“Serious questions remain about whether PPP funds were equitably distributed to minority-owned businesses, and there is an alarming rate of small-dollar loans.”
White House senior adviser Jared Kushner attends a meeting with President Donald Trump and several CEOs of major banks discussing the coronavirus response during a meeting in the Cabinet Room at the White House on March 11, 2020 in Washington, D.C.Tuesday, July 7
The Kushner family, large chains backed by private equity, Wall Street investors, Kanye West, members of Congress, and the law firm that represented President Donald Trump during the Mueller probe were among the thousands of beneficiaries of a Covid-19 relief program aimed at rescuing struggling small businesses and keeping workers employed, according to new federal data released Monday.
While the Small Business Administration’s (SBA) data disclosure reveals just a fraction of recipients of forgivable Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans, critics voiced concern that large, wealthy firms were able to readily access millions of dollars in relief funds as more vulnerable companies frequently received less money than they applied for—or nothing at all.
“To raise eyebrows even more,” Arensmeyer added, “more than 1,200 of those businesses received less than $100—with some receiving loans as low as $1.00! Underfunding has been a pervasive problem for borrowers since PPP launched.”
As the American Prospect‘s David Dayen pointed out on Twitter, it’s not as if the $660 billion program was not sufficiently funded to provide small businesses with the relief they requested. At the previous PPP loan application deadline on June 30, more than $130 billion in funding remained in the tank. Last month, Congress extended the application deadline to August 8.
“The problem, in other words, is the incompetent filtering of the program through private sector banks because we’ve hollowed out public sector benefit delivery,” wrote Dayen.
I don't really care about PPP shaming and dunking, all that does is give people a laugh without changing anything. I do care about businesses unable to get loans or more than a *dollar* in funding when there's $130 billion still left in the kitty. pic.twitter.com/OpSKkfqvy5
— David Dayen (@ddayen) July 6, 2020
The SBA’s disclosure—which included only the names of beneficiaries who received at least $150,000 in PPP funding—came in response to widespread outrage over the Trump administration’s effort to keep information about loan recipients secret.
A searchable database of PPP beneficiaries can be viewed here.
As the Washington Post reported, “companies owned by the family of Jared Kushner… received several PPP loans. Princeton Forrestal LLC, a Kushner Cos. affiliate that bought the Princeton Marriott Hotel in 2018, received a loan of between $1 million and $2 million.”
Trump-connected lobbyists have raked in $10 billion in Covid-19 aid for corporate clients “The crisis offered an especially lucrative opportunity for those lobbyists who enjoy close ties to President Donald Trump and his administration—and they seized it.”
Meanwhile, Arensmeyer of Small Business Majority said around 25% of the companies in his group’s network “have reported receiving a lower loan than what they requested.”
“While many business owners received no explanation for why they did not receive the full loan amount,” Arensmeyer added, “a number of other businesses have reported that lenders and the SBA either failed to catch and rectify errors on applications, or businesses were told to accept less than what they would qualify for to move things through the process quickly.”
“The survival of America’s small businesses depends on the full disclosure of PPP’s successes and failures,” said Arensmeyer. “Sunlight has always been the best disinfectant, and we cannot allow those small businesses that were grossly underfunded or disadvantaged by the program to disappear and not have their stories told and rectified.”
This article published by Common Dreams on July 7, 2020, here…
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