real 36%-rate-cap petition.
The payday lenders have nothing to lose, so they make stuff up. Let’s count the insults, spin lines, and outright lies
- The flyer calls petition sponsor Steve Hildebrand “crazy.”
- I Google keywords from the “U.S. Bank” quote the flyer attributes to Hildebrand and get zero results. The flyer offers no source for the quote. I challenge Lisa Furlong to provide the original source of the quote or invite Hildebrand to come on line and confirm that he said it.
- The flyer tries to muddy the rhetorical waters by co-opting the word “phony,” which is a legitimate charge against the fake 18% rate cap and the best way for us to distinguish the real 36% measure from its payday-lending industry decoy. There is no way in which the 36% rate cap is “phony.” Hildebrand’s proposed initiated measure would cap interest rates and fees on payday loans at an annual rate of 36%. Period. No tricks, no exceptions, no applying that cap only to non-existent oral payday storefront loans the way the fake 18% petition does.
- The flyer claims the 36% will make it “impossible” for “many small businesses” in South Dakota to keep their doors open.
- If those small businesses are loan sharks, we should be as glad to see them close as we are to see other laws shut down whorehouses.
- The payday lenders who can’t survive charging people less than 36% are small businesses the same way McDonald’s is a small business. Payday lender CEOs Chuck Brennan and Rod Aycox are not small businessmen.
- The fakers opposing the real 36% rate cap have no respect for real South Dakota small businesses, as demonstrated by their efforts to sabotage Steve Hildebrand’s independent coffeeshop in Sioux Falls this summer.
- “Impossible” is an exaggeration: in response to the failed lawsuit payday lenders filed in June to delay the real 36%-rate-cap petition, Judge Kathleen Trandahl said the evidence the payday lenders submitted to back their claim that payday lenders have found it impossible to do business under rate caps in other states was “inconclusive or incomplete.” In other words, this pamphlet repeats a claim that the payday lenders know is false.
- The flyer claims that the real 36% rate cap is “crafted by big banks and out-of-state interests” while the fake 18% rate cap is “South Dakota’s own” ballot measure. The flyer offers no evidence that big banks or any other out-of-staters are the prime movers or even secondary backers of the 36% rate cap. Meanwhile, the fake 18% rate cap drive has relied on out-of-state petition mercenaries, out-of-state fake protesters, an out-of-state payday lending company to file suit against the state to block the 36% rate cap petition, and an out-of-state CEO flying from Atlanta to Sioux Falls to personally pressure South Dakotan Steve Hildebrand to drop his petition drive.
- The flyer claims that “The 18% petition places a stricter cap”—false! The fake 18% rate cap applies only to oral agreements and can be undone simply by the payday lender requiring a borrower to sign a piece of paper to get the loan… which is how they do business nowadays anyway, meaning the 18% cap does not impose any cap on current business practices. A cap that does nothing cannot be called “strict.”
- The flyer claims that “The 18% petition places a stricter cap on interest rates by more than double other petitions being circulated”—false! Assuming that “more than double” refers to the “strictness” and not the “interest rate,” and assuming Lisa Furlong’s fakers could make an accurate statement without suffering an allergic reaction, the best claim this sentence could make is, “The 18% petition calls for an interest rate cap that is exactly half that called for by the one other petition in circulation that addresses this issue.” There is no petition calling for any interest cap higher than 36% that would justify the flyer’s use of the phrase “more than double.” That claim is nonsense.
Of course, Furlong’s fakers aren’t worried about making sense. They just want their hired thugs to augment their harassment of South Dakotans circulating and signing the real 36% rate cap petition by throwing glossy flyers in their faces.
South Dakotans, the real 36% rate cap is about more than shutting down loan sharks. The payday lenders are making it about standing up against lies, thuggery, and sabotage of South Dakota’s ballot initiative process. Stand against that deception and abuse. Stand for South Dakota’s citizens and truth in elections. Go to Josiah’s Coffeehouse in Sioux Falls and sign the 36% petition. If you’re not in Sioux Falls, contact Reynold Nesiba at Cap The Rate SD to find out where you can find a 36% petition to sign and to circulate among your friends and neighbors.
And when the payday lenders’ thugs hand you their fake flyers, smile and ask for a handful to take to your friends. The more you take off their hands, the fewer they’ll have to hand to their next marks. Or just whip out your camera and see how many pictures you can take before those fakers run away.
This sort of underhanded corruption is just another day in paradise here in the Sunshine State. We have been handed this same kind of grift from the attorney general’s office for several election cycles when they “mansplain” the drift of the amendments we are to vote on. The same author for the furlong paper, which by the way means 1/8 of a mile in racing, must be one in the same that does the election drivel. I am thinking by the time we reach the clubhouse turn, we honest voters will run up against yet another handicap in this race.
The black, white and red color scheme is pretty typical of the work done for the South Dakota Mining Association in their campaigns opposing the mining initiatives. It’s been copied by several “no” groups over the years. It was probably done by the same graphic art house taking advantage of whatever social-psychological research has been done over the years.
One way you can distinguish a group of ordinary citizens from an elitist special interest group is they don’t use this sort of cookie cutter, professionally done approach to educating the public on the issue. Citizens groups usually try to present more information, less off-putting art. As a result their flyers tend to be more cluttered, less dramatic. Anytime you see this black, white and red scheme, you know it’s from a special interest entity.
Your SOS and AG don’t want to interfere in the election process by fact checking and investigating specious statements,such as are on the 18% fauxknee rate cap petition? I have noticed how some false statements perpetrated by right wing nuts are echoed by right wingnut pols such as the claim libs and the ACLU have driven gawd out of public schools. No matter how many times this gets debunked.wingnuts and their compadres state it as fact. Obama isn’t taking anyone’s guns,either.
This is not the most devious thing the robber barons will roll out. I warned you they would probably have more things up their cuffed sleeves but I did not think they would resort to their constitutional right to hand out literature. When you write it on fancy papers like that people tend to believe it. I do not think my good friend Bill is behind this advertising as slick as it may be.
I do like the Sylvan Lake picture on the 18% brochure. It is subtle and rings unconsciously in the minds of all west river South Dakotans.
grudz u may be worse than the bad guys, but regardless…
if AG Jackley doesn’t protect SD consumers from these people, I either do not understand his role, or he is as bad as these criminals AND they are corrupting a state election.
You just fear my truths, Ms. leslie.
your truth=parsed prejudice
btw, heard Darla Drew Lerdal, RC Alderwoman & GEARUP Communications dir. yesterday on the radio speaking about this.
18% is half of 36%. Dr. Math would agree.
Lighten up Cory. I learned on DWC that Mrs Furlong is just a mom who decided one day to draft enormously complex bill language so single moms like herself would have access to credit. ;-)
The humorous part to me in this flyer is they say Big Banks wrote our 36% measure. The big bank associations oppose it. To my knowledge we’ve not received any out of state money, or money from any group for our 36% rate cap drive. It truly is just an in-state grass roots effort.
Please if you are reading this, get a petition and get family and friends to sign and send it in as soon as possible.
How much are the payday lenders paying her to be the front for them?
I wonder if Mrs. Furlong is the mastermind behind all the shenanigans going on in Rapid City where petition slingers are brawling with each other in public and turning voters everywhere off to the insanity of initiated measures. She is likely a pernicious genius.
At the end of the day, if the right one passes and the wrong one does not, we will be reassured that the common person has a brain that works and this process is good. Not sure that the Republicans will notice since they prefer to be a republic where a few make the decisions for the rest. They assume that they can only do what is right in their eyes if no one knows what they are doing because they think the common person can be deceived to easily against good laws.
If neither one passes we will be reassured that the common person has a brain.
If either or both pass, it shows that initiated measure process is an abhorrent blight on the processes of good government and our populace’s limited brain power. The welfare, pay-day loan, video lottery crowd, who are the meat and bone of the voting block of the democrat party, will swell in rank.
Black white and red—good warning, Don! I’ll try to avoid that on our referendum flyers. I’m thinking all we’ll need is a short slogan: “No on 18, 19, and 20!”
No limit to their shamefulness.
It seems like the phrase “it’s just business” came into more common use in the Reagan years. But just as when Reagan fired the very hard-working air traffic controllers, “just business” does real harm to real people.
“Just business” is an attempt to excuse cruelty to more vulnerable people. For the payday lenders, causing hardship, stress and suffering to people who are vulnerable, is “just business”.
“Just business” is not enough. Businesses do not have to be cruel to be successful.
Those air traffic controllers decided to unionize and then walk off the job, Ms. Geelsdottir. I’m sure you were too young back then to remember the details. Mr. Regan should have had them shot, not just fired.
By early August a strike seemed imminent, putting Mr. Reagan, who had been in office less than seven months, in a difficult spot. During the 1980 campaign, as part of his effort to win union support, Mr. Reagan had met with Mr. Poli. Not long after, the controllers, frustrated with the F.A.A. under President Jimmy Carter, made a surprise move: They endorsed Mr. Reagan.
“You can rest assured,” Mr. Reagan, a former president of the Screen Actors Guild, wrote to Mr. Poli just days before the election, “that if I am elected president, I will take whatever steps are necessary to provide our air traffic controllers with the most modern equipment available and to adjust staff levels and work days so that they are commensurate with achieving a maximum degree of public safety.”
The next year, on the day of the strike, President Reagan gave the controllers an ultimatum: Return to work within 48 hours or be fired. The controllers doubted his resolve.
Grudz,you are so far wrong on your analysis I don’t know where to begin correcting you. Uncle Ronnie made the Patco union many promises he had no intentions of keeping.
When you have a job and you walk off it, you should be fired immediately. Goes for air traffic controller, hog butchers in Des Moines, or teachers in the great state of South Dakota.
Fired.
Good on ya Grud! You and your friends who see employees as the chattel that makes a right to work state seem like a good thing have made South Dakota one of the worst states to make a living according to Forbes Magazine.
While you and your boys in Pierre spend taxpayer money on trying to solve the workforce development and teacher challenge with one arm tied behind your back and one eye closed, Forbes hits you with a 2X4 and says we suck when it comes to making a living.
http://www.forbes.com/pictures/fjle45lmdf/no-8-worst-state-to-make/
Grudz,when your Prez deliberately lies to you,don’t you have the right to redress?
Right to Petition for Redress of Grievances Rooted in the Magna Carta
Magna CartaThe Petition Clause finds its roots in Article 61 of the Magna Carta (1215). Article 61 provided for the presentation of grievances to the king, and required the king to redress grievances within 40 days or risk rebellion. The Magna Carta’s Right to Petition includes, if the right is abridged, the right to wage whatever war against government needed to get just redress.[3]
The Magna Carta’s Petition Right included a Right to Rebel in the event that the Right to Petition were abridged. What happened to such a crucial right in the almost 800 years since?
– See more at: http://www.shestokas.com/constitution-educational-series/us-constitutions-first-amendment-right-to-petition-for-redress-of-grievances/#sthash.YbekUrcG.dpuf
Also read your 1st amendment to the end.
Leslie, what did Darla Drew Lerdal have to say about the rate caps?
sorry cory, that should have been posted in the gearup thread. couldn’t find the interview on the on the net yesterday
Grudz,
Air traffic controllers were putting in too much overtime for a job that requires intense concentration. There were accidents and many near misses. No controllers were making it to retirement.
Reagan, who sold out his SAG membership in contract negotiations and the next day sold land to Universal for 10 times its value, should be pictured in the dictionary as the illustration of the word “corruption”.
Let me know if it pops up!
There were 2 of them circulating the 18% petition yesterday at BJ’s in New Underwood. They got mad at me because I was stopping people from signing by telling them the TRUTH about the fake rate cap. They went so far as to tell people that the 36% one was fake. If they’re there again today, I’m gonna get pictures, video and try to get their names.
I forgot to mention when I refused to sign (and after I let it be known that I knew all about their fake rate cap), the girl said “Well, will you at least sign the Marsey’s Law petition because that’s an actual good law”. Which goes to show that they know exactly what they’re doing.