Do you want to know why Debbie Wasserman Schultz is controversial? Read this.
“First, a quick recap: Rep. Wasserman Schultz (D-FL), chair of the Democratic National Committee, also has been an advocate for the payday loan industry. The website Think Progress even described her as the “top Democratic ally” of “predatory payday lenders.” You know — the bottom-feeding bloodsuckers of the working poor. Yes, them.
“Low-income workers living from paycheck to paycheck, especially women and minorities, are the payday lenders’ prime targets — easy pickings because they’re often desperate. Twelve million Americans reportedly borrow nearly $50 billion a year through payday loans, at rates that can soar above 300 percent, sometimes even beyond 500 percent. Bethany McLean at The Atlantic recently reported that the government’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) studied millions of payday loans and found that “67 percent went to borrowers with seven or more transactions a year and that a majority of those borrowers paid more in fees than the amount of their initial loan.”
“Yet when the CFPB was drawing up new rules to make it harder for payday predators to feast on the poor, Rep. Wasserman Schultz co-sponsored a bill to delay those new rules by two years. How, you ask, could the head of the party’s national committee embrace such an appalling exploitation of working people?
“Just follow the money. Last year, the payday loan industry spent $3.5 million lobbying; and as we wrote two weeks ago, in Wasserman Schultz’s home state, since 2009, payday lenders have bought protection from Democrats and Republicans alike by contributing $2.5 million or so to candidates from both parties, including her. That’s how “Representative” Wasserman Schultz, among others, wound up representing the predators instead of the poor.”
Then there is Connecticut’s Governor Dannell Malloy. His first allegiance is to the richest citizens of his state.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
She also played a key role in rigging the primary for HRC. Like Hillary, DWS is a pathological liar and has no problems cheating her way to any victory.
Support Tim Canova who is running to replace her in Congress: https://timcanova.com/
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It sometimes worries me that such a large portion of the US economy seems to rely on ripping poor people off.
I think that indicates a certain lack of vitality and creativity in the private sector. They’re not adding any value or inventing anything- they’re just churning interest.
There are SO MANY of these scams, and they’re legal! The newer rip-off is “title loans”. They attach a rip-off loan to the only collateral poor people own, which is their used car.
They can’t get to work without the car so they have to pay the loan. The cars have no real value as collateral, other than to the person who needs the car to get to work so it’s just coercion- it’s a threat.
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The fundamental tenet of Capitalism is profit over people.
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Yes. Which is why the competitive capitalistic “choice” school game makes no sense. Competition means winners and LOSERS.
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So much production has been shipped overseas that one of the few growth areas left is the extraction of wealth from people and from the common wealth.
For-profit colleges, online “schools,” vouchers, charters are all, part of the parasitism of our current incarnation of capitalism, to say nothing of payday loans, for-profit hospice, big pharma, etc…
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It is all part of cannibalism syndrome. When businesses can’t come up with anything new or original, they figure out a way to feed off what is already there. The “sharing economy” is a product of this thinking as are all the hedge funds which, of course, promote privatization of anything from which they can extract profit.
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Cost cutting can be done by a know-nothing hack. Ripping off the poor, by giving them less, is what a true bottom feeder does.
Doesn’t Bill Gates’ investment, “20% ROI”, in Bridge International Academies, making money on the backs of the poor, giving them nothing “different than what the public system offers… by scaling it (to) large numbers of students, at least 50 per class” make him a scum bag, like his fellow investor, Mark Z-berg?
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Payday lenders, title loans. And for the children of the middle class, college loans, which leave them many thousands of dollars in debt and, many of them, unable to pay for decent housing (because there aren’t enough well-paying jobs), so they wind up living at home after college.
All of these, and more, are rip-offs. We haven’t come all that far from the days of the company housing and company stores of the coal miners. It’s just different forms now.
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Good one Zorba!
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With the concentration of wealth, the company towns have become international. As one nation’s example, the median American family income is in decline. and families are ripped off by corporations, on every front, with little or no recourse.
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The change of the party animal from donkey to shark is long overdue.
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The senseless eating frenzy of piranha seems more descriptive.
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Both parties are corrupt to their eyeballs because he oligarchs pay to put them into office, but nothing compares to the GOP who gave us Trump and Palin. ”
“In the months ahead Republicans will claim that there are equivalent scandals on the Democratic side, but nothing they’ve managed to come up with rises remotely to the level of even one of the many Trump scams in the news. They’ll also claim that Mr. Trump doesn’t reflect their party’s values. But the truth is that in a very deep sense he does. And that’s why they couldn’t stop him.”
From Today’s NY Times Krugman column, says it all. More below!
“How did someone who looks so much like a cheap con man bulldoze right through the G.O.P. nomination process?
I mean, it’s not as if any of this dirt was deeply hidden. The Trump U. story was out there long before it became the big deal it is today. It took some real reporting to flesh out the details of Mr. Trump’s other business practices, but we’re talking about ordinary if skillful journalistic legwork, not revelations from Deep Throat.
So why didn’t any of Mr. Trump’s primary opponents manage to make an issue of his sleazy business career? Were they just incompetent, or is there something structural about the modern Republican Party that makes it unable to confront grifters?
“The answer, I’d argue, is the latter.
“If your fundamental premise is that the profit motive is always good and government is the root of all evil, if you treat any suggestion that, say, some bankers misbehaved in the run-up to the financial crisis as proof that the speaker is anti-business if not a full-blown socialist, how can you condemn anyone’s business practices?
“Consider this: Even as the newspapers are filled with stories of defrauded students and stiffed contractors, Republicans in Congress are going all-out in efforts to repeal the so-called “fiduciary rule” for retirement advisers, a new rule requiring that they serve the interests of their clients, and not receive kickbacks for steering them into bad investments. Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House, has even made repealing that rule part of his “anti-poverty plan.” So the G.O.P. is in effect defending the right of the financial industry to mislead its customers, which makes it hard to attack the likes of Donald Trump.
“Rick Perlstein, who has documented the rise of modern conservatism in a series of eye-opening books, points out that there has always been a close association between the movement and the operations of snake-oil salesmen — people who use lists of campaign contributors, right-wing websites and so on to sell get-rich-quick schemes and miracle health cures.
“Sometimes the political link is direct: dire warnings about the coming depression/hyperinflation, from which you can only protect yourself by buying Ron Paul’s DVDs (the “Ron Paul curriculum”) or gold shares hawked by Glenn Beck. Sometimes it just seems to reflect a judgment on the part of the grifters that people who can be persuaded that President Obama is Muslim can also be persuaded that there are easy money-making opportunities the establishment doesn’t want you to know about.”
“There’s also a notable pattern of conservative political stars engaging in what is supposed to be activism, but looks a lot like personal enrichment. For example, Sarah Palin’s SarahPAC gives only a few percent of what it raises on candidates, while spending heavily on consultants and Mrs. Palin’s travels.”
“Finally, the con job that lies at the heart of so much Republican politics makes it hard to go after other, more commercial cons. It’s interesting to note that Marco Rubio actually did try to make Trump University an issue, but he did it too late, after he had already made himself a laughingstock with his broken-record routine. And here’s the thing: The groove Mr. Rubio got stuck in — innuendo that the president is deliberately weakening America — was a typical example of the political snake-oil the right sells along with free money and three-minute cures for high blood pressure.”
“The point is that Mr. Rubio was just as much a con artist as Mr. Trump – just not as good at it, which is why, under pressure, he kept repeating the same memorized words. So he, like all the G.O.P. contenders, didn’t have what it would have taken to make Mr. Trump’s grifting an issue. But at least so far it appears that Hillary Clinton and her allies won’t have the same problem.”
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Yes Susan but dismal Democrats empower Right Wing Republicans. The sight of working class Americans flocking to Trump because he has a more populist message than Clinton, is macabre but very real.
As Thomas Frank says all of Bill Clinton’s major accomplishments were Republican .
I have a few problems with Krugman . First he has a terrible TV persona.
He should stick to print.Never get in front of a Camera especially to debate. The sight of him going after Sanders economic plan after watching him for years pushing many of the same progressive ideas was a little disconcerting.
But yes everyone on the Republican Right is the same from Trump to Rubio… … The Reagan Welfare Queen is today’s Trump Mexican Rapist,.
Bernie Sanders is not the party outsider, he was the Democratic Party of FDR-Johnson . The party has been high jacked by the outsiders and the working class base is running away.
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Everything you say is both valid and true.
Krugman is a hack, but his column is on the nose, because never before has such mendacity been accepted.
I am a very cynical person, but when the speaker of the house,and the Senate Leader KNOW the extent of this man’s chicanery and lawlessness, when they know he is insane, and would be our representative in the world, no to mention this thin-skinned child with a finger on the red button…then SOMETHING HAS CHANGED.
Look, I read John Dean’s “Conservatives Without Conscience, ” http://www.peoplesworld.org/conservatives-without-conscience-an-insider-views-the-gop-s-ominous-politics/
which traces the roots of the movement, (and has a simply wonderful chapter on how Republicans can be hypocritical. ) I have the audio tape an dI LOVE IT!
BUT IT WAS WRITTEN YEARS AGO… and THIS is different. THIS is the culmination of years of shameless mendacity, of snake-oil salesmen running our legislature.
This is what happens when a public is so ignorant, and so busy, and so accustomed to lies, that they cannot parse the difference between political rhetoric, and the ramblings of a psychopath!
I have read Al Franken’s “Lies & the Lying Liars Who Tell Them.”
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/oct/11/highereducation.news1
I am not naive. I write at Oped News, where Robert Reich , Chirs Hedges and EVERYONE knows that the New World Order is upon us, and the Democratic party and the GOP have abandoned the people.
Krugman said it well!
Even, David Brooks, whom I cannot stand, has been waxing philosophical about the effects of such acceptance by the GOP of a really dangerous lunatic.
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Evidence- David Koch and Madelyn Albright on the Aspen Board, overseeing Gates-funded Aspen programs like “Senior Congressional Education Staff Network” and, only one US Senator voting against a privatizing Secretary of Education. And, mum’s the word, in the press about BIA’s 20% ROI for Pearson, Bill Gates, Mark Z-berg,….
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Sigh! So true… and I could dadd to the list and fill pages from a file I keep called “Charlatans and Liars!”
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Is this the same Krugman .I should have gotten the link before .
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Yup! Same one, and we have that unequal society lie even he could not have predicted…
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Diane : Read this Story last week on Moyers site. Are you just looking for us to go into a tirade about the “Rot at the heart of the Democratic party ” It is spelled CLINTON . The Donald has to be a ploy by corporate republicans to force us to vote for Clinton . Now that the Washington Post is done with the hatchet job on Sanders . Perhaps Bernstein can unravel the plot .
Further Michael Fiorillo , so true but they get that wealth first by extracting it off of the backs of foreign slave labor . Than off of schemes to defraud Americans. As Dean Baker says we now and for a while have had a hollowed out economy only capable of generating good growth and income due to market bubbles.When working Americans go into debt to expand consumption using paper assets as collateral in their minds . What Schiller and then Greenspan called “Irrational Exuberance .”
Which probably explains why Obama never went after Wall Street. Hoping for a new bubble to stimulate the economy.
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Joel,
If you watch closely, you will see that many of the articles I post were not published today or yesterday. When there is breaking news, I break it. Worthy articles don’t go bad after a day, like a fish. They remain worth reading months later.
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I was not commenting on the age of the article or did not mean to.
The comment really was about the dismal situation we we are in .I can find few progressive friends who can keep their breakfast down these days . Because of the choice we are being forced to make . Had I posted that article it would have been part of my laundry list for what what is wrong with the New Democratic Coalition . If I lived in Colorado I would probably take up a habit, I have not had in 35 years.
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I understand, Joel.
The message of this year’s election is: Organize.
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Thank you for calling attention to this predatory loan practice which sounds like legalized loan sharking.
I do have to give credit to Gov. Malloy of Connecticut for a humane and heroic act. Last winter, after 3 years of vetting by U.S. security agencies, a Syrian refugee family with small children was approved for settlement in Indiana. Their plane was en route to New York where they would change planes for Indiana when Indiana’s Governor ordered that no state agencies could provide temporary safety net services to this family. (This ban on state services later was ruled illegal and overturned.)
The volunteer agencies were stunned but sprung into action, calling national counterparts for a solution. That same day, Gov. Malloy stepped into the breach and welcomed the family to Connecticut, working together with governmental and volunteer organizations to put into place the arrangements it had taken Indiana volunteers many months to arrange. Those arrangements included finding and furnishing a household, finding jobs, accessing transportation, enrolling families in English classes if needed, signing up for medical and other services, and more.
Gov. Malloy’s leadership helped those arrangements happen for that family. He was a modern day “Good Samaritan” who set a good example for everyone.
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He publicly helped one family while screwing the rest of us. It’s all about Dannel. What a saint.
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I was there, Gandalf. It was 1968 …
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Cool!
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A big old shout out to ed-privatizing lover, Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown.
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It’s impossible to criticize the rot of the Democratic party and not look at their putative head – Candidate Clinton who they have overwhelmingly coronated. If the left won’t fix neoliberalism and its damages on society, the people will turn to a strongman to do it. Thus Donald Trump. .
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Yet once again:
A Major reason why I promoted Bernie Sanders.
AND
JUST MAYBE, his “army” will make its voice heard to overcome garbage such as the above.
BUT – We ALL must join that fight. To just complain to friends etc,, to preach to the choir, will NOT do it.
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Democrats Against Democracy, Self-Styled Progressives Against Progress (by
Jake Johnson)
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