The Justice League Gets Two New Members – Well, Sort Of
By day they masquerade as mild-mannered journalists, but the Wall Street Journal’s and the Center for Public Integrity’s two-headed team of Michael Hudson and Jessica Silver-Greenberg, and the Denver Post’s Alicia Caldwell, might be better known as False Sanctimonious Man/Ostrich Girl and Copycat Girl respectively.
For Hudson and Silver-Greenberg, their bosses cannot find enough bad things to say about Elizabeth Warren, the new Assistant to the President and Special Advisor to the Secretary of the Treasury on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. And why not? For years these stout defenders of free-enterprise and free-market capitalism have turned a blind eye to the profane profits made by predatory lenders. Profits are profits, as long as they are legal (e.g. meet regulatory, or in this case, unregulated approval), and as long as you are non-Indian. Yep, I said it.
But something happened on the way to the reservation. In the article
“Debt Deception: Fights Over Tribal Payday Lenders Show Challenges of Financial Reform”, Hudson and Silver-Greenberg put their super powers on display. Yes, this two-headed super-hero feigned outrage that someone might make money off pay-day lending. False Sanctimonious Man’s outrage was reserved for pay-day lenders who were affiliating with Indian tribes, while Ostrich Girl continues to bury her head in the sand and ignore the fact that for years pay-day lenders have set up shop at the edge of Indian reservations and preyed on Indian Country’s poor and un-banked citizens. And not to be outdone, Alicia Caldwell from the Denver Post, aka Copycat Girl, just could not help herself and along with her editors, published “Hiding Behind a Tribe” on February 13, 2011.
My question to Monsieur Hudson and Mademoiselle’s Silver-Greenberg and Caldwell is: Where has your outrage been when the pay-day lending industry was pilfering millions of dollars from Indian tribal members?
In a 2009 study, “Borrowed Time: Use of Refund Anticipation Loans Among EITC Filers in Native American Communities,” First Nations Development Institute’s research demonstrated that predatory lenders, by means of refund anticipation loans, drained more than $22 million from Indian communities in 10 states. And the dead quiet you heard was the Wall Street Journal’s and the Denver Post’s response to this news.
It used to be said that the only good Indian was a dead Indian. I guess today it is safe to say that the only good pay-day lender is a non-Indian pay-day lender.
As Indian people, we are well aware of the very real fact that we have neither the large demographic numbers, nor the population density, nor the political clout to effect notice and/or priority and as a result are an easy target for one-sided reporting. We know that we will rarely get a fair shake.
But in this instance I ask, please spare me the false sanctimony, and go back to burying your head in the sand. Or better yet, try writing something original. Or fair.
