Via “Michael Froomkin”:http://www.discourse.net/2013/08/democracy-in-action-missouri-edition/, this “Pro Publica piece”:https://www.propublica.org/article/how-high-cost-lenders-fight-to-stay-legal is well worth reading.

bq. As the Rev. Susan McCann stood outside a public library in Springfield, Mo., last year, she did her best to persuade passers-by to sign an initiative to ban high-cost payday loans. But it was difficult to keep her composure, she remembers. A man was shouting in her face. He and several others had been paid to try to prevent people from signing. “Every time I tried to speak to somebody,” she recalls, “they would scream, ‘Liar! Liar! Liar! Don’t listen to her!’” Such confrontations, repeated across the state, exposed something that rarely comes into view so vividly: the high-cost lending industry’s ferocious effort to stay legal and stay in business.