The far Left publication Mother Jones has an article this week criticizing the payday lending industry for supporting the Congress on Racial Equility and spending money on Financial Literacy programs.   Yes, you read that right.  The industry is being criticized for charitable contributions.  Kathleen Moore, who heads community outreach for CFSA, is quoted in the story:

Kathleen Moore, CFSA’s director of partnering and program development, who previously worked at Habitat for Humanity, insists that such outreach programs have nothing to do with politics or generating business for her members. “I do not promote payday lending. This is part of our giving-back agenda,” she says. “None of our outreach is targeted at ethnicity.”

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.  The Payday Pundit discussed the Mother Jones article in an earlier post.

…compared to bounced check fees and overdraft protection.  The payday lending industry has been making this point for years, but now economists are catching up.  This article on the blog of the Left-wing magazine Mother Jones discusses research by East Carolina University Professor Marc Anthony Fusaro.   

From the article:

     Fusaro looked at overdraft protection as a form of a short-term loan and found that people who occasionally bounce checks (between 1 and 10 times a year) pay interest rates exceeding 6,000 percent. Chronic bouncers in the study, who make up a small percentage of bank customers, paid more than $3,000 in fees annually for the privilege. The average size of the overdraft was pretty small, between $90 and $300. The most extreme case in the study was one poor soul who had a $3 overdraft outstanding for one day, which resulted in an intereste rate of 260,245 percent, a hefty surcharge for using a debt card for a latte.