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Lee Fang
https://theintercept.com/2020/04/24/coronavirus-small-business-loans-trump-donors-ppp/
MAJOR DONORS to President Donald Trump’s presidential reelection campaign have won coveted loans from the Paycheck Protection Program, the new government effort to provide a lifeline to small businesses under duress because of the coronavirus pandemic.
The loans, which are converted to grants if payroll is maintained and other, sometimes unclear, conditions are met, have been out of reach for tens of thousands of small business owners, many of whom have faced delays and denials. But PPP loans have been swiftly approved for a number of corporations whose executives have donated heavily to Trump’s campaign, Securities and Exchange Commission records show.
The largest known recipient of small business rescue money has been a set of luxury hotels run by Archie Bennett and his son Monty Bennett. The pair have obtained over $59 million in PPP funds for Ashford Hospitality Trust and Braemar Hotels & Resorts, holding companies used to own and manage a range of hotels, including the Ritz-Carlton in St. Thomas. The companies were eligible for PPP loans because the program was intentionally designed to benefit large franchise owners of restaurants and hotels operators, as long as each location employs 500 people or less.
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The father and son are also megadonors who have given nearly half a million dollars to Trump since 2016 and over $1.3 million to GOP politicians and groups in recent years. The company, disclosures show, also sought professional influence.
Just days after the passage of the CARES Act, the sweeping bailout law that enabled the PPP program, the Ashford Hospitality Trust signed a lobbying contract with Jeffrey Miller, a lobbyist and fundraiser who has raised $1,494,000 for Trump’s 2020 reelection. Miller went to work attempting to influence the Small Business Administration and Congress on behalf of his client, records show, to obtain a share of the bailout money.
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They weren’t the only ones with a financial inside track to the Trump administration.
Continental Materials Corp., a construction equipment product company, received $5.4 million in PPP loans. The firm is owned by the family of Ronald Gidwitz, who has donated $50,000 to Trump and over $109,000 to the Republican National Committee in recent years.
Jarrett Streebin, the founder and CEO of the shipping and tracking start-up EasyPost, gave $105,600 to Trump last year, utilizing a joint fundraising PAC. Streebin’s company obtained “a few million dollars in a PPP loan,” according to an account in the Wall Street Journal.
Nikola Motor Company, a startup that develops electric trucks, received $4.1 million in PPP loans. The company is run by Trevor Milton, a billionaire Trump donor. The hotel company owned by Gordon Sondland, the hotel magnate who donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration, and later received an ambassadorship from the president, received PPP loans.
Hallador Energy, an Indiana-based coal company, obtained $10 million in PPP funding. The company currently employs Scott Pruitt, Trump’s former EPA administrator, as a lobbyist, the Washington Post reported. Phunware, a Texas-based technology firm employed by the Trump campaign to develop applications to track the locations of voters, received $2.8 million in PPP loans. The Intercept has previously reported on Phunware’s aspirations to develop location tracking for the coronavirus pandemic.
THE PPP PROGRAM has been mired in controversy since it was launched. Though the program, originally funded with $349 billion through the CARES Act, was publicized as aid to struggling small companies, it ended up benefiting large companies — and ran out of money in just two weeks.
Many large banks reportedly gave preference to wealthy customers. JPMorgan Chase, for instance, awarded nearly every high-income private banking customer a PPP loan who applied, while only 6 percent of the 300,000 retail small business customers who applied were able to receive a loan. Surveys from the National Federation of Independent Business show that only 20 percent of small businesses that applied received a PPP loan.
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Data on loans analyzed by Reveal and New York Daily News suggests other inequities. Over half of the businesses that applied for the loans in Republican-leaning states such as North Dakota and Nebraska received approval. In Democratic-leaning states hard hit by the crisis, such as California and New York, the rates are 15 and 18 percent respectively.
Large PPP loans approved for major, publicly traded companies with access to other forms of credit have received negative attention in recent days. Shake Shack, for instance, has promised to return its $10 million PPP loan, while Ruth’s Chris Steak House has pledged to return the $20 million the company received from the program.
On Thursday, the House of Representatives passed renewed funding for the PPP program, injecting the program with another $321 billion. Given the dozens of lobbying firms that have recently registered clients seeking SBA relief, it’s unclear whether the next tranche of funding will last much longer than the first.
Elizabeth May
https://theintercept.com/2020/04/23/coronavirus-health-care-workers-medical-student-debt/
IN RECENT WEEKS, health care workers have been heralded as heroes in the national response to the coronavirus pandemic. Wartime analogies flow freely: U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres called the Covid-19 pandemic the most challenging global crisis since World War II. In a recent press briefing, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo made calls to “support our troops,” referring to health care workers as “the soldiers in this fight.”
In many ways, the comparison is apt. Doctors, nurses, and support staff find themselves enlisted in a war against a virus that has infected thousands and killed hundreds of their colleagues globally. Public expressions of support for health professionals are meaningful. But they are also insufficient to drown out the deafening silence from Capitol Hill in response to mounting cries for relief measures — chief among them educational debt forgiveness.
Every Covid-19 patient admitted to the hospital will be cared for by a team of professionals who, theoretically, have over $1 million in combined student debt.
I am a physician and, unsurprisingly, the owner of a sizable student loan. You can’t become a doctor in America without paying for years of higher education, so I began my medical career with more than $200,000 in educational debt — the average for med school grads. In the U.S., the average salary for new doctors in training is about $57,000 per year. Four years into residency, and approximately $20,000 in loan payments later, I am still scraping away at the interest. I owe more than when I graduated.
Now, as a psychiatry resident in the national epicenter of this crisis, I am tasked with responding to mental health emergencies, including for Covid-19-positive patients. When not in the hospital, I will provide outpatient coverage for co-workers pulled to work shifts in emergency rooms and intensive care units. Many junior psychiatry residents have already been “redeployed” to internal medicine teams overwhelmed by the tidal wave of Covid-19 patients. We are being extended far beyond our original job description. Even so, relative to my nursing, ER, and ICU colleagues, I have it easy.
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Among indebted health care workers, young doctors are not alone. Almost 70 percent of all nurses — who staff the truest front line in this pandemic — graduate from training with $40,000 to $150,000 in debt. My sister, a family medicine nurse practitioner who oversees the clinic at her local homeless shelter, has dutifully paid interest on nursing school loans for 10 years without making a dent in the principal. Now, she reuses the same paper gown each day to examine patients with Covid-19 symptoms. The average debt of a graduating college student is roughly $30,000 — on par with the average annual salary for certified medication technicians, EMTs, and ambulance crew members.
Just imagine: Every Covid-19 patient admitted to the hospital will be cared for by a team of professionals who, theoretically, have over $1 million in combined student debt. So, sure, you can call us heroes. But we’d prefer debt relief.
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Critics will say an economic crisis is no time to talk about student debt reform. Some view such reform as placing an undue burden on American taxpayers. Others will remind us that we signed up for these jobs and, hey, at least we have jobs. But, in the age of Covid-19, the reality facing health care workers is more akin to military deployment than a day at work. We now speak of front lines, redeployments, isolation zones, tours of duty. For many, these are no longer the jobs we signed up for, but they do demand skills we indebted ourselves to acquire.
MUCH HAS BEEN made of the shortage of personal protective equipment plaguing our nation during this crisis. This shortage has already — and will continue to — cost health care workers their health and, for many, their lives. From janitorial staff to respiratory therapists to attending doctors, we are all filling gaps in a system not designed for global pandemic. And when the dust settles, many will need to rebuild their health while contending with the very real trauma of working amid an onslaught of sick, dying, and mourning patients, as well as their families.
Covid-19 health care veterans deserve better than the six-month stay on loan payments for all borrowers as a part of the recently passed stimulus. Certainly, we deserve better than the bedraggled Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program, for which many of us do not qualify and which — having rejected 99 percent of all applicants in 2018 — was called “fundamentally broken” by the very government officials hired to manage it. If health care workers did our jobs as poorly as the Department of Education manages student loans, patients would die at an alarming rate.
And yet, with awe-inspiring reliability, health care workers are rising to the occasion, demonstrating commitment to the ethics of the field. I am proud to be part of this community, proud to have skills that ease patient suffering. What, then, is a reasonable way for our government to repay this burden?
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A look at World War II-era GI bills may be instructive. These GI bills included immediate financial rewards for nearly all veterans. Additional benefits included low-cost mortgages, dedicated loans, dedicated unemployment compensation, and tuition stipends. The benefits were provided to all vets active for at least 90 days during an allotted time period.
Like all systems of wealth, knowledge, and power, the American health care system has its own discourse. What is said aloud functions alongside what remains silent. The word “hero” carries a loaded history. It originally referred to a person — a man, often semi-divine in origin — who demonstrated superhuman strength. Heroes champion causes against all odds, sacrificing their well-being in the pursuit. Health care workers have been given the herculean task of fighting Covid-19.
But we live in the real world, where we juggle this task with the same demands as every American: child care, mortgages, health insurance, rent, student loan payments, and so on. When nurses are called soldiers and told to fight a war, we should wonder what is being overlooked. When Education Secretary Betsy DeVos dismisses plans for student loan forgiveness as “crazy,” we should ask who her language serves. And when Congress speaks on behalf of corporations, while remaining silent on an issue impacting 42 million indebted graduates, we should hear that silence loudly.
Speak up, Uncle Sam. Support the troops.
https://theintercept.com/2020/04/22/trump-coronavirus-governors/
ONE PIECE OF wisdom from ancient Rome has guided astute public health officials dealing with epidemics for 2,000 years: “Cito, longe, tarde.”
That’s Latin for “Leave quickly. Go far away. Come back slowly.”
Faced with a highly contagious, lethal disease for which there is no known cure, President Donald Trump has ignored that timeless advice.
Instead, like a medieval demagogue, Trump is spouting quackery and hatred straight out of the 14th century, when panicked Europeans confronting the Black Death strapped live chickens to their bodies, drank potions tinged with mercury and arsenic, and blamed the Mongols and the Jews when none of it worked.
Major catastrophes lay bare the truth about our leaders. Trump’s criminally negligent, chaotic handling of the Covid-19 pandemic has exposed, once and for all, that he is a corrupt, narcissistic psychopath.
His babbling and incoherent press conferences, in which he lashes out in every direction, continue to show that he is in urgent need of psychiatric treatment. He exhibits the self-centered tendencies of a small child.
But a legion of enablers surrounds Trump and prevents any intervention, even in the midst of the worst public health crisis in a century. His family members, like Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, appear perfectly happy to keep smiling while enjoying the favored status that, most recently, allowed them to disregard stay-at-home guidelines to decamp to a Trump resort in New Jersey for Passover.
Of course, some of Trump’s most important enablers are the reporters in the White House press corps, who daily act as his Greek chorus. Instead of ignoring his lies and outrageous statements, they dutifully cover his Covid-19 press conferences and tweets as if they were the serious, coherent statements of a genuine national leader. In the process, they are aiding and abetting Trump’s disinformation campaign, which could result in thousands of additional and needless deaths.
The government’s top public health professionals, fearful of losing their jobs and of even worse behavior by Trump, have also become crucial enablers, forced to pretend that Trump’s handling of the Covid-19 crisis has been sound. Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus coordinator, has taken on a more prominent role at briefings after effusively praising the president, while Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has been less noticeable as he has grown more willing to contradict Trump’s most dangerous assertions. On Saturday, Birx went along while Trump hijacked the daily briefing to complain about Democrats, the press, and China.
The result is that the White House is stuck in a surreal alternate reality in which reporters and government officials continue to do their jobs as if the president were not mad as a hatter.
BUT BECAUSE OF COVID-19, the rest of the nation now recognizes what should have been obvious ever since Trump took office: His first response to every crisis is to insist on complete authority, while at the same time abandoning all responsibility. Despite his inaction and incompetence, he won’t relinquish control over the government’s resources to those who know how to use them.
In the total absence of national leadership or direction, governors have had to take charge, leading Trump to lash out at them. In this, he resembles the insane U.S. Navy captain played by Humphrey Bogart in the 1954 film “The Caine Mutiny,” who is so paralyzed with fear during a storm that junior officers must take control of the ship. After they steer it into calmer waters, he accuses them of mutiny.
Trump has attacked governors in hard-hit states for imposing strict stay-at-home orders to slow the spread of the virus. He is fearful of how the economic impact from Covid-19 could affect his chances for reelection in November and wants the economy to reopen even before the disease has been contained or any treatment is available.
This has led, predictably, to small protests against state-level quarantine measures, staged by an extremist, zombie-like slice of Trump’s base. Trump has endorsed these demonstrations, which have been highlighted by groups funded by wealthy, right-wing industrialists eager for Americans to get back to work even if doing so will kill them.
Once again, the press has done Trump’s work for him by exaggerating the significance of the protests. In fact, Trump has long leveraged support from such fringe anti-government groups to control the media narrative.
These extremist Trump supporters firmly believe that government only helps people of color, and the Covid-19 pandemic, which has disproportionately harmed the African American community, has intensified and accelerated these racist, counterrevolutionary beliefs. These White Walker-like Trump extremists view measures to slow the Covid-19 contagion as government overreach designed to protect people who live in big cities — in other words, in their view, African Americans, liberals, and urban elites — and not them. Trump’s failures in dealing with the crisis only seem to reinforce their view that he is on their side.
JUST AS A MAJOR catastrophe exposes the truth about a leader, it also reveals the truth about societies and nations. Since 2016, the central question facing the United States has been whether it could survive Trump. So far, Covid-19 has shown that the answer is yes. Americans have overwhelmingly supported state-level efforts to curb the virus and have willingly sacrificed their own comfort and livelihoods to help the sick and the medical professionals fighting the disease.
For the most part, state and local officials have acted like adults, ignoring Trump and his threats while forging their own ad-hoc solutions. While some Southern Republican governors are eagerly pursuing a pro-Trump strategy of prematurely reopening their states, not all governors have responded along partisan lines. Maryland’s Republican governor, Larry Hogan, has issued strict stay-at-home orders, as have other Republicans like Ohio’s Mike DeWine and Idaho’s Brad Little.
Hogan has gone further than the others, working closely with the Democratic governor of Virginia and the Democratic mayor of Washington, D.C., to try to come up with a regional strategy to fight the pandemic. He has also started to craft his own foreign policy: On Monday, Hogan announced that Maryland bought 500,000 badly needed Covid-19 testing kits from South Korea.
Hogan and his wife, a Korean immigrant, worked out the deal with the help of South Korea’s ambassador to the United States. Hogan’s unilateral success in countering the severe testing shortage embarrassed Trump, so naturally, Trump attacked Hogan, charging on Monday night that the governor “needed to get a little knowledge,” about testing in Maryland. On Tuesday, Hogan responded, saying on ABC’s “The View” that Trump “seemed to be a little confused yesterday in his press conference. I have no idea what set him off.”
WITH THE COVID-19 CRISIS, Trump is exhibiting many of the same traits that led to his impeachment just four months ago, after he illegally sought to pressure Ukrainian leaders to intervene in the 2020 presidential election for his personal benefit. Trump abused his power by withholding crucial aid from Ukraine in an attempt to pressure the Ukrainians to spread lies about Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.
Now, he is abusing his power again by threatening to withhold badly needed resources and aid from governors if they don’t go along with his reckless demands to abandon their quarantine measures.
It is strange to remember that the United States had a chance to remove Trump from power just weeks before the full force of Covid-19 hit the United States. The Senate impeachment trial ended with Trump’s acquittal on February 5, just a month before the World Health Organization declared the existence of a global pandemic.
The Senate’s failure to convict Trump of impeachable offenses and remove him from office is now coming back to haunt the nation. We are left with a president whose own company tweeted out a video suggesting that getting drunk on vodka is the way to defeat Covid-19.
“I kind of got a cure for this,” professional golfer John Daly said in the video. “I only drink one drink a day — it just happens to be a bottle — of good, old Belvedere. You know, you just drink one of these a day. You know, sippy, sippy on a little McDonald’s Diet Coke. You know, wash it down pretty good. Never have a hangover. And that’s the way you kill this coronavirus, I believe.”
