Richard Cordray

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Director Richard Cordray, center, listened to comments during a panel discussion on payday lending a year ago in Richmond, Virginia. Brent Larkin writes that the federal CFPB is preparing rules to crack down on payday lenders nationally.

(Steve Helber, Associated Press, File, 2015)

Ohio's new tourism slogan encourages people to "Find it Here."

What they'll find is that it's easier to locate a place that charges the working poor 300 percent interest rates than one selling Big Macs and fries.

How proud it must make the Republicans running the state that there are now more payday loan stores in Ohio than the 223 McDonald's.

Eight years after voters emphatically rejected those hideous places that gouge those who can least afford it, business is booming at Ohio's 236 payday loan stores.

A November 2015 report by the Center for Responsible Lending said payday loans or car title loans at those stores now earn payday lenders more than $500 million annually in "predatory loan fees" that "further expose Ohioans to the harms of unaffordable loans secured by their bank accounts and cars."

Working-class Ohioans struggling to provide a better life for their children routinely pay annual percentage rates that, including fees and expenses, exceed 300 percent for short-term loans.

If only our elected officials in Columbus were smart enough to comprehend that this despicable coddling of the payday lending industry serves as a textbook example of why voter disgust with their political leaders has allowed Donald Trump to effectively destroy the Republican Party.

In 2008, more than 63 percent of Ohio's voters upheld a law passed by the legislature earlier that year capping payday-loan interest rates at 28 percent.

Consumer activists, newspapers, and any Ohioan with a conscience declared victory. Payday lending had been brought to its knees.

Then, just days later, the vultures found a loophole. Payday lenders re-registered under a different section of the law, a section that exempted them from the 28 percent cap on interest rates.

They were back in business.

No one in Ohio has been more consistent on this issue than Sen. Sherrod Brown, who understands exactly why the state's elected officials have flagrantly ignored the will of the people.

"The legislature is so close to the payday lenders, so close to the for-profit charter school operators, so close to the oil and gas people, and so close to the gun lobby," said Brown, a Democrat. "It's their far-right politics. Its their campaign contributions.

"It's the whole network in Columbus that betrays the public interest so often."

Like every single day,.



2015: With more payday lenders than McDonald's, a crackdown is needed now, U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown says

The 2008 law that capped these insidious loans at 28 percent was the product of a bipartisan effort involving Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland, Republican House Speaker Jon Husted and Senate President Bill Harris, also a Republican.

After the legal loophole rendered that law meaningless, in 2010 the next House speaker, Armond Budish, a Democrat, assembled a bipartisan coalition to close that loophole. But the bill died in the Senate.

And since 2011, neither the House nor Senate, both Republican-run, has lifted a finger to prevent Ohio's working poor from being financially tortured by sky-high interest rates.

"They hire every lobbyist they can and they spread money all around," Bill Faith, head of COHHIO, the Ohio Coalition on Homeless and Housing, said of the payday loan industry. "That's why nothing has happened to fix this."

In a unanimous 2014 ruling, the Ohio Supreme Court upheld the payday industry's use of the loophole, concluding it was the job of the legislature to fix the problem.

But Justice Paul Pfeifer, a Republican, felt compelled to write a concurring opinion noting that payday lending is "a scourge" that needs to "be eliminated or at least controlled" by Ohio's lawmakers.

Don't hold your breath. Since 2011, the Ohio General Assembly has repeatedly kicked taxpayers in the teeth. Its leaders don't work for their constituents. As we have seen on countless occasions, they are subservient to whoever funds their campaigns -- and no one else.

This special-interest sellout is largely a Republican problem.

But not entirely.

A small number of Democrat legislators with ties to payday lenders were reluctant to support the 2008 bill in Ohio.

And Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the Democratic National Committee chair and Florida congresswoman who seems hard at work destroying any semblance of party unity heading into the presidential election campaign, has sold her soul to payday lenders who bankroll campaigns of Democratic candidates in her home state.

But relief may be on the way. And it may come as early as June 2.

That's when the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, headed by former Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray, is widely expected to propose rules that impede payday lenders' ability to charge usurious rates.

Brown is confident the federal bureau, created by the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010, will act decisively.

"I think there will be a strong rule. Rich [Cordray] always thinks things through. He never moves too quickly. His staff does its work and Rich understands these issues backwards and forward. I assume there will be an effort in Congress to overturn any Cordray rule. But we will hold together and protect it."

Brown has proposed seeking ways for working-class taxpayers to borrow money, including a bill that would allow them to, under certain conditions, obtain advances on earned-income tax credit proceeds.

"My goal here is not to put the payday lenders out of business," Brown said. "My goal is that we provide enough rules that they can't abuse the public."

That may be Brown's goal. But it's not one that's shared in the Statehouse.

The people in charge down there think Ohioans who borrow money at 300 percent interest rates are getting exactly what they deserve.

Brent Larkin was The Plain Dealer's editorial director from 1991 until his retirement in 2009.

To reach Brent Larkin: blarkin@cleveland.com