TRICKS FROM PR FLACK SCHOOL
1. Change Your Name: When your members make toxic chemicals by the barrel and
don't always use responsible care
, doesn't American Chemistry Council sound a whole lot better than Chemical Manufacturers Association?
2. Get An Astroturf (no grassroots) Front Group: Put "Citizens" and/or "Consumers" in the name, even if there aren't any consumers marching in the streets backing your views. (Common Cause report Wolves In Sheeps Clothing outs the phone companies for this trick.)
3. Create Your Own "Think Tank:" That's what the predatory payday lenders did, after the Pentagon called them loan-sharks and deployed its active-duty generals and admirals, and JAG lawyers, too, against them. When the Pentagon not only aligns in support of an insurgent rebel band of consumer advocates and clergy who've been fighting for years to protect the poor and working class from your unfair, deceptive and usurious practices but also says that your practices have reduced our military preparedness, you've got a PR mess. But you've got enough money saved up from loan-sharking to try to confuse the facts and issues, so you take your PR flack's advice: create a "think tank."

This week that payday-lender backed so-called "think-tank," the Consumer Credit Research Foundation, an "outfit" with "neither offices nor employees," and run by a PR flack for the payday lenders, released a lightweight report by a couple of professors purporting to find (1) that our military personnel are paid pretty damn well and (2) that "There is no principled reason for limiting the access of military enlisted personnel to short-term credit."

Even though there's nothing on the "foundation" site explaining that the foundation is a project created by the payday lenders and maintained by a PR person, it is. At least two of the three board members, investment banker John F. McGlinn II and attorney Hilary B. Miller, have links to the industry. It is run by PR flack Robert Hoopes. Business Week reported recently in its story This Opinion Brought To You By... on how Hoopes took a previous report from the "foundation" and repackaged it into an op-ed, which then appeared in a Capitol Hill newspaper, seemingingly spontaneously, and simply attributed to a professor Tom Lehman:

Sometimes stealth sponsorship of media opinions is more convoluted. Such was the case with economist Lehman's friendly column about payday loans published last June in The Hill, the thrice-weekly paper aimed at lawmakers and their staffs. ... He was identified only as a professor at Indiana Wesleyan in Marion, Ind. But the article's origins weren't so simple. Lehman says he had been paid $1,000 to $2,000 by an outfit called the Consumer Credit Research Foundation to analyze payday loans. The foundation has neither offices nor employees. A phone number on its Web site leads to Washington PR man Robert Hoopes, who says the group is funded by the payday-loan industry. ... "We are funded by the payday-loan industry, and we have always been very up front about that," he says. "Tom's work for the foundation is extremely well known, including in press releases and among his peers."

Well, why doesn't the website say that it is really a front-tank for the payday lenders? I may be a web newbie (not) but I couldn't find any links to payday lenders, even on its about us page. Not too up front, that.

As for the report's claim that when you add up all the perks, including base housing and that excellent food, our military are paid well, they're not. That's why they take out payday and auto title pawn loans and shop at rent-to-own stores. According to the non-profit Center for Responsible Lending:

In many ways, soldiers are ideal targets for these abusive payday loans. They have a steady income from the government, often with little to spare, at an average of $1,200 per month for new recruits. At deployment time, when military families are faced with extra expenses at home and abroad, they may be more vulnerable to the promise of quick cash from payday lenders.

And, according to a definitive and peer-reviewed study (2mB pdf) by two other professors, (published in an academic journal, not by a fak-o think tank) Chris Peterson, a law professor at the University of Florida, and Steve Graves, a geographer at Cal State Northridge: At one military base, Camp Pendleton, 24 payday loan stores were found operating within three miles of the base, far more than the projected five stores that Graves and Peterson expected to find in an otherwise similar but non-military community. (By the way, it is unclear to me whether the payday-lender backed study was peer-reviewed).

Anyway, this blog is getting long. Here's a link to a previous blog on predatory lending and the military. Here's another previous blog on how one of the Baby Bell Verizon's main PR firms, Issue Dynamics, for example, established its own in-house fak-o think tank, the New Millenium Research Council. For a link to the definitive academic article on what I call "professors for hire," see The Market for Data: The Changing Role of Social Sciences in Shaping the Law, by Harvard Law Professor Elizabeth Warren in the Wisconsin Law Review.

We don't like it when predatory lenders prey on anyone, but when they cut into the nation's military preparedness by preying on military families, something needs to be done. Congress has a chance to step up here. We'll report in the future on how well they do on Capitol Hill.