Still sick of payday lenders charging 400% interest on their never-ending cycles of debt? Did you know that the Military Lending Act caps all payday and car title loans at 36% for active duty soldiers? Well, the Veterans and Consumers Fair Credit Act (I can find no bill numbers at this writing) would expand this and other protections to all Americans. The bill would also let state laws stand if they offer stronger protections than the bill does. Hence Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect working families from predatory lenders by passing the Veterans and Consumers Fair Credit Act. And the payday loan "industry" won't even be able to complain about being forced to "figure out" how to comply with the law, because they've already been offering loans to active duty soldiers under these rules! Oh, they'll cry a river anyway about market disruption, but to be frank, any "market" that relies on trapping working families in a cycle of skyrocketing debt demands disruption, if not obliteration.
Meanwhile, in the wake of the news that the 2017 tax bill's "opportunity zones" have delivered taxpayer money to far too many uber-wealthy developers who are not actually using it to boost depressed neighborhoods, CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to end these "opportunity zones" and thus close off at least one avenue through which the wealthy get handouts. Actually, there's another news hook: our Treasury Secretary, Steve "the Foreclosure King" Mnuchin, apparently intervened personally so his buddy Michael Milken (who once did two years' jail time for insider trading and was apparently the inspiration for Wall Street's Gordon Gekko) could get a windfall from an "opportunity zone." "Opportunity zones" supposedly give out tax breaks to developers who help uplift poorer areas, but in practice they just deliver more of your hard-earned taxpayer money to the already-rich who are more likely to gentrify areas than they are to create real jobs and livelihoods. "Creating wealth" in the form of higher real estate prices is fool's gold -- and too often the fools get all the gold.
Finally, Win Without War helps you tell your Senators to protect our immigrant soldiers from deportation. If you're looking for a good-guy litmus test to determine who gets to come here and stay here, volunteering to give up your life for your country is a real good place to start. And if you're annoyed that we don't have enough volunteers in our Army to keep it, ah, home-grown, you may want to wonder if that's because of all the stupid wars we fight! Surely we don't want a country where we throw out active-duty soldiers because of their immigration status but allow folks with equally-rickety immigration status continue to work for dung pellets on our President's vineyards, because that's the kind of country he's bringing us -- a world full of flamboyant nativism, but also a world no less full of undocumented immigrants. Why, you have to wonder if that's the whole idea. (Full disclosure: you do not actually have to wonder. It is the whole idea. You can't keep people in a state of rage if you don't keep the objects of their rage around.)
Comments