Some of these people have hundreds of millions of dollars. Why are they taking federal SBA bailout dollars ahead of real small businesses?
By David Icke Turner
It’s like somebody needs to save capitalism from the capitalists. Vladimir Lenin famously said “When it comes time to hang the capitalists, they will vie with each other for the rope contract.” Despite Lenin being a murderous, bloody tyrant, he was right on this one. The greedy can not seem to control themselves when their hand is in the cookie jar. 2020 has seen the brazen manner in which the rich exploit our system reach new heights. Don’t these people know that the lists of borrower’s are made public?
Yesterday, the Small Business Administration (SBA) released a list of all businesses that have received monies between $150,000 and $10 million as part of the federal government’s Paycheck Protection Program loan program. This program is ostensibly to help keep employees getting paychecks during the economic hardship of quarantine and pandemic. Loans are guaranteed by the federal government hence banks are quick to make them and interest rates are decent. The list is littered with companies in the music business that neither need nor deserve to get federal dollars ahead of small mom and pop shops. ATO Records, a partnership between Dave Matthews and music industry robber-baron Coran Capshaw, took out the federally backed PPE loan despite the duo’s combined net worth coming in just under a billion dollars. Jack White’s label Third Man Records received a minimum of $350,000 as did the underground archetype Sub Pop. J. Cole’s Dreamville Records took in at least $150,000. Two days after announcing a presidential bid, Kanye West’s Yeezy LLC is the recipient got a whopping between $2 and $5 million. All of this at a time where we likely will see a large portion of the county’s independent venues go bust.
The glaring issue here is that the PPP funds eventually depleted and the program was subsequently halted. It seems folks like Kanye and Dave Matthews maxed out their loan program at it’s $349 billion dollar limit. Million of Americans who were initially approved or depending on their employers getting the money were then denied funding. There are more than 30 million small businesses in America, according to the SBA. Though the loans were described by the SBA as ‘first come, first served’, one would hope that some level of decorum would have compelled the likes of Kanye and Coran Capshaw to slow their roll before ‘borrowing’ these federally backed dollars.
No word as to whether the SBA will be making public a list of LLC’s that do not pay back the ‘loan.’
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