{"id":175493,"date":"2020-12-21T12:00:26","date_gmt":"2020-12-21T12:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=175493"},"modified":"2020-12-20T07:48:28","modified_gmt":"2020-12-20T07:48:28","slug":"how-u-s-government-paid-off-its-super-rich-in-order-to-pass-its-coronavirus-relief-laws","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2020\/12\/how-u-s-government-paid-off-its-super-rich-in-order-to-pass-its-coronavirus-relief-laws\/","title":{"rendered":"How U.S. Government Paid-Off Its Super-Rich in Order to Pass Its Coronavirus-Relief Laws"},"content":{"rendered":"

19 Dec 2020 – <\/em>On December 14th, two excellent news-reports were belatedly published about some of the massive corruption that was behind the initial U.S. federal coronavirus-relief law, the CARES Act, and about U.S. Senators of both Parties now intending to include such corruption in the next one. (NOTE: This present news-report may be viewed as a confirmation, and a further explanation, of what I was predicting in my article on April 22nd, \u201cWhy Post-Coronavirus America Will Have Massive Poverty\u201d<\/a>. What that was predicting is being confirmed in the two recent news-reports that are cited here.)<\/p>\n

\n

Regarding the CARES Act, J. Robert Downen headlined in the Houston Chronicle<\/em> on December 14th, \u201cJoel Osteen\u2019s Lakewood Church got $4.4 million in federal PPP loans\u201d<\/a>, and he reported that \u201cLakewood received a $4.4 million loan through the Paycheck Protection Program, a part of the federal CARES Act that provided loans to pay employee wages or for other basic operational costs such as utilities. The program marked the first time federal lawmakers allowed for direct financial assistance to houses of worship. \u2026 More than 1,000 religious groups in Texas received hundreds of millions of dollars to retain a combined 59,000 jobs, the Chronicle<\/em> reported in July.\u201d<\/p>\n

At around the start of the coronavirus-epidemic, the Texas state government had announced, on 24 January 2020, that \u201cOur workforce continues to grow and is now 14,188,100 Texans strong\u201d<\/a>, and this means that the CARES Act\u2019s breaking-of-precedent (\u201cthe first time federal lawmakers allowed for direct financial assistance to houses of worship\u201d) was helping to retain employment for one two-hundred-and-fortieth of employed Texans, and therefore it couldn\u2019t even possibly have produced any significant impact upon the rate of unemployment in Texas, but only improved the re-election chances of public officials in Texas, by its purchasing from Texas\u2019s preachers (who have lots of political clout in that state) a more favorable attitude toward those incumbent governmental office-holders, who had provided this largesse, upon their special interest.<\/p>\n

Downen\u2019s article also listed 16 Texas corporations (such as \u201cPercheron Holdings LLC\u201d) which had been given federal loans of at least $10,000,000 each; and, so, the federal Government\u2019s largesse wasn\u2019t only<\/em> to \u2018non-profits\u2019, nor to religious organizations.<\/p>\n

However, if the actual intention<\/em> of the CARES Act had been to help workers instead of to help their bosses, then nothing would have been funneled through the corporation down to its workers, but everything would instead have been paid directly<\/em> to each individual worker, and any corporation that was suffering losses during the epidemic could separately have applied to the U.S. Small Business Administration after-the-fact, for loan-assistance, in order for that corporation (or church, or etc.) to be able to stay in business, if they otherwise<\/em> would have gone bust.<\/p>\n

In other words: all CARES-Act monies that went to corporations were funneling their benefits to workers by way of and through<\/em> their employers, and thus were really political pay-offs<\/em> to the richest, in order for political incumbents to be able to retain their seats as governmental officials. A \u2018democracy\u2019 like this is actually a kleptocracy. And that news-report in the Houston Chronicle<\/em> appeared only after<\/em> the 2020 \u2018election\u2019, not<\/em> before it. So: it was no help to voters in preparation for the November \u2018elections\u2019.<\/p>\n

Also on December 14th, the great investigative journalist David Sirota\u2019s blog headlined \u201cSCOOP: Stimulus Bill Bails Out Defense Contractors, Denies Direct Payments to Families\u201d<\/a> and reported that, \u201cBuried in the new 525-page stimulus bill is a provision granting military contractors benefits that are being denied to workers and small businesses across the country.\u201d He and his reporter Julia Rock opened by noting that, \u201cEarlier this year, Republican senators slammed<\/a> the idea of spending money to pay Americans not to work during the pandemic. Only a few months later, a group of GOP senators has signed onto stimulus legislation that would authorize the government to pay idle defense contractors to not work, even as those contractors rack up big profits<\/a> during the pandemic. Meanwhile, the same bill excludes<\/a> bipartisan provisions authorizing direct payments to millions of Americans struggling to survive.\u201d They reported that Democratic Party leaders in Congress (especially West Virginia\u2019s U.S. Senator Joe Manchin) were quietly working in the background in order to be able to pass this new corruption into law, and were no less corrupt than their bolder Republican colleagues were in in whoring themselves to \u2018defense\u2019 contractors \u2014 the \u201cMilitary-Industrial Complex\u201d or \u201cMIC,\u201d which basically writes America\u2019s international sanctions, and other U.S. foreign policies, so as to maximize the global sales of U.S.-made military weaponry.<\/p>\n

All of this news is \u201cbelated,\u201d however, unless the major American \u2018news\u2019-media, such as the Washington Post<\/em> and the New York Times<\/em> and CNN and Fox and ABC and CBS and NBC and The Atlantic<\/em> \u2014 all of which are owned and controlled by America\u2019s fewer than 1,000 billionaires \u2014 will decide (which they never yet have done) to make a public issue out of the real issue here, which is the question of whether or not funneling public benefits through employers constitutes anything else than the corruption of any democracy and the installation of an aristocracy of the super-rich replacing that democracy of the people by a dictatorship of the aristocrats. This is a fundamental issue, and it is always being simply avoided, banned to publish. (In fact, a recent law-review article, which was titled \u201cThe \u2018Small Business\u2019 Myth of the Paycheck Protection Program\u201d<\/a>, actually defended what had happened by saying that that program, which is commonly acronymed \u201cPPP,\u201d had been sold to the public as being intended to protect workers in small businesses, but never was intended to do that. This article claimed that \u201cThe misinformed condemnation of large companies obscured the fact that Congress had designed a flawed program with limited ability to help small businesses.\u201d But it wasn\u2019t \u2018misinformed\u2019, and these weren\u2019t merely \u2018flaws\u2019. In fact, lobbyists for huge corporations had heavily lobbied and paid Representatives and Senators to lard the entire CARES Act with huge give-aways to large corporations and to the investors in those corporations<\/a>; and, as a result, Wall Street boomed even while unemployment soared. \u201cCongress had designed a flawed program\u201d because<\/em> they were being paid<\/em> to produce<\/em> those \u201cflaws\u201d in it. Academia is, itself<\/em>, often either grossly incompetent, or else part of<\/em> the corruption, and therefore it should be viewed as being part of the \u2018news\u2019-media, itself \u2014 in other words: propaganda.)<\/p>\n

Perhaps all of America\u2019s \u2018news\u2019-media ought to be nationalized and donated to a public trust which is headed by a board of directors which consists of 100 certifiably low-income Americans who are otherwise (than their being in the lowest-wealth category) selected randomly<\/em> from the general population, and who will, then, in turn, select and fire the top officials of all of the nation\u2019s largest twenty media corporations, so as to make the news-media accurately inform the general public, instead of to continue deceiving the public in the ways that the super-rich \u2014 both liberal and conservative \u2014 collectively want<\/em> the public to be<\/em> deceived. Maybe that would do it. Maybe that would restore democracy, to the United States of America. Democracy is impossible without there being an accurately informed public. And, in the U.S., the public is instead systematically deceived, so as to hide<\/em> from them what the billionaires of both of the nation\u2019s political Parties want the public not<\/em> to know, or not<\/em> to understand. That can\u2019t be a democracy.<\/p>\n

In an aristocracy, everything is just a racket. Even a covid-19 relief bill is.<\/p>\n

___________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of\u00a0 <\/em>They\u2019re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010<\/a>,<\/em> of\u00a0<\/em>Christ\u2019s Ventriloquists: The Event that Created Christianity<\/a>, and\u00a0of<\/em>\u00a0Feudalism, Fascism, Libertarianism and Economics<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On December 14th, two excellent news-reports were belatedly published about some of the massive corruption that was behind the initial U.S. federal coronavirus-relief law, the CARES Act, and about U.S. Senators of both Parties now intending to include such corruption in the next one. In an aristocracy, everything is just a racket. Even a covid-19 relief bill is.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":112456,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[867,1829,550,1868,70],"class_list":["post-175493","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-anglo-america","tag-anglo-america","tag-coronavirus","tag-corruption","tag-covid-19","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175493","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=175493"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175493\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/112456"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=175493"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=175493"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=175493"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}