The Treasury Department administered the CARES Act’s Paycheck Protection Program, which was supposed to hand out more than $600 billion to small businesses. Stephen Mnuchin kept much of the information secret but had to release the full list of recipients in response to media Freedom of Information Act suits. We know that charter schools, private schools, and religious schools collected huge sums, slipping in as “nonprofits.”
Here is an account from the Boston Globe:
WASHINGTON – More than half of the money from the Treasury Department’s coronavirus emergency fund for small businesses went to just 5 percent of the recipients, according to data on more than 5 million loans released by the government Tuesday evening in response to a Freedom of Information Act request and lawsuit.
According to data on the government’s Paycheck Protection Program, about 600 mostly larger companies, including dozens of national chains, received the maximum amount allowed under the program of $10 million.
Officials from the Treasury Department and the Small Business Administration have argued that the program primarily benefited smaller business because a vast majority of the loans ― more than 87 percent ― were for less than $150,000, as of August. But the new data show that more than half of the $522 billion in the same time frame had gone to bigger businesses, and only 28 percent of the money was distributed in amounts of under $150,000.
The newly released data comes after a federal lawsuit filed by The Washington Post and 10 other news organizations under the Freedom of Information Act challenging the SBA’s refusal to release records on borrowers and loan amounts. A federal judge ordered release of the data by Tuesday and the agency did not appeal.
Devised as a way to temporarily pay small companies to keep their employees on staff for eight weeks, PPP is widely credited with helping millions of businesses make payroll during the early months of the pandemic, benefiting tens of millions of employees. A bipartisan group of senators unveiled plans Tuesday for another $908 billion in stimulus, including nearly $300 billion in new funding for PPP and other SBA programs...
The data released Tuesday disclosed for the first time the exact dollar figures received by some of the top recipients, showing that a number of restaurant chains received the maximum $10 million, among them the parent companies of Uno Pizzeria & Grill, Legal Seafoods, Boston Market and Cava Mezze Grill. Law firms, churches and professional staffing services were also among recipients of $10 million loans…
Many companies were reported to have “retained” far more workers than they employ. Likewise, in some cases the agency’s jobs claim for entire industries surpassed the total number of workers in those sectors. For more than 875,000 borrowers, the data showed that zero jobs were supported or no information is listed at all, according to the analysis.
Religious organizations received billions in PPP aid. One of the largest grants went to Joyce Meyer’s Ministry in Fenton, Missouri, which received between $7-10 million.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It’s up a OEN. https://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/More-than-Half-the-Funds-i-in-General_News-Government-Corruption-201207-452.html
Stephen Mnuchin is guilty of grand theft.
It’s too bad no one in power ever had the chance to prosecute Mnuchin. https://www.politico.com/news/2019/10/22/kamala-harris-attorney-general-california-housing-053716
This story about Mnuchin during the 2007-2008 crash is extremely important. Thanks for sharing it, Dienne! The Obama administration could have chosen to organize the bailout in such a way as to benefit individual homeowners. They could, for example, have had the bailout funds funnel through the homeowners to the banks, so that the homeowners held onto their homes. Instead, they let the banks foreclose on the little people and get huge bailouts. The wealthy got a lot wealthier, and those clamoring to enter the middle-class got a lot poorer. Another big bailout for the rich.
Gee, this kind of thing keeps happening, again and again, huh?
And, ofc, Penny Pritzger got a bunch of her rich friends together to buy the Obamas a multi-million-dollar vacation home, and then he named her Commerce Secretary. At a time when about 10 MILLION Americans were losing their homes because of the financial crisis.
That is the neoliberal way of handling problems. In order for needy people to get access to help, the money still has to magically trickle down. Instead, companies buy back their stocks to raise the amount shareholders get and pump up the value of the stock. The people must fend for themselves. Both parties are guilty of belief in this falsehood .
Bob, are you sure of your timeline? I tried to find out more about the Pritzger house buying but I couldn’t.
What I did find was an article about how Penny Pritzger felt insulted because Obama did NOT appoint her Commerce Secretary in 2009 after she gave him all that help raising money when he was running for president in 2008. Obama presumably was listening to the concerns of the Service Employees International Union, which objected to her. That was when Obama was dealing with the financial crisis. And Penny Pritzker was unhappy that she was not only not offered a job, but she was basically ignored by Obama after she helped raise money for him.
In fact, Pritzger wasn’t nominated as Commerce Secretary until May, 2013 after Obama’s re-election, when Pritzger raised less money than she had in 2008! And the opposition from unions was much less muted by then — I honestly don’t know why as she was no better in 2013 than she was in 2009 when Obama totally insulted her and made her so angry that she didn’t do nearly as much for his 2012 campaign.
So unless Americans were losing their homes in 2013, 4 years after the financial crisis, your statement that he named her Commerce Secretary at that time isn’t true — if anything, she was incredibly angry that she was totally ignored by Obama and had no influence on policy at all, until she re-emerged by doing some – but not nearly as much – fundraising for the 2013 campaign.
I also couldn’t find anything about the million dollar vacation home she bought for Obama, but if she bought that home before he became President, no wonder Penny Pritzger was so angry that Obama completely ignored her for 4 years when he became president and was dealing with the financial crisis.
For those of you who only trust the liberal media: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/kamala-harris-has-to-answer-for-not-prosecuting-steve_b_5980d18ee4b09d231a518205
I went to the link on that article.
It linked me to this:
“CfA Calls on Federal Authorities to Investigate Steven Mnuchin’s OneWest Bank for Fraud”
FEDERAL authorities! Not state authorities. Where were the progressive Senators and Representatives in Congress calling for this investigation?!
This link that this “liberal media” writer links to seems to confirm that Kamala Harris was right that the feds should have been prosecuting this bank. Kamala Harris’ office gathered tons of evidence, but Mnuchin simply refused to comply with subpoenas because it was a federal matter.
It is possible to argue that Kamala Harris should have pursued a case even if she was unlikely to win and all of her subpoenas could be ignored by Mnuchin, and wasted time so that the feds had an excuse for ignoring this. But it is also possible to argue that progressives Senators and Representatives on the federal level were not fighting for this when they should have been.
My question is what did Elizabeth Warren say about this, because she clearly believed Mnuchin should be prosecuted – did she blame Kamala Harris? Did Michael Moore?
These attacks on democrats are by the very same people who condone the Trump administration corruption and want to normalize it. These old links (yesterday one was 9 years old!) appear every time Diane Ravitch posts about outrageous behavior by the Trump White House, and they always imply that the evil and corrupt Democrats did something worse than the “normal” Trump administration.
I wish they had even .01% of the outrage at the Trump corruption and the PPP money that was wasted as they do at Kamala Harris.
You poor thing. You must have experienced unbelievable horrors to have turned out as congenitally bitter and helplessly contrarian as you did.
Thanks Diane and Susan and for the many journalists who still have investigative savvy. The more widely this fraud is known the better, especially because it still possible that another round of this funding will be approved before the end of the year.
“The newly released data comes after a federal lawsuit filed by The Washington Post and 10 other news organizations under the Freedom of Information Act challenging the SBA’s refusal to release records on borrowers and loan amounts. A federal judge ordered release of the data by Tuesday and the agency did not appeal.”
Thanks also to the federal judge who ordered the release. But why should records of this this rapid and massive distribution of funds be kept from public view?
Mnuchin fought any and all public release of where the PPP money went.
This information should be subject to the Freedom of Information Act. It is public money, and the public should have the right to know where it went.
retired teacher I haven’t read the law about it. That said, it seems to me that, precisely because we live in a democracy, the “burden of reason” should be on those who want secrecy rather than on those who want to expose information and government actions to the light.
In other words, and correct me if I am wrong in this, the “freedom of information act” as an act assumes an a posteriori view, or a default-to-secrecy, as if information should be kept secret unless forced into the light, instead of the other way around. If we first assumed openness and freedom of information, then we would need an ACT that required those who wanted secrecy to provide evidence for their concerns. CBK
Religion is SUPPOSED to be about morality, at least that is what I thought. Morality, real spirituality. Where did we lose our way?
Love of money, the root of all evil.
It sure has taken over in the U. S.
Gordon Wilder A more-than-technical distinction: if we migrate back to the fundamental questions that inform (1) religion and (2) morality. . . . (1) Religion is about the answer to our questions about our relationship to God, the divine, ultimate being as such, or however you want to refer to what remains beyond and mysterious to us.
On the other hand, for (2), Morality is about the answer to our questions about our relationship to others, and also to ourselves–how those answers are worked out in real time over our history.
Of course, in real-time, these two questions are dynamically interrelated in different ways for different people and in different histories and cultures; but where the political is the “how to we relate to others and ourselves” question in its WRIT-LARGE version of (2), or on the scale of cultures, states, tribes, and communities.
. . . just a distinction I thought may be helpful. CBK
“Religion is about the answer to our questions about our relationship to God, the divine, ultimate being as such, or however you want to refer to what remains beyond and mysterious to us.”
Are you suggesting with that statement that there are many gods, ultimately a possibility of an indefinite number, depending upon what a person believes?
Because a human mind can conceive of something, it doesn’t mean that that something necessarily exists.
Sometimes I think that living might be better without the capabilities of language and thought that enable absurdities, i.e., as the vast majority of life on this planet does. For those absurdities facilitated by language and thought have been the foundation for death and destruction of not only many human beings, but of other life forms, even ecosystems. What other living being destroys so much as do humans?
Duane I’m only addressing the different kinds of questions we ask . . . one concerns our relationship to the mysterious-beyond, and the other concerns our relationship to others and to ourselves. There are many cultures and many kinds of answers and doctrines that are RESPONSES to those same kinds of questions. But a kind of question is not yet an answer . . . I’m not ‘suggesting’ anything beyond that.
But I do think keeping these things separate in our thinking and discourse is important to the fundamental issues presented to us by living in secular-democratic culture. CBK
Duane
Much of human thought and language is devoted to motivated “reasoning” (a misnomer if ever there was one) — trying to justify beliefs that have no basis in reality.
The pandemic has made this particularly obvious. People speak with far more confidence about what is going on (eg, in schools) than is justifiable based on the evidence. They do this because they WANT to believe what they are claiming and want others to believe it as well.
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin is moving $455 billion in unspent stimulus money into a fund that the incoming Biden administration cannot deploy without Congress. It is a pity that Republicans would rather hobble the Democrats than help struggling Americans. Katie Porter recently gave an insolent Mnuchin a grilling in Congress over the issue. We will never be able to move forward if the only goal of Republicans is obstructionism.https://www.cnn.com/videos/economy/2020/12/03/unspent-coronavirus-stimulus-relief-funds-mnuchin-porter-bts-cpt-vpx.cnn
Is this supposed to be surprising?
Why do people keep getting surprised by the same things over and over?
SomeDam. . . yes, we keep playing the trusting Charlie Brown to the Republicans’ Lucy . . . who keeps pulling the football away just as Charlie is about to kick it. We are such “losers” to think we actually can trust other Americans, and oath-taking Congress-people, to be authentic citizens in a Constitutional democracy. Shame on us. CBK
There is one difference: unlike Charlie Brown who kicks air, we keep kicking a football filled with lead.
It’s hard to say which contains more lead: the football or our heads.
SomeDam I think we have a little bit of what, for Trump, is ALOT of: *toxic optimism.” CBK
MNUCHIN MUNCHKIN (in Lederhosen, to the tune of “The Lollipop Guild”):
We represent the Oligarch Guild.
The Oligarch Guild. The Oligarch Guild.
And in the name of the Oligarch Guild.
We’d like to welcome you to Grifter Land.
All citizens are marks in Grifter Land.
Mine’ll be a con, worth of the Don,
Relief? Good grief. Are you insane?
This con will be hist, will be history.
and the rich will glorify my name!
“We love our Munchkin, who has no shame.”
Let me see, how much does this surprise me? Oh, yeah, not at all.
We live at a time when wealth and income inequality in the United States are as high as during the Great Depression and growing steadily higher. How can poor and middle-class strive to grow generational wealth, to raise themselves up? Well, scraping together the money to buy and pay off a home is one way, and starting a small business is another. But both these means have been trashed by our system. The Trump Administration makes a big noise about its patriotism, and then it does everything in its power to undermine the American Dream. And voters in places like Kentucky and West Virginia still go to the polls and vote against themselves. People need to be educated not to do that.
We could do much worse than to strive to become a nation of shopkeepers as opposed to a nation of megacoporations and part-time gig workers.
Joyce Meyer feeds people. 🤔😮🔔
Joyce Meyers is a disgrace to the Show Me State.
Joyce Meyer is “enjoying everyday life” (the title of her program). 😁
“Religious organizations received billions in PPP aid. One of the largest grants went to Joyce Meyer’s Ministry in Fenton, Missouri, which received between $7-10 million. ”
No religious or other organization based on ideology should ever get any federal or state support.
Maybe this what Bernie was objecting to when he opposed the newest help package. The vast majority of that money also goes to places where it’s just wasted.
Bernie objected because the package of $908 billion was too small.
Is/was there a chance to increase the amount quickly, like in couple of weeks? Some people have it very bad, and they certainly cannot wait when it comes to loosing homes or not enough food.
We cannot expect any mercy from companies. For example, my apartment’s rent just went up by over 10%.