May 19th 2020

By Thom Hartmann

When Congress put together the $2 trillion CARES2 Act they added a Congressional Oversight board. That board just released its first report, and it is shocking. Former “Foreclosure King” and current Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin is in charge of what it is, essentially, a $500 billion slush fund.

To prevent him from using it to help out his and Trump’s rich buddies, Congress mandated the only companies that could demonstrate they have been harmed by the economic fallout of the coronavirus could qualify for money, that it would have to be used to retain employees, and that the money will be passed out in relatively small amounts.

Now, it turns out, Mnuchin has rewritten the regulations so that an individual company can get up to $200 million (because so many small businesses need to buy a new private jet), only has to make “commercially reasonable efforts” to hang onto or help their employees during the term of the loan (so they can put financial considerations ahead of the health of their workers), and no longer has to prove that they are financially in trouble because of the coronavirus. Additionally, most of the money has not been distributed, although it now appears that a major Trump donor who runs a private jet company that shuttles rich people and executives to private high-end golf resorts got one of the very largest payments to date.

Giving professional grifters like Steve Mnuchin and Donald Trump hundreds of billions of dollars to give away or spend at their own discretion is like dropping a couple of alley cats into a cage full of canaries.

Once again, the grifters get rich and the average American gets screwed.

Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of The Hidden History of the War on Voting and more than 30 other books in print. His most recent project is a science podcast called The Science Revolution. He is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute.