Molly Ivins February 25

AUSTIN, TEXAS — In an effort to toughen up my bleeding heart and get more in tune with the Age of Bill Gates, I've been trying to think of loan sharks as part of the evolutionary process.

In the old days when I was an unrepentant compassionate liberal, I used to abhor shylocking, and I supported all those efforts to cap interest rates, or at least get disclosure laws on the books so people would know they were signing up to pay 200 and 300 percent interest. I quoted the Bible on the subject and wrote many a story about the crushing effects of cruel, greedy loan sharks on the lives of working people who struggle to meet their monthly bills.

But now loan sharks are respectable; in fact, they're among the most distinguished names in American banking. If you want to know about shylocking, naturally you go to an expert, such as Elmore Leonard's Chili Palmer, who was associated with a certain notorious organized monetary interest group.

In Leonard's new book, "Be Cool," a cop asks Chili, "And usury isn't breaking the law?"

"That was later, in Miami Beach. I was, you might say, a loan shark," explains Chili. "But as far as it being illegal, I always saw it as a gray area, open to question. I was never booked for it and nobody ever brought a complaint."

Of course, Chili was in the habit of kneecapping anyone who complained about his business practices, which I think we can agree is taking things too far.

On the other hand, figure it this way: Anyone dumb enough to sign up with a loan shark deserves to die; it will improve the gene pool if we get rid of people that dumb. Kind of like the time there was a brief fad among teen-agers of lying down in the middle of highways — it's hard to work up a lot of sympathy for what happened.

Not that I am suggesting that the major banks that now own many of the usurious payday loan companies are actually killing people — heavens, no. I mean, defaulters are not actually killed. It's just that some of them wind up homeless, and there you are — street people have such high disease rates. (And disease, when you think about it, is part of the evolutionary process, too.)

Or to quote another expert, sociologist C.

Wright Mills, "Stealing, if you do not already have money, is a perilous matter." The corollary to that profound insight is that if you already have money, stealing is pretty easy. You just give a lot in campaign donations, and the politicians change the law to make your theft legal. Presto, easy as pie. And that, beloved readers, is just what is happening.

Here's how the payday loans work: You need money, but payday is a week or two away. You write a check dated for your payday and give it to a check-cashing outfit. You get your money, less a fee. In two weeks, the check casher cashes your check or lets you pay another fee to renew the loan for another two weeks. Voila, as we say in Lubbock: triple-digit-interest loans.

Now, notice that the reason these check-cashing outfits sprang up in the first place is because banks held paychecks for several days, and if you live from paycheck to paycheck, you need the money right away. And bank fees are so high, it's not worth it to have a low- balance checking account. Banks will no longer cash a paycheck if you don't have an account with them (ital) even when the check is drawn on that bank. (unital)

However, our friends in banking naturally noticed the extraordinary profits made by these payday loan companies, and you know they were not going to miss out — they started buying up the payday loan companies for themselves. So it's now big banks underwriting the lobbying efforts to legalize payday loans in 18 states.

An Associated Press report by John Hendren quotes state Sen. Steve Cohen of Tennessee: "They hired a Noah's Ark of lobbyists [to legalize payday loans]. They hired a black lobbyist to get black votes. If we'd had a transsexual, they would have hired a transsexual lobbyist."

And of course your up-front lobbying is backed up by those campaign contributions in both soft money and hard.

Mills also observed: "Organized crime in the underworld raises to an extreme the individualistic philosophy of predatory success, the indifference to public weal, the fetish of the profit motive and of the laissez faire state." So here's the Mafia with major banks starting to muscle in on the loan sharking trade. What's the mob to do?

Those folks could use their traditional methods. But from personal observation, I'd say it would be more effective if they just hired some lobbyists and started making those campaign contributions.

Molly Ivins is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. To find out more about Molly Ivins and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.

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