Voter beware. A shamelessly duplicitous initiative is being pushed by a grossly dishonest ad campaign aimed at getting you to vote for Proposition 200.

Don’t. The only reasonable vote on Prop. 200 is “no.”

This initiative will not reform payday lending, despite its deceitful title.

It will only allow the lenders to keep preying on Arizona’s poor – permanently charging usurious interest rates such as 391 percent on 14-day loans.

By law, two years from now, payday lenders must ratchet back to a maximum 36 percent interest rate – the most that any other commercial lender in Arizona is allowed to charge.

But that would cut into the industry’s extremely lucrative profits. So it created Prop. 200 – to eradicate the 2010 deadline for lower interest rates while claiming “reforms.”

The industry is desperate.

• It has spent more than $14.3 million on a powerful propaganda program to sell this initiative. Now it’s asking fellow payday lenders nationwide to contribute even more to the campaigns here and in Ohio, lest this despicable industry be slowed.

• In exploiting its own negative image, the industry is running TV ads lambasting predatory lenders and urging you to “END RIP-OFFS,” “end unfair practices” and “bring payday lenders under control.”

Few viewers would suspect the industry itself is running these ads in an effort to get people to vote “yes” when they mean “no.”

• In another shameless ploy, the Prop. 200 campaign uses robo-calls with former Arizona Attorney General Jack LaSota speaking. Never does he mention that he’s an industry lobbyist who has been paid $10,000 since mid-August by the campaign.

• And with unbelievable gall, the Yes on 200 campaign even paid through Google AdWords to link the name “Debbie McCune Davis” to its Web site, creating the impression she’s on their side.

An outraged state Sen. McCune Davis – chairwoman of the No on 200 campaign – said she knew the industry was dishonest, but this “really crosses the line.”

For this industry, $14 million here and $10,000 there is just chump change. It’s got plenty of money to burn on fraudulent advertising, robo-calls and lobbyists.

Tragically, that money comes from people who hit upon hard times and turned to a convenient neighborhood payday lender for help.

Many become trapped in a spiral of ever-mounting debt on overdue payments, then borrow from another payday lender to pay off the original one.

No Arizonan should support preying on the poor. Vote “no” on Prop. 200. If they can’t lend at 36 percent interest, they should leave our state.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 31st, 2008 at 12:00 am and is filed under Elections, Opinion. Tags for this post: Arizona, Editorials, Elections-Propositions, Elections-Propositions-Arizona, Opinion-Politics, Opinion-Politics-Editorials, page-b01, Politics, Propositions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.