Payday Loan song

To put this topic in perspective, think of the terrible old banker, Mr. Potter, featured in the Christmas classic, "It’s a Wonderful Life." Mr. Potter drove a very hard bargain, but he wanted customers to actually pay off their loans.  Keep in mind that Mr. Potter was lending out money at about 2%. If Mr. Potter could have charge as much as many credit card companies, he would want to stretch out his repayment plans. And if he could charge 500%, he might not actually ever want his loans to be repaid. Welcome to the world of payday lending. During the day I work as a consumer lawyer at the Simon Law Firm in St. Louis, Missouri. My firm has filed several class actions again payday lenders based on their outrageous lending practices--on many occasions they systematically ignore the weak state laws that ostensibly regulate their conduct.   At my firm, we've met undeniable facts demonstrating that payday lenders make most of their money from people they would term "repeat customers," but these people should more accurately be referred to as people who are trapped in high interest loans or 400% or even 500% interest.

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Neo-Jesus according to Rush Limbaugh

Lawrence O'Donnell put Limbaugh in his  place after Limbaugh attempted to rewrite the Bible. Limbaugh's outburst was this: Those on the political left mangle the words of Jesus Christ. They improperly claim that Jesus was a liberal/socialist who would approve of tax increases on the rich. This is incorrect, says Rush. Jesus would not "take" taxes from the rich: At 5:30, O'Donnell gives Rush a homework assignment:  Find a bible passage where we find Jesus "sympathizing with rich people for having paid too much tax or having been too generous, or having been forced by anyone, by the state, by Caesar, by anyone . . . forced to be too generous. "

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Chris Hedges: Kick the modern money-changers out of the temple

Chris Hedges had some sharp words for the modern day money-changers last Friday, during his speech in Union Square, New York City, during a protest outside a branch of the Bank of America:

The bankers and hedge fund managers, the corporate and governmental elites, are the modern version of the misguided Israelites who prostrated themselves before the golden calf. The sparkle of wealth glitters before them, spurring them faster and faster on the treadmill towards destruction. And they seek to make us worship at their altar. As long as greed inspires us, greed keeps us complicit and silent. But once we defy the religion of unfettered capitalism, once we demand that a society serve the needs of citizens and the ecosystem that sustains life, rather than the needs of the marketplace, once we learn to speak with a new humility and live with a new simplicity, once we love our neighbor as ourself, we break our chains and make hope visible.

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Creating Doubt in Science

There is currently a strong suite of Discovery Institute bills running through state legislatures to allow "alternative theories" to be taught in science classes. See list here: Antievolution Legislation Scorecard. There is not a direct link back to the Discovery Institute, but it is their wording, seen before and passed in places like Texas and Louisiana and Tennessee. From a legal standpoint, the bills look harmless, closely resembling intellectual freedom policies. But the point is clearly to sow confusion about the difference between science and just making things up, especially in regard to evolution and climate science. Hemant Mehta suggests that it would only be fair to show this video in churches where the churches put their books into science classes.

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