Predatory lenders are circling Florida's poor. It's up to state leaders to come to the rescue and fend off the sharks.

The loan-sharking industry is having a pool party in Florida.

It's swimming in money while the working poor and the financially strapped who turn to it for help are being eaten alive by the industry's triple-digit interest rates, charges and fees.

The sharks are a collection of check-cashing businesses, stores that offer consumers advances on their paychecks and companies that lend people money in exchange for car titles. All charge exorbitant interest rates or outrageous fees to desperate people, many of whom can't even afford to maintain a bank account.

In other words, the people being charged the most are those who have the least.

Meanwhile, Florida lawmakers, who could set this right, seem to have been co-opted by their lobbyist buddies and the lenders' free-flowing campaign contributions.

Richard Wilson, a disabled mechanic from Ocala, summed up the plight of the needy at the hands of the greedy during the opening days of this year's Legislature. To get a $100 loan, he put his $1,500 vehicle up for grabs by a title-loan company. As long as he made payments -- at a whopping 22 percent a month in interest and fees - things were fine. He had paid back more than $140 -- $40 more than he borrowed -- when he missed a payment, and the title-loan company seized his car.

A Georgia man fared even worse. After he borrowed $150 from Georgia Auto Pawn in Macon, the company said Henry James Hubbard III had been falling behind on his payments, amounting to 300 percent a year. So it dispatched a collection agent to repossess the car. Mr. Hubbard protested. Both he and the agent drew guns, and Mr. Hubbard was shot dead.

Obviously, that was an extreme case. But, the stakes are high. Lots of money is on the table.

The industry pulls out a laundry list of reasons to defend its outrageous fees -- it does business in rough neighborhoods; its customers often have bad credit; and it loses more money than banks do on loans that aren't repaid.

But business is booming. Every year, an estimated half-million Floridians empty their pockets to sate the lenders' greed. And every year, the victims parade before the Legislature, begging for relief -- to no avail.

Yet it doesn't have to be that way:

Lawmakers should limit the title-loan companies to 18-percent-a-year interest, the same rate banks can charge. The total, with fees, shouldn't exceed the 30 percent that consumer-finance companies can charge. If title lenders can't make money at that price, good riddance.

State Senate President Toni Jennings should quit hiding on the sidelines. She promised that this issue would get a fair hearing -- and that's not happening. She needs to live up to her word and get involved.

Ditto for John Thrasher, speaker of the state House of Representatives. If he really favors reform, as he says, why did he jettison into near oblivion a bill that would have reformed the industry? He sent it through an all-but-impossible gantlet of committees, knowing that it had little chance to survive.

Speak up, Mr. Speaker.

Lawmakers shouldn't stop with the title-loan industry. They should limit fees on payday advances to 30 percent, too. There should be no room for abuse. Lawmakers also should rein in the 3-percent-to-10-percent rates that check-cashing services charge. Those should come down to between 1 percent and 2 percent, as other states have mandated.

The Legislature bears primary responsibility for controlling Florida's financial predators, but Gov. Jeb Bush also has a role to play. He's a Republican governor with a Republican legislature. He and Ms. Jennings and Mr. Thrasher can decide this issue. They need to make clear that they won't let loan sharks continue to feed on Florida's poor.

The federal government also has to get involved. These lenders have ballooned into interstate empires that reach beyond Florida's borders, hitting people in the armed forces particularly hard.

Finally, banks must do the right thing. A big reason the legal loan-sharking industry has flourished is that banks no longer want to set up shop in poor neighborhoods. The profit margin is too slim for their tastes.

The social obligation that goes with the right to operate a bank ought to include helping people surrounded by predatory lenders.

Banks elsewhere -- most notably Union Bank in Los Angeles -- have taken that obligation seriously, working actively to convert check-cashing customers into regular customers. The program has worked so well that it is being expanded.

That can happen in Florida.

The poor and financially strapped in Florida need a life preserver.

How long before their cries are heard?