Among the loan recipients, 48,922 reported zero as the number of jobs they would retain with the money, and 40,506 applicants appeared to leave that section blank. It appeared that 10 other companies received between $5 million and $10 million but reported retaining only one job with the money they received.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/07/06/sba-ppp-loans-data/?

Nearly 90,000 companies in the program took the aid without promising on their applications they would rehire workers or create jobs.

At 40 Wall Street, an office building Trump owns in Lower Manhattan, 22 companies received loans, for a combined total of at least $16.6 million. The recipients included mortgage giant Countrywide, the pro-Israel group Hadassah, the Girl Scout Council of Greater New York, and the engineering and consulting firm Atane, according to the data.

As part of its $660 billion Paycheck Protection Program, the SBA also handed out loans to firms owned by foreign companies and large chains backed by well-heeled Wall Street firms.

As part of its $660 billion small-business relief program, the SBA also handed out loans to private schools catering to elite clientele, firms owned by foreign companies and large chains backed by well-heeled Wall Street firms.

As David Dayen has told us repeatedly, there is no oversight chair still for the CARES Act...We begin to understand why...

Data released Monday by the Small Business Administration show that companies owned by several members of Congress and the law practice that represented President Trump were among the hundreds of thousands of firms that received federal stimulus aid from the agency.

As previously touted by Trump, the US economy opens and building is at the top of the list...A pic from the recent progress

#pups4peace

Ken-Dogger: Morning Bobo, how you doing?

Bobo: Doing okay I guess, just smelling the flowers

KD: They do smell nice don’t they, but you love smelling stuff.

B: I know it’s my go-to strategy for staying safe. I stick with the sweet things.

KD: Sweet things may not always be safe you know.

B: IKR, that Fifi, she’s sweet, but the lady has a wicked streak.

KD: A little secret, most of the femmes do, they just hide it better than we do.

B: Got it, stored it…Sweet things rock.

If I can't watch baseball, I'll do the next best thing...Bull Durham is on...Let's get quantum physical

Not only were millions of people coming off of payrolls (Many states do tax unemployment but some, like California and New Jersey, do not), but reduced economic activity was crushing sales tax revenues as well as use taxes like road tolls. States were staring at hundreds of billions of dollars in shortfalls, and unlike the federal government, they could not borrow their way out of trouble or keep their budgets unbalanced.

The goal was to use the unemployment system to keep people safe, alive and afloat while the country tried to manage the outbreak. (The PPP also paid businesses to keep people on payroll, but unemployment was the more dominant mechanism here.)

What the CARES Act did not do was protect cities and states who were about to lost giant chunks of tax revenue as a result of this plan.

#economics

David Dayen in his Unsanitized Report...

While the Feds decided no national response was going to be just fine, they also choked the states via the CARES Act

But it’s important to understand the dynamics underlying this second half of the first wave, and why we failed where so many other developed countries succeeded. It goes back to the CARES Act.

The legislation, as you recall, paid people for staying at home during the lockdowns, which was an important step at that time.

One: Wait for it … Donald Trump! Our president could make up facts on multiple fronts, but he can’t lie his way out of an in-your-face pandemic that finally demolishes his pretension to leadership.

Now: Will Joe Biden seize the moment? Will we, in the spirit of FDR, "make him do it?"
~ ROBERT KUTTNER

Follow Robert Kuttner on Twitter
Robert Kuttner’s latest book is
The Stakes: 2020 and the Survival of American Democracy.

Four: For-Profit Drugs and Vaccines. They were always a costly, inefficient disgrace. COVID could stimulate putting all this in the public and nonprofit sector.

Three: The Sheer Economic Waste of Business as Usual. Turns out we don’t need all those office towers and malls.

Two: Structural Racism. It took a pandemic to finally create a national, multiracial movement for revolutionary change.

God help working parents when schools open with split shifts alternating between live and virtual. We need a reliable, comprehensive child care system—decently paid, too.

Six: The Value of Public Institutions. The private sector just can’t fix this, much less the profit motive. It’s all about social solidarity.

Five: How Wall Street Always Wins. Even in a pandemic, Wall Street profits while others suffer. Maybe COVID will trigger long-overdue reform.

Nine: Climate. The air is a lot cleaner, thanks to reduced economic activity. Imagine what we could do, proactively, without the perversity of a pandemic-induced depression.

Eight: Low-Wage Work. We knew that low-wage work was a travesty. COVID has put a human face on grossly underpaid "essential workers." During the pandemic, and afterward, they need substantial raises.

Seven: The Crisis of Child Care and Care Workers.

COVID seems in the category of pandemic that could change everything. Herewith, a list of realities demanding change that COVID has thrown into relief:

Ten: Health Disparities. Some 40 million workers will lose their employer-provided health coverage, just when they need health care most. We always knew our system was nuts. COVID provides the exclamation point.

#economics #equality

Robert Kuttner in The American Prospect newsletter on 10 Good Things from COVID-19...

Sometimes, epidemics create massive social and political change; sometimes not.

The Black Death of the 14th century so decimated the European population that it created worker shortages and hastened the end of serfdom. But the great flu pandemic of 1918-1919, which caused about 700,000 U.S. deaths, changed just about nothing.

We just liked the house, and it felt like home the moment we walked through the (front) door. A Confederate general would have nothing to say about that decision. For too long, black bodies have been controlled; we weren’t going to let men set in stone and dead for over a century make our choices. Monument Avenue must be for everyone.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/07/06/monument-avenue-must-be-everyone/

#politics

Melody Barnes, who worked in Obama admin, on living in Richmond on Monument Ave.

My husband and I live on Monument Avenue, near the Lee statue, though some of our friends wonder why. We didn’t move here to be close to the statues but despite them — and the racial covenants that once would have prevented us from doing so.

Whatever the excesses of some on the fringes of the protests, Biden himself has supported the removal only of monuments to Confederate leaders, and this attack on Biden’s depiction of the Declaration of Independence only further illustrates how pathetically the Republican Party is scrounging to portray him in that way.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/07/06/twisted-revealing-gop-attack-joe-biden/