Since President Biden announced a program to forgive $10,000-20,000 in student loan debt, new attention has been paid to the Trump administration’s Paycheck Protection Program. PPP doled out billions of dollars to businesses of all kinds, many of which didn’t need the money but took it anyway. Free money.
Among those that collected significant sums were religious schools, private schools (some of which had multi-million dollar endowments), and charter schools.
Regular public schools had a separate stream of money to help them survive COVID-19, but they were not allowed to apply for PPP money, which was only for private businesses and nonprofit.
Charter schools were allowed to double dip. Betsy DeVos was Secretary of Education, after all. So charter schools qualified for public school funding and for PPP.
Carol Burris wrote a brief summary:
More than 1,100 charter schools (about 1 in 7) received PPP loans and had those loans forgiven, according to an investigation by Craig Harris of U.S.A. today. Whether they ever needed the money is questionable since 93% of them were located in states that funded them at the same or higher levels than before Covid 19.
Charter schools, in total, received more than 1 billion dollars in PPP funding. Kipp alone got $28 million even though, according to Harris, they had $78 million in assets.
For-profit charter chains also collected PPP funds and public school funds, although they lost no funding.
ProPublica published a database of every organization that received a PPP loan. Go to the website and type in “charter school,” “Catholic school” or “private school,” “religious organization” and you will see the Trump administration’s extraordinary generosity. Check your own zip code. You will be stunned by the big giveaway to private and religious schools, even televangelists.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I blame the libertarian/anarchist, Koch-ALEC billionaire/multi-millionaire seditious, greedy, power-hungry cheaters for legally stealing from public funds (taxes, et al.). Taking public funds from the working class and literally handing it to the already wealthy class wouldn’t be legal if it wasn’t for ALEC.
Koch industries got close to a million dollars in PPP money, half of which was forgiven.
And during the pandemic, the wealth of the Koch family increased by tens of billions of dollars.
Only a shameless bastard would take money that they did not need that they knew was supposed to go to help small businesses survive.
“Only a shameless bastard” — there it is
You’re being too nice just calling them “shameless bastards.”
At least thirteen GOP members of Congress received forgiven PPP loans. Some of these representatives had the nerve to complain about student loan forgiveness.https://www.instagram.com/p/ChqFLG0jTM5/
Simply put, the MAGA RINO mob will make all the decisions for themselves, and the rest of us, that don’t belong to their evil cult, shouldn’t think. Do as we’re told, not what they do.
Where did that kind of thinking come from?
Well, Rush Limbaugh called his followers ditto heads, and often said they didn’t have to think, because he’d do their thinking for them.
ALEC is one front of attack for the triad axis made up of the (1) Koch network (2) conservative Catholic and (3) protestant Christian power brokers.
Project Blitz is a 2nd front. It has a playbook of draft legislation that includes 500 bills introduced in 49 states. The Congressional Prayer Caucus with hundreds of lawmaker members in Congress and statehouses, is behind
Project Blitz (USA Today 2019).
As an example of the triad’s work, Heritage Foundation (Koch) posted on 3-18-2020, “LGBTQ’s LEFT’s shameful intolerance of faith-based adoption agencies hurts kids.”
The author of the article was a former research assistant at the DeVos Center and currently is a Young Leader in a program at Heritage.
The Triad’s political parties (in the U.S., it’s the GOP) drive economic policy that creates poverty. Amy Coney Barrett’s adoption of poor children provides an example of the dual purposing of conservative Catholic/Christians and Koch. Worldwide, more than 90% of adopted children have a living parent. The parents have children they can not afford which creates, “orphans”. Then, people like Barrett adopt and make the children into their patriarchal sect’s faithful, a group that discriminates against women and gay people.
Thank you. I’m aware of the other threats but struggle to keep my comments shorter. If I mentioned all the threats that go beyond even the triad you mention few if anyone would bother to read that much because of the average attention span today.
“According to research, our attention span has markedly decreased in just 15 years. In 2000, it was 12 seconds. Now, 15 years later, it’s shrunk significantly to 8.25 seconds. In fact, scientists reckon we now have shorter attention spans than goldfish, who are able to focus on a task or object for 9 seconds.”
Lloyd,
I know you understand about Project Blitz. It’s not your responsibility to cover the entirety of the attacks against democracy.
It’s disappointing that it has received so little attention from media and influencers.
A headline from the Ohio Independent today, “Anti-abortion DC group sets its sights on the Ohio Supreme Court.”
Too few media are or have been focused on conservative religious power brokers.
Charter schools continue to fleece our taxpayers with money making schemes. It is children that attend public schools that get their services reduced due to expansive charter drain. The number one priority of charters is profit. Corporations will always put profit over people. Double dipping, sweep contracts, nepotism, and rampant embezzling are nothing new to the charter sector. They are opportunists that lobby for every dollar they can squeeze out of the common good. They generally do not provide better education, and they are not worth the disruption the cause to real public schools that serve all students.
VERY interesting.
I just plugged in my own zip code.
I should’ve been on this one a long time ago.
Socialism for the rich, rugged individualism for the poor.
Kevin Ward of KIPP in D.C., the subject of a recent Ravitch post, allegedly stole $2.2 mil. during his tenure at the school from 2017 to July 2021. The amount of alleged theft averaged more than $40,000 a month.
$480,000 a year would make possible the employment of 10 additional teachers at $48,000 each. That is the cost to the community for the wrongdoing at KIPP.
Very interesting to see the PPP loans for businesses in my town. I went through the first 100 or so & only 2 looked out of line — much bigger loans to a particular CPA firm & a particular law firm. Then I checked out their websites and found out their primary clients are NJ public schools. I guess that makes sense (?).