Another Payday Payoff

There are many, many things in this incessantly, incurably corrupt state that we are “sick unto death” of … but few institutional scams get us as riled up as the ongoing efforts by some South Carolina elected officials to regulate industries that they – or in this case, their relatives – are simultaneously attempting to make millions by suing.

That is the very definition of “pay-to-play,” people – to say nothing of taxpayer-funded jury shopping.

In fact, one of the first big stories broken by FITS was the sordid tale of thirteen state lawmakers – most of them ethically-challenged ambulance chasers – who were attempting to ban payday lending while they simultaneously leveled several multimillion dollar class action lawsuits against the industry.

As if that scam wasn’t sufficiently devoid of fairness, the local fish wrapper – The (Columbia) State newspaper (a.k.a. La Socialista) – had its own anti-payday lending racket going.

Their scam involved bludgeoning the industry via a steady stream of fact-free articles and editorials (we told you it was all about jury-shopping, didn’t we?) and then – in one of the most flagrant examples of journalistic blackmail we’ve ever seen – hitting the industry up for advertising revenue so that they could “educate those whose understanding may be distorted.”

Sheesh.

Well, judging from today’s editions of the “newspaper that can’t shoot straight,” it would appear that the tired old formula for “taxpayer-funded jury shopping” is alive and well … still.

Leading the charge this time is an ambitious City of Columbia Councilwoman named Belinda Gergel, who evidently wants to give her sister in the struggle (a glorified thief and fellow councilwoman named Tameika Isaac Devine) a run for her money on the corruption front.

To that end, Gergel has single-handedly engineered the passage of a new City of Columbia regulation that would “ban payday lenders from operating within a half-mile of each other or in buildings of less than 30,000 square feet.”

Ummm … we’re gonna go out on a limb and guess that those aren’t arbitrary designations, and that Gergel has some specific results in mind by initiating such a proposal.

Before we grab our plum-bobs and start surveying the city, though, it’s worth noting that one of the lawyers involved in the payday lending shakedown we exposed is none other than Carl L. Solomon, a partner in the firm of … wait for it … Gergel, Nickels and Solomon, P.A.

Are you kidding us?

This is the same old scam, people, and it drives us absolutely nuts.

If a politician wishes to profit off of attacking an industry (or wishes their family to profit off of attacking an industry), then they have every right to do so via our system of civil justice.

What they do not – or at least should not have the right to do is abuse their positions of public trust to help facilitate those ends.

In keeping with that premise, Gergel should immediately acknowledge her conflict of interest and recuse herself from any future votes on this issue.