Source: The Center Square Staff
The federal Payment Protection Program established in 2020 to help small businesses and protect the jobs of their workers eventually were allowed to include unions, and millions in forgivable loans ended up with them and other organizations.
Eligibility and timing are in question for many, according to a new report from the Freedom Foundation. Nationally, labor organizations received $36.7 million in PPP funds, and $1.2 million ended up in the hands of Pennsylvania unions.
“Disconcertingly, the apparently inappropriate PPP loans may have been granted due to fraudulent loan applications or other questionable conduct by applicants or the private lenders operating under the SBA’s delegated authority,” wrote Maxford Nelsen, report author and director of labor policy at the Freedom Foundation.
PPP eligibility expanded from small businesses and nonprofits in March 2020 to include labor unions and building corporations by March 2021. But many unions applied for funding before they could legitimately receive the largesse.
Teachers’ unions and unions for state and local government employees across the country received funding, even though they were not affected by the sorts of economic shocks private businesses were.
“This was a complete breakdown in how the program was supposed to work,” Nelsen said.
As most unions did not qualify for PPP loans before legislation was signed into law on March 11, 2021, it wasn’t a matter of misfiled paperwork. They did not qualify for program funds at all in the time period when they applied. As the paperwork went through private lenders and not the Small Business Administration, applications are not publicly available. Thus, it’s unclear whether private lenders failed in understanding program qualifications or if unions misrepresented how the funds would be used.
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“It’s become pretty clear in the year since the program was launched that the SBA did not have proper controls in place to ensure that the funds were only going to eligible recipients,” Nelsen said.
“Loans determined through the loan review process to have been made to ineligible borrowers will not be forgiven,” SBA Administrator Jovita Carranza wrote after a critical investigator general report.
Yet the Freedom Foundation noted that $24.2 million of the $36.7 million in union loans have already been forgiven.
And so the corruption continues…
I would think that more people would be more intelligent – more awakened – than this. Consider. Either there is ‘a God’ – and all that that factor implies, of a larger reality than just this one that we perceive through our physical senses – or there is not. If there is not – and thus no real purpose to life, beyond just in and for itself only, as an accident of Nature – then nothing really matters anyway, and one might just as well live strictly for oneself as not. But if there is, however – and there is considerable evidence in to that fact by now – then certain things follow. It follows, for one thing, that there is perfect Justice in the experience, for there would be Plan in and Purpose to the whole exercise. (Think of Life as a school, for us ‘pieces of the continent, parts of the main’ of our Creator Source, learning lessons along The Way.) So there is no real ‘getting away with’ anything. It is all recorded, and ‘played back’ to us at our next stage of development, for us to see how we did in that crack at our lesson book. So it is childish for all this corruption crap to continue. Time to wake up; and graduate to the next level of our education. As befits our better natures, as the ‘spiritual beings having a human experience’ that we are.
Graduate school: Here we come. Those who are ready TO graduate, that is to say. For the other incarnate souls amongst us: Better luck next time around. In this (spiritual equivalent of) elementary school for gods in the making.