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Connecticut Condemns Tribal Payday Lending Campaign

Jessica Hill
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The Associated Press
Gov. Dannel Malloy in a file photo.
The tribal chairmen of the Mohegan and the Mashantucket Pequot tribes both stepped up to condemn the lending companies.

Governor Dannel Malloy has struck back at a marketing campaign mounted by supporters of an Oklahoma Indian tribe after controversy over payday loans which charged illegal interest rates. 

In recent weeks, billboards featuring a Native American child and the slogan: “Governor Malloy don’t take away my future” have popped up in the state, alongside a similar social media and direct mail campaign.

It's the response of the conservative Institute for Liberty in support of two lending companies owned by the Otoe Missouria tribe. The two were fined last year by the state Department of Banking after they offered payday loans in Connecticut with interest rates of 448 percent.

The tribe claims as a sovereign government it is not subject to Connecticut laws that cap loan interest rates at 12 percent.

But Governor Malloy said that’s simply wrong. “We wouldn’t allow the Swiss to do it. We wouldn’t allow the French to do it. We wouldn’t allow the Germans to do it. We shouldn’t allow anybody else to do it,” he told a news conference.

Representative Matthew Lesser said the lending companies are exploiting the poorest residents of Connecticut, and he said the legislature's Banking Committee has backed a bill this session that would declare null and void any loan that’s made under illegal terms.

Lesser said the marketing campaign has covert aims “to smear our governor, to smear our state with billboards, and to pretend that consumer protection laws are somehow an attack on all Native Americans everywhere. And that’s outrageous, and this legislature won’t stand for it.”

Credit Photo Phiend / Creative Commons
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Creative Commons
The Senate chamber at the Connecticut State Capitol in a file photo.

The tribal chairmen of the Mohegan and the Mashantucket Pequot tribes both stepped up to condemn the lending companies, saying they’d been approached to participate in similar businesses and had turned them down.

Kevin Brown of the Mohegans said that while the tribes stand together on issues of sovereignty, this campaign is misdirected.

"It’s unfortunate that the proprietors of this mailing campaign are leveraging the images of tribal nations, and the issues of sovereignty and healthcare, because in fact that’s not what this is about," Brown said. "It’s about protecting the consumers of the state of Conecticut."

The Institute for Liberty, which said it is not directly linked with the Oklahoma tribe, said it financed the billboard and social media campaign because payday loans are needed in the marketplace.

Harriet Jones is Managing Editor for Connecticut Public Radio, overseeing the coverage of daily stories from our busy newsroom.

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