RSN: Garrison Keillor | So Where Do We Go From Here?

01 May 20

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Garrison Keillor | So Where Do We Go From Here?

Garrison Keillor, Garrison Keillor's Website
Keillor writes: "Government is failing. People are dying. Comedy is at the heart of being American. Where do we go from here?"
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Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. (photo: Alex Wong/Getty)

Betsy DeVos Sued for Seizing Student Loan Borrowers' Wages During Pandemic
Michael Stratford, POLITICO
Stratford writes: "Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is continuing to garnish the wages of federal student loan borrowers who fall behind on payments even though Congress suspended the practice in the economic rescue package, according to a new lawsuit."
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There is little consensus among health experts about why the second week of the illness seems to be extra dangerous for some covid-19 patients. (photo: Marco Bello/Reuters)

'Second-Week Crash' Is Time of Peril for Some Covid-19 Patients
Lenny Bernstein and Ariana Eunjung Cha, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "During the first week she had covid-19, Morgan Blue felt weak, with a severe backache and a fever. The symptoms did not alarm doctors at her local emergency room, however. They sent her home after she showed up at the hospital."
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Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. (photo: Getty)

AOC Will Vote for Biden, but Doesn't Know if She'll Endorse Him: 'I Don't Necessarily Know if He's Going to Move Us Forward'
Paul Blest, VICE
Blest writes: "New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said she will vote for presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, but she stopped short of endorsing him."
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Jovita Carranza, administrator of the Small Business Administration. (photo: Getty)

Public Companies Received $1 Billion in Stimulus Funds Meant for Small Businesses
Jonathan O'Connell, Steven Rich and Peter Whoriskey, MSN
Excerpt: "Publicly traded companies have received more than $1 billion in funds meant for small businesses from the federal government's economic stimulus package."

early 300 public companies have reported receiving money from the fund, called the Paycheck Protection Program, according to the data compiled by The Post. Recipients include 43 companies with more than 500 workers, the maximum typically allowed by the program. Several other recipients were prosperous enough to pay executives $2 million or more. 

After the first pool of $349 billion ran dry, leaving more than 80 percent of applicants without funding, outrage over the millions of dollars that went to larger firms prompted some companies to return the money. As of Thursday, public companies had reported returning more than $125 million, according to a Post analysis of filings. 

Other companies have said they plan to keep the funds, saying the loans had been awarded according to the program’s rules and that they would use most of it to pay workers, as required, in order for the loans to be forgiven. 

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has defended the program as a success, saying three-quarters of the loans were for totals of under $150,000. But after the first batch of loans was issued, the administration also scrambled to release new guidance for the program to discourage large public companies from applying. 

Officials have urged publicly traded firms with access to other capital to return the money by May 7. Mnuchin said this week that all loans of more than $2 million would be audited with potential penalties for those who don’t comply. 

“I want to be very clear it’s the borrowers who have criminal liability if they made this certification," of being a small business he said on CNBC. 

The Small Business Administration has refused to release the names of companies that have received the loans, despite having released such information on its loan programs for years. 

Some of the companies that received the loans were large in another way: Their CEOs have been making millions. 

Veritone, a company based in Costa Mesa, Calif., that provides artificial intelligence technology, paid chief executive Chad Steelberg $18.7 million in total compensation in 2018, the last year for which data is available. His brother, Ryan Steelberg, the company’s president, made $13.9 million. The company received $6.5 million in funding from the program. The company did not respond to a request for comment. 

At least two other companies with highly paid CEOs have said they will return the money. Each changed its stance on the loans after the Treasury Department issued guidelines discouraging companies “with substantial market value and access to capital markets” from accepting the money. 

Aquestive Therapeutics, a New Jersey pharmaceutical company, paid CEO Keith J. Kendall $2.6 million in 2019. That company received $4.8 million from the program but has said it will return it. 

“As a small business, we were happy to qualify for a PPP loan, as it was originally written and intended, to continue to employ and provide health coverage to our 219 employees located around the country and provide important medicines to these patients during this period of crisis,” the company said in a statement. “However, the new guidance issued on April 23 by the Federal Government appears to change the criteria for small businesses to qualify for the PPP loans.” 

Wave Life Sciences, a genetic medicine company, paid CEO Paul B. Bolno $5.8 million in total compensation in 2018. The company received $7.2 million from the program but has decided to return it, too. 

“We made this decision after the SBA issued new guidance that states, in effect, that public companies are not appropriate recipients of these loans,” the company said in a statement. 

Chain restaurants and hotels were able to obtain tens of millions of dollars from the first pool of $349 billion in forgivable loans because Congress and the administration allowed multiple subsidiaries of large owners to each apply separately. 

Those recipients include a group of hotel companies chaired by Monty Bennett, a Dallas executive and Republican donor, including Ashford Hospitality Trust and Braemar Hotels & Resorts. The companies used more than 100 filings to seek $126 million total and received $76 million. 

Some chains that have returned funds have done so at the expense of their workers. AutoNation, the Fortune 500 network of auto dealers, said last week that it would return the $77 million it received. The same day of the announcement, employees there said AutoNation put some workers back on furlough and rescinded wage guarantee deals to commission-based employees. 

Marc Cannon, AutoNation executive vice president, issued a statement to The Post saying the pandemic had reduced sales by half and stores had rehired employees based on commitments of the federal program. 

“It is regrettable that we must continue to mitigate the financial impact of COVID-19,” the company said. “Those employees who were being funded by PPP are being re-furloughed. There is no FORGIVABLE loan available anywhere to rehire 7,000 employees." 

While much of the program’s criticism has focused on the relatively large companies that received the money intended for small businesses, there is some evidence that the program missed its target in other ways, too. 

Research by academics at the University of Chicago and MIT indicates that the areas where small businesses have been most affected – New York and New Jersey, for example – were less likely to see loans from the program. The authors defined “most affected” using small-business employment data, cases of covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, and other factors. 

According to the research, only about 15 percent of businesses in the congressional districts most affected by business losses were able to obtain PPP help; by contrast, in the least affected congressional districts, 30 percent were able to obtain them. 

“The loans were disproportionately allocated to areas least affected by the crisis,” according to authors Joao Granja, Christos Makridis, Constantine Yannelis and Eric Zwick. 

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Justin Trudeau speaks during a news conference in Ottawa on 1 May. (photo: Dave Chan/Getty)

Trudeau Announces Ban on 1,500 Types of 'Assault-Style' Firearms - Effective Immediately
John Paul Tasker, CBC News
Tasker writes: "Prime Minister Justin Trudeau today announced a ban on some 1,500 makes and models of military-grade 'assault-style' weapons in Canada, effective immediately."
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Sunset in the Chippewa National Forest, home to one of the world's largest climate adaptation experiments. (photo: Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)

Minnesota Scientists Look to Plant a Forest for a New Climate
Jordan Davidson, EcoWatch
Davidson writes: "The landscape of Minnesota is changing as the climate crisis intensifies. Animals and plants that once were only found in the southern part of the state have moved north, suggesting that as the climate changes, Minnesota, by 2100, will start to resemble an environment similar to the one found in Kansas, a few states to the south."

EXCERPT:

"The trees are going downhill fast," Kolka said. "The changes to the plant community are like the canary in the coal mine. Once you start seeing changes to the plant communities, you can expect to see bigger changes up the ecosystem scale."

One of the bolder parts of the experimental forest is the planting of trees that once would not have been found here, but that are expected to flourish in the future that scientists foresee in Minnesota's North Woods.

"The worst-case scenario is if we don't do something like this, we'll have no forest," said Brian Palik, a longtime ecologist with the Forest Service's Northern Research Station, to The Washington Post. "Our broad objective is to look at ways to keep forests on the landscape. It may be a different forest. I like to say that it may not be your grandfather's forest, but it will be your grandchildren's forest."

"It's not that this is going to happen. It's that it's already happening," he added of the changes that the warming climate is bringing to the North Woods. "The time to act is now."

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