America Closes Down -- Revolution Draws Closer

 SiAmerica Closes Down -- Revolution Draws Closer

People abandoned by government while monopolies take over!

Business owners plead for help as Covid-19 precautions destroys business as the wealthy prosper.

"Why aren't you angry?" 

- WARNING - Strong language!

Posted December 06, 2020

 

The Jimmy Dore Show

Why the Trillion-Dollar Coronavirus Bailout Benefited the Rich

"Time" -  - June 18, 2020 - When Congress passed the $2.2 trillion dollar Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES) in late March, lawmakers were quick to tout its egalitarian guardrails.

Unlike the 2008 bailout packages, which funneled hundreds of billions to Wall Street and padded executives already-cushy pay packages, the CARES Act was shot through with provisions that lawmakers said would ensure that federal funds actually went to those in need. Any money loaned through the new $500 billion Federal Reserve program, for example, came with oversight measures, limits on stock buybacks and caps on executive compensation.

But nearly three months after the CARES Act’s passage, none of those guardrails appear to have made much of a difference. The disbursement of the money so far has been riddled with complaints and analyses showing it has disproportionately gone to the wealthiest corporations and individuals.

“No lessons have been learned [from the 2008 bailout]—it certainly seems that way,” says Neil Barofsky, who oversaw the Troubled Asset Relief Program as Inspector General under the Obama administration. Those much-talked-about guardrails that lawmakers imposed on the $500 billion Federal Reserve program, for example, have been mostly irrelevant so far. By June 17, the Treasury had committed to spending just $222 billion, less than half of the funds it was allocated. The rest of the roughly $1.7 trillion allotted through the CARES Act was not, for the most part, subject to the same restrictions.

TIME’s analysis of just three pots of money allocated in the CARES Act—the programs buttressing small businesses, healthcare organizations, and institutions of higher education—indicates that the inequitable distribution was of a myriad legislative and regulatory design flaws. While lawmakers included language in the law that explicitly directed funds to those most in need, they often designed programs that were not set up to carry out those intentions. “The safeguards in place are certainly not foolproof,” says Philip Mattera, Research Director at Good Jobs First, a non-profit organization tracking the recipients of the CARES Act.

While few dispute that an ambitious federal bailout package was necessary to help the country confront dueling economic and public health crises, it’s clear now that Congress’s massive outlay of cash has been often inefficient, helping to exacerbate the already-yawning wealth gap in the United States while leaving the neediest in the lurch during the worst unemployment crisis since the Great Depression. This package, devised and promoted as a mechanism to alleviate inequitable suffering during the pandemic, may end up playing a role in exacerbating it in the immediate future.

“All of this is going to tilt towards the biggest and most established companies and the smaller businesses and regular people are going to get left behind,” says Barofsky. “Because that’s what always happens.”

Small, minority-owned businesses struggled to access the Paycheck Protection Program

The Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) has become one of the most heavily scrutinized components of the CARES Act. It was the first program to launch and has spent the most money. It has also become a case study in the ways in which the law has fallen woefully short in distributing relief equitably.

The concept of PPP itself earned broad praise: the program was designed to offer small businesses federally-backed loans that would transform into grants (that do not have to be paid back), so long as the majority of the funds were used to keep workers on payroll. But the implementation of the program, says John Arensmeyer, the CEO of the Small Business Majority, an advocacy group that represents more than 65,000 independent companies, was structurally flawed. Because PPP required banks to act as intermediaries, it created a dynamic wherein larger, more established companies—often with existing relationships and lines of credit with banks—received funds before smaller operations, who feared their collapse was imminent.

“We never felt that running it through banks as intermediaries was the way to go,” says Arensmeyer. “We really felt the larger grant program would be more effective.”

The law’s definitions were also problematic. While PPP defined “small businesses” as entities with up to 500 employees, the law included a provision pertaining to the food and hospitality sectors wherein companies with individual locations of fewer than 500 people were still eligible. That meant that large, multi-million dollar chains, like Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse and Shake Shack were able to apply, often edging out the smaller mom-and-pop enterprises that the law was touted as propping up. (Both Ruth’s Chris and Shake Shack returned their loans after a wave of public criticism.)

Finally, lawmakers failed to allocate even close to enough money to meet small businesses’ needs. When PPP first launched on April 3, the $350 billion fund was depleted within two weeks. The limited supply meant that small-business owners like Tara Williams-Harrington, who owns a Newark franchise of Bricks 4 Kidz, which holds various classes for children using LEGO® bricks, were shut out of the first round. (Williams-Harrington received a loan in May, after Congress allocated more money to PPP.)

In a controversial move, the Treasury Department has refused to release recipients of the program, making it impossible to fully assess which enterprises benefitted most. But independent analyses indicate that the smallest companies, and particularly minority-owned shops, were the least likely to receive PPP funds. A survey of African-American and Latinx workers conducted by the Global Strategy Group released May 13—after the second round of funding—found that just 12 percent of workers received the assistance they requested. A later survey from Arensmeyer’s group showed that, while 63 percent of Black and Latino small business owners sought and received financing, three in 10 did not receive the amount they requested.

The program “is a reflection of the inequity that already existed and that’s playing out in a crisis situation,” Arensmeyer says. While many of the businesses that received help needed it, he adds, the way the funds were distributed was unfair. “The fact [is] that it left more underserved businesses behind, that has widened that gap.”

This outcome, lawmakers say, was not their intention. The CARES Act specifies that lenders prioritize underserved markets, including female and minority owned businesses. The problem is that there was neither an enforcement mechanism nor a system of incentives to ensure that banks actually prioritized such businesses. A May 8 report by the Inspector General for the Small Business Administration found that the organization did not comply with this guidance. As a result, the Inspector General wrote, “these borrowers, including rural, minority and women owned businesses, may not have received the loans as intended.”

Barofsky says this scenario was a classic example of Washington repeating past mistakes. “We learned from [2008] that when you rely on private institutions such as banks to carry out public policy it’s not going to happen unless you build in requirements and incentives,” he explained, noting that TARP implemented similar provisions for homeowners, only to see those efforts fall short. “Rather than learn that lesson…Treasury and SBA really just ignored it and thats one of the reasons the program rolled out the way it did.”

The wealthiest universities were eligible for the most aid—leaving community colleges in the lurch

The CARES Act directed $14 billion in grants to universities and other institutions of higher learning, the majority of which—$12.5 billion—went towards colleges and universities to assist with student financial aid. Institutions that received federal funding were required to spend at least 50% on students; the remainder could be used to reduce pandemic-related costs.

But so far, most students have yet to receive a windfall, in part because — like PPP — the program was structurally flawed. In this case, one major problem was the formula, determined by Congress, dictating how the Department of Education disburse the funds. The formula relied on the number of full-time Pell Grant recipients physically on campus prior to the pandemic. While that data point sounded good on paper, it had the effect of disproportionately rewarding wealthier institutions, which tend to have more full-time students and graduate students than poorer institutions like community colleges, says Ben Miller, a postsecondary education expert at the progressive think tank Center for American Progress.

“A majority of students at community colleges are part time,” Miller says. “So when the calculation uses full time equivalent enrollment, that substantially shrinks the enrollment in community colleges which mean they receive fewer dollars.”

New York University, for instance, which in 2017 had a $4 billion dollar endowment, received $25.6 million from the CARES Act—more than every CUNY community college except for the Manhattan campus. Both Harvard and Yale Universities were slated to receive nearly $9 million and $7 million, respectively. Both Ivy League institutions declined to accept the funds after a public backlash. But their refusal leaves the Department of Education in a bind.

“Given how Congress wrote the law, we are currently assessing our options for redirecting this money that goes either unclaimed or returned by institutions,” Angela Morabito, a spokeswoman for the Department of Education, said in a statement to TIME. The funds that Harvard and Yale refused have yet to be reallocated.

On May 15, House Democrats passed a bill that would amend the formula, distributing funds by total headcount, rather than full time enrollment. The bill as a whole has virtually no chance of passing the Republican-led Senate, although the fate of that individual provision is unclear. Other critics point at Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s April guidance, which decreed that certain students, including recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Program (DACA) were ineligible for aid. (The California community college system is currently suing DeVos over this matter.)

Hospitals serving wealthier patients got more aid than those serving the poor

The CARES Act allocated $175 billion to the Department of Health and Human Services to help prop up hospitals and health care providers, but that program, like the one designed to serve students, relied on a flawed formula. In this case, the formula was determined by HHS, not Congress. But it still resulted in unintended outcomes, says Colleen Meiman, a policy adviser at the National Association for Community Health Centers who previously worked at HHS. Because the formula relied on net patient revenue, it meant that wealthier hospitals, where patients are more likely covered by private insurance, received more funds than community health centers and hospitals in poor regions, where patients are more likely to be on Medicaid.

A May 13 Kaiser Foundation study found that hospitals with the lowest share of revenue from private insurance received half as much per hospital bed as their counterparts with the highest share. “All things being equal,” the study found, “hospitals with more market power can command higher reimbursement rates from private insurers and therefore received a larger share of the grant funds under the formula HHS used.”

The fund set aside $10 billion for hospitals and health centers in rural areas, but the results were perverse: community health centers, particularly larger outposts in urban areas hit hard by COVID, like New York City, that were ineligible for other programs like the PPP, were less likely to receive federal aide than wealthy hospitals in places where the rate of infection was lower. Meiman, who says she has been in frequent touch with HHS voicing her concerns over formula, says she’d perplexed that nothing has changed. “Its HHS’s responsibility to look at these discrepancies and try and even them out. I’m frustrated.”

An HHS spokesperson said a “number of approaches” were considered, and these were adapted after consultations across both the department and broader presidential administration.

Most hospitals nationwide stopped elective surgeries—a significant source of revenue—to handle COVID patients. But Karyn Schwartz, a senior fellow at Kaiser who wrote the study, notes they were the ones “ probably better positioned to absorb some of the shock from coronavirus” than those that received less funding.

On June 9, after facing pressure from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, HHS announced an additional $25 billion will be distributed to healthcare organizations, with a priority on providers that either did not receive funds in the initial round or serve a disproportionate number of patients reliant on Medicaid. But Meiman says that doesn’t fix the problem. The eligibility requirements mean community health centers, particularly those who already received funds, “won’t get a penny,” she says.

“I cant tell you how many phone calls I got from health centers saying, ‘They are going to give us some funding finally,'” Meiman says, “And I had to say, I’m very sorry but read the fine print. You’re not eligible for any of this.”

Hundreds of billions have yet to be disbursed

Almost three months after President Trump signed the CARES Act into law, some of the most anticipated programs are finally getting off the ground. On June 15, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin announced lenders could begin registering for the Main Street Lending Program (MSLP). Like PPP, the MSLP will administer federally-backed loans, but expands the eligibility requirements to encompass businesses with up to 15,000 employees or $5 billion in revenue. (Unlike PPP, the loans are not forgivable). While the program is not yet operational, the use of banks as intermediaries could potentially mean a repeat of the anger that surrounded PPP recipients.

“Once you start getting into the ideas of awards without formulas, lobbying and influence comes into play,” says Mattera, who is tracking the money for the Good Jobs First project.

Democrats are already taking issue with several MSLP provisions, including one that allows companies that have already laid off or furloughed workers to apply for MSLP, and another that fails to require that companies keep workers on payroll to receive the federal funds. (According to the latest Federal Reserve guidance, companies must only demonstrate a “commercially reasonable” and “good-faith effort” to keep payroll intact.)

What’s clear now is that neither the pandemic itself nor the economic recession will be short-lived. And as the debate over another relief package to combat these woes intensifies in Washington, the inequitably disbursement of cash in the first round could soon take center stage.

 

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See also ==== Federal Reserve to lend additional $1 trillion a day to large banks   Percent of wages currently subsidized by governments due to COVID: Japan: 100% for small businesses; 80% for large firms Netherlands: Up to 90% Norway: Up to 90% Germany: Up to 87% France: Up to 84% Italy: 80% United Kingdom: Up to 80% Canada: Up to 75% United States: 0% — Public Citizen (@Public_Citizen) November 30, 2020 US Billionaires Have Increased Their Riches By $1 Trillion During the Pandemic   Regular person goes broke in the pandemic: 4-hour bread lines and homelessness Company goes bankrupt in the pandemic: employees get laid off and the CEO gets a seven-figure bonus (not hyperbole - here's a partial list of companies that have done just that): pic.twitter.com/7ODFVwO5N7 — Dan Price (@DanPriceSeattle) December 4, 2020

lencing dissent: WikiLeaks and the violation of human rights

WikiLeaks has raised fundamental questions about human rights and free speech both in Australia and around the world – and about Australia's place in the world.

When WikiLeaks first appeared in 2006, it was publishing important information that had been kept from the public but was essential for human rights accountability. From the classified Guantanamo Bay manual detailing US torture techniques, to the Minton report detailing Trafigura's toxic dump on the Ivory Coast affecting over 100,000 people which the company had suppressed with a gag order in the UK, WikiLeaks' releases were enabling us as lawyers to have the information we needed to do our job.

As a media lawyer battling for journalists to get access to government documents under freedom of information laws, I have been frustrated by the broad exemptions (and the broad interpretation given to them) that are used by governments to maintain secrecy and hide their mistakes from the public they are supposed to be accountable to. This is why investigative journalism operates on leaks. Principled government bureaucrats hand journalists documents when they see wrongdoing because they believe the public ought to know what the government is really up to. Principled corporate employees hand journalists confidential documents that demonstrate the unlawful or unethical practices of powerful corporations.

Journalists receive and publish that material with the free speech protections provided in the constitutions of liberal democracies around the world – except in Australia, where we rely on a mere implied and limited right to freedom of communication granted to us, by interpretation, by the High Court in 1992. Australia has no explicit constitutional protection of free speech.

In many jurisdictions, whistleblowers have no legal protection, relying instead on the obligation journalists have to protect and maintain the confidentiality of their sources to prevent the identification of the whistleblower and hence protect them from prosecution. Unfortunately, however, journalists can face prosecution if they refuse to reveal their source in many places around the world.

WikiLeaks' model provides a practical solution: its anonymous submission system was specifically designed to provide protection to journalists and whistleblowers that the law does not provide. Together with its robust publication policy, WikiLeaks provides sources better protection and a promise that their material – once verified – will be published. And published with maximum global effect: WikiLeaks makes its information available to journalists, citizen journalists, activists and lawyers the world over.

This is why WikiLeaks is so dangerous to those in power with something to hide – and why WikiLeaks must be defended and protected.

A supporter of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange during a protest outside the Central Criminal Court in London on September 14.Credit:AP

So when I was approached to defend Julian Assange, I said yes without hesitation. It was September 2010: by then WikiLeaks had published "Collateral Murder", a video showing the US military killing two Reuters employees in Iraq, and the "Afghan War Diary", then "the most significant archive about the reality of war to have ever been released during the course of a war". Chelsea Manning was in a US military prison about to face espionage charges and a possible death penalty for allegedly releasing material to WikiLeaks. But even then, I did not anticipate just how big the story would become.

 

In Australia, the revelations increased pressure on the government to withdraw from the US coalition of occupation, and in June 2008 prime minister Kevin Rudd announced a drawdown of most Australian combat troops. However, it was a US State Department document later released by WikiLeaks that showed the truth hidden from the Australian public: fulfilling a campaign pledge, Rudd withdrew approximately 515 combat troops from Iraq in June 2008, leaving in place approximately 1000 defence personnel, including a 100-man security detachment for its diplomatic mission in Baghdad, and naval and air patrol assets based in neighbouring countries to support operations in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

Soon after, WikiLeaks published the "Iraq War Logs" – the largest leak in US military history. The documents demonstrated there were many thousands more civilian deaths than reported or acknowledged by the US government, as well as the systemic failure to investigate reports of abuse, torture, rape and even murder by Iraqi forces and abuse in US detention facilities.

Days after, Assange told me there was more to come: he had over a quarter of a million US diplomatic cables and he was going to publish them: it would provide the public unprecedented insight into international diplomacy, US foreign policy and, as a result, Australian acquiescence to its ally's demands. Assange was acutely aware of the personal consequences and the persecution that would follow, but felt a duty to the source and to the public to publish the material: "They will chase me to the end of the earth, but I have to do it."

Soon his bank accounts were frozen, WikiLeaks would be cut off from public donations by Mastercard and Visa, the Australian government threatened to cancel his passport and he was wrongfully accused by then prime minister Julia Gillard of unlawful conduct, as part of what was reported to be a co-ordinated international campaign driven by a "WikiLeaks Task Force" in the US.

High-profile US politicians called for him to be killed by drone strike. Assange, busy working on the publication with mainstream media partners, was suddenly the subject of an international manhunt culminating in an Interpol Red Notice and a European Arrest Warrant for a Swedish accusation that had previously been dropped by the Chief Prosecutor in Stockholm because, she said, the evidence "did not disclose any evidence of rape" and that "no crime at all" had been committed.

There were also consequences for me as his lawyer. In the days before "Cablegate" was published, the US State Department leaked to the press a letter it had sent to "Ms Robinson and Mr Assange" accusing us both of putting at risk US national security, military and anti-terrorism operations around the world. The death threats directed at Assange also started being directed at me.

"Cablegate" became known as "the largest set of confidential documents ever to be released into the public domain" and there is no denying the overwhelming public interest in the material. From Tunisia to Tonga, Canberra to Cairo and the West Bank to West Papua, WikiLeaks disclosures revealed corruption, abuse of power and human rights abuse.

WikiLeaks documents were cited in human rights reports about Sri Lankan military operations against the Tamils and in the groundbreaking documentary No Fire Zone, which led to a UN investigation into war crimes. The "Iraq War Logs" were used by lawyers in filing a case against the UK before the International Criminal Court. And in a landmark judgment in early 2018, the UK Supreme Court held that WikiLeaks cables were admissible as evidence before the British courts. This development is likely to be followed in courts around the Commonwealth.

But what of WikiLeaks' founder and editor – the person responsible for making all of this possible?

 

Assange sits in Belmarsh Prison in London, where he has been for over a year-and-a-half, facing US extradition. This, after spending almost seven years in London's Ecuadorian Embassy, to protect himself from US extradition. In 2017 Sweden dropped its criminal investigation, only to re-open and re-close it in 2019.

Women's allegations must always be taken seriously, but so too should due process protections which Assange was denied.

Assange was always willing to face Swedish and British justice, but not at the risk of facing American injustice for publishing information in the public interest.

Throughout that time, successive Australian governments refused to ask for the assurances against extradition he needed to be able to resolve the situation. To the contrary, then foreign minister Bob Carr wrote in Diary of a Foreign Minister that he had been deliberately misleading in his statements to the Australian public – inventing his claim that Assange had more consular assistance than any other citizen – in order to undermine the campaign that Assange's mother and supporters were trying to start to bring him home. (Carr has more recently written in support of Assange and the need for the Australian government to intervene.)

In 2016, we obtained a ruling from the UN that Assange was being arbitrarily detained and should be immediately permitted to leave the embassy and return home to Australia. Australia took no action.

 

By 2018, no one could credibly deny the threat of US extradition: US attorney-general Jeff Sessions had said that prosecuting Assange was a priority. Then director of the CIA (and now US Secretary of State) Mike Pompeo declared WikiLeaks a "hostile non-state intelligence agency" and claimed Assange should not benefit from the right to free speech under the US Constitution. Australia took no action.

In 2020, Assange faces 175 years in prison for the 2010 publications for which WikiLeaks won the Walkley Award for Most Outstanding Contribution to Journalism and for which Assange won the Sydney Peace Prize.

He is now being held on remand, in a high-security prison in London, having not had a visitor since the outbreak of COVID-19. And still Australia takes no action.

The Australian government claims it is offering consular assistance. But this case requires more: it needs diplomatic and political action.

 

The treatment of Assange stands in stark contrast to assistance the Australian government has offered others, such as International Criminal Court lawyer Melinda Taylor, who was visited by Carr when he was still foreign minister, had a passport delivered and then was brought out of Libya.

The fact that Assange now faces prosecution under the Espionage Act puts at risk editors and journalists not just in the US but around the world.

Assange is an Australian citizen, not based in the US, who published truthful information about the US, but he is being sought for extradition and prosecution in the US. Imagine if Saudi Arabia was seeking the extradition and prosecution of an Australian journalist for having published the truth about the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, or if China was seeking the extradition of an Australian editor for publishing truthful information about the beginnings of COVID-19. Australia would definitely have something to say about that. Why not when it is about the US?

The US government is trying to claim in the extradition proceedings that Assange put lives at risk with these publications. But during the Chelsea Manning trial in 2013, a US brigadier-general in counter-intelligence was unable to identify one casualty. Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell had said in 2010 "there was no evidence that anyone had been killed because of the leaks".

 

We must now recognise this case for what it is and has always been about: the persecution of a publisher for robustly publishing what the powerful do not want the public to see – evidence of war crimes, human rights abuse and corruption.

As Bob Carr has written following his term as Australia's foreign minister: "Foreign Minister Payne is entitled to courteously remind Secretary of State Mike Pompeo that ... we are a good ally to the point of giddy excess ... We are entitled to one modest request: that in the spirit with which Barack Obama pardoned Chelsea Manning ... it would be better if the extradition of Assange were quietly dropped."

Assange has contributed much to human rights accountability through his work for WikiLeaks and yet he is persecuted for that work. It is time his human rights are respected.

This is an edited extract from A Secret Australia: Revealed by the WikiLeaks Exposés, edited by Felicity Ruby and Peter Cronau, Monash University Publishing.

Jennifer Robinson is an Australian barrister in London. She advises the United Liberation Movement for West Papua.

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