FindingNamo said: "There are payday loan places that prey on people in Middlebury VERMONT. I'm not saying that means anything about anybody who is in power in VERMONT or has been for a long time or anything."
Namo, you're the king of snark. i bow down to you in that regard, but that^ is just silly. I believe that Vermont prohibits payday loans and they've taken some pretty swift action against out-of-state payday lenders that have used loopholes to continue business in the state. Wasserman Schultz should absolutely be condemned for her actions this week. I posted the story about her support of Payday-Lender friendly legislation not because I think Hillary has to take responsibility for DWS's actions, but because it's a perfect example of the very real reasons that many of Bernie's supporters are deeply cynical about the intentions and loyalties of the Democratic establishment. When I see a story like this, I 'get' that cynicism even if I don't share it in its entirety. As head of the DNC it's pretty hard to argue that Schultz isn't one of the most prominent and influential members of that establishment.
As for Sanders, please correct me if I'm wrong on this, but I believe he introduced legislation or proposed amendments to existing legislation in 2004 and again in 2010 to more strongly regulate the predatory practices of payday lenders and check cashing services. I know that he spoke out about these issues many times over the past 15-20 years, sometimes invoking Elizabeth Warren's name before she was a media darling or even considering a Senate run.
And just last year he made a pretty bold proposal that could help save the US Postal Service and give the working poor greater access to banking: to turn post offices into banks that offered savings accounts and that cashed checks. And before you say that's yet another radical pie-in-the-sky dream from Bernie, as The Atlantic points out, postal banking is common throughout Europe and Asia and has also been proposed by some respected economists and legal scholars... (I know formatting kinda sucks on here, so for clarity, everything posted below this chorus line is from The Atlantic article)
It’s something Sanders alluded to in a 2014 Wall Street Journal op-ed, and it’s not even the craziest idea proposed to save the USPS—a report last year explored the implications of turning post offices into hubs for 3-D printing.
In fact, Sanders’s idea is quite sensible. “Postal banking”—which just means that post offices run savings accounts, cash checks, and perform other basic financial services—is common in most of Asia and Europe, and only about 7 percent of the world’s national postal systems don’t offer some bank-like services. Postal banking is a really good way to reach people who haven’t had access to standard savings accounts. One estimate figures that more than 1 billion people have used post offices for making deposits.
The reason why this would be so useful in the U.S. is that somewhere between 20 and 40 percent of the population has to rely on check-cashing or payday-lending services, which in some places charge usurious rates that send people into spirals of recurring debt. Mehrsa Baradaran, a professor at the University of Georgia School of Law and the author of How the Other Half Banks, touched on the promise of postal banking in a book excerpt published in The Atlanticlast week...
"The basic idea of modern postal banking is a public bank offering a wide range of transaction services, including financial transactions, remittance, savings accounts, and small lending. These institutions would remain affordable because of economies of scale and because of the existing postal infrastructure in the U.S. Plus, in the absence of shareholders, they would not be driven to seek profits and could sell services at cost."
Updated On: 3/3/16 at 11:45 AM
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