There was a story in the newspaper today about how Shake Shack is returning $10 million dollars they received under the Paycheck Protection Program. If you recall, this was part of the COVID stimulus package. $350 billion dollars was set aside to give low interest loans to “small businesses” in order to keep their employees on payroll for ten weeks. The loan would forgiven if those “small businesses” didn’t lay anyone off.
To be clear, “small business” wasn’t defined in any way that makes sense by design. Since our congress is bought and paid for by big corporations, these “oversights” are always going to be baked in any economic relief package that ever gets passed.
Make no mistake, the Paycheck Protection Program is one that was designed for big corporations to exploit on top of probably trillions of dollars in other relief that was specifically designed for them.
Shake Shack just admitted that they never needed the money. Just like Kelly Leoffler didn’t need the money she made from her insider trading. Neither did Martha Stewart when she did her insider trading. This is unmitigated, irrational greed and it will always happen if it’s allowed to.
As long as our congress is bought and paid for, it will always happen. I’ve said this a thousand times; it was not an accident that 95% of Obama’s recovery went to the top 1% any more than Shake Shack was “accidentally” eligible for cashing in on the Paycheck Protection Program.
The problem is that only half the country cares when these things happen at any given time. The half that didn’t care from 2009 – 2016 suddenly care now. We can’t keep doing this.
Corporate CEOs don’t bother actually building companies anymore. Their only goal is to make an extra nickel today. Meat processing plants all around the country are starting to shut down because they didn’t want to spend a relatively tiny amount of money to protect their workers and their customers from this virus because that was going to cost them a nickel yesterday, and they can’t have that. So now they’re shut down completely, which should cost them exponentially more than yesterday’s nickel, but it won’t because congress is going to bail them out. There is literally no incentive for companies not to grab the extra nickel every single day that they can.
No (for example) McDonald’s franchisee should have been eligible to dip into the Paycheck Protection funds, but I promise you that hundreds did. Most people think that McDonald’s is a fast food business. It’s really a real estate holding company. Virtually every McDonald’s location sits on land that is owned by the corporate entity so every franchisee pays rent to that entity. Corporate should be figuring a way to bail out their tenants, since losing all of them overnight would probably cost more than keeping them alive. They’re sitting on hundreds of billions of dollars worth of real estate. If anyone doesn’t need a bailout, it’s a chain. And any chain that truly needs a bailout shouldn’t get one, since their executive board didn’t bother with shit like keeping enough liquidity to weather a storm. If we let enough companies go under, guess what will happen? Yeah, we will get business practices that don’t revolve around “a nickel today”.
This behavior isn’t just being incentivized by corporate owned federal legislators. It’s happening on every level of government. I remember 25 years ago or so, a 10 or 15 story building went up in the downtown area of the city where I grew up. That building stayed empty for about 15 years because the owner wanted one single tenant to rent the whole thing. Guess who took those losses while that building sat empty because the owner didn’t want to rent to multiple tenants? The taxpayers in that community. That son of a bitch real estate owner wrote off the losses on that building every single fucking year it stayed empty. That happens all across the country. We privatize the profits and socialize the losses and then on top of that, we fork out the big bucks for bailouts. We could force real estate developers to keep lowering rent prices until they get tenants in order to receive those right downs, but we don’t because they own the politicians. So they can hold out for the right tenant at the right price, thereby making it more difficult for people to become business owners.
Very little of the corruption that’s happening with Trump is actually new. What’s new is that this administration isn’t going to the pains of making it impossible for us to see the extent of the corporate welfare. Again, 95% of Obama’s recovery going to the top 1% was just about as savage as it gets. His administration was smart enough to hide the lion’s share of bailouts in a myriad of complex fuckery like giving the banks that took your house money from the federal reserve (your money) for literally nothing and letting them charge you 24% interest on your credit cards. You created the liquidity that keeps the banks running, and you were told that they paid back the bailout money so everything was swell, even though you were still bailing them out and continue to do so at this very moment.
Unfortunately, Obama left America’s cupboards bare. We literally can’t afford to do this again. Half of Americans were left without $400 in the bank after the last economic crash. This one is going to push them over the edge. Forty years of whittling away at the working class’s ability to save any money has finally come to a head.
We have to stop the ‘a nickel today’ approach to business once and for all, and the only way to do it is to let some percentage of business fail so that we can do a reset.
Here’s what’s going to happen once this virus is neutralized: all of your favorite local restaurants will be forever gone. The owners of those buildings are going to keep them empty until they can get a chain to rent those spaces. That is going to be the opposite of what needs to happen to rebuild our economy. Those commercial rent costs need to be allowed to plummet to pave the way for hundreds of thousands of small businesses to start up. This is precisely the reason why I’ve always been anti-Starbucks. They drove out small businesses and turned those business owners into employees. It’s fucking terrible for our society.
We cannot continue this concentrated ownership of our country and expect to survive. Concentrated ownership necessitates more corporate welfare and bigger bailouts.
And we can’t keep being outraged only when the other party does it. This practice tells our politicians that we’re not outraged at all. Actually, Bill Maher straight up told us not to be outraged in this seven minute long “okay boomer”:
We cannot keep doing what we’ve been doing and expecting different results. Bill Maher’s lunacy would just keep the ‘a nickel today’ business practices going in perpetuity. We can all start by not voting for corporate funded candidates in any election when we have another choice.
We’re stuck in the presidential election now, so voting for Biden is the only thing that makes sense to minimize the damage. But make no mistake; this presidential election is about minimizing damage. It’s not about improving anything in any sort of meaningful way since Biden is promising to keep the Obama years going. We had our chance for real change in the primary. Sadly, we didn’t get it so we all have to vote for Biden now.
But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t fight to make him better. And no, doing so doesn’t undermine his candidacy. If Trump were smart, he could do the opposite of what Obama did right now and take this election in a landslide. He could advocate for a 1 year universal basic income of $2,000 for every individual (so 4k for a family), automatically enroll anyone who gets laid off in Medicare and it would all be over for Biden.
Fortunately, he’s not smart so we need to make Biden a more populist candidate who understands that this economy needs to be rebuilt from the bottom up. If he doesn’t start speaking directly to the plight that working people find themselves in right now, he leaves room for Trump to do it.
More importantly than the presidential election, almost all of you have the chance to vote for local and state level candidates who aren’t funded by the corporations who always rob you.
It’s really time to understand the power that we actually have as voters, and to do way more homework (and legwork) than we’re used to doing at election time. This ‘a nickel a day’ corporate culture we have is one we’ve created by telling us that Bill Maher’s nonsense is reasonable.
STOP IT! We can change things if we understand that this is within our collective power.
