Nobody Tell Daddy The Paycheck Protection Program Is Broken. Daddy Gets Real Mad.

Hell of a way to run a country.

I'll tell you a secret: I don't think the "shitshow" Small Business Administration rollout of the "Paycheck Protection Program" is the SBA's — or even Steven Mnuchin's! — fault.

Remember back to the ACA website rollout. That thing was epic! (And yes, Republicans wouldn't give our Bamz enough money to do it right, barely giving him duct tape and peanut butter to stick it together, but that's a thing — Republican malfeasance and straight up evil — you gotta take into account in your contingency plans.) Shit takes time!

And in this case, there are millions and millions of people who own small businesses all hitting up the same pot of money at once, and Treasury was doing the most important thing: Get the money out as fast as possible and ask questions later. Banks complaining that SBA guidance was "unclear" and they might be held liable for their customers' fraud? I read it. (You know I read it. I love paychecks!) SBA guidance was actually quite clear. "YOU WILL NOT BE HELD LIABLE FOR FRAUD, JUST MAKE THEM SIGN THE THING." OK, so they had to check payroll reports, if there were any. But no matter what, they would not be on the hook for customers' bad loans. The taxpayers would pick up 100 percent of any bad loans, and give the banks 1-5 percent "processing" fees just for checking the sigs.

But you know what is the Trump administration's fault? Trump.

WaPo video "unavailable"? GRRRR click here. 

A Nevada SBA official, Joseph Amato, is calling banks "jerks," out loud, with his mouth. Big banks are — SHOCK — being fucking dicks, parceling out loan applications as a perk to their big customers. (The SBA's EIDL "emergency loans" of $10,000, which are separate from the Paycheck Protection Program that straight up grants two-and-a-half months of payroll to any business with fewer than 500 employees as long as you do in fact spend it on payroll, are completely unable to get off the ground, with not enough computers or employees to process them. And instead of $10,000 ASAP, SBA is changing the terms on the fly, and without paying attention to the terms of the CARES Act that created them. Maybe $1,000 per employee instead of a flat $10k? Nobody knows.Even the Wall Street Journal is pissed.)

But the PPP itself, well, call me an optimist who lives in a small town with actual local banks that love processing free loans. I think eventually they'll be fine, once they give Wells Fargo everything it ever asked for, including desanctioning it for its criminal acts like a common Russian oligarch.

Still. We have all heard that the PPP rollout is bad. Has Trump?

Check the video above. He has not heard that!

Question: Cause every day we're hearing from small business owners that their banks don't know how to access this money. They're trying to apply, they can't figure it out. So where does the fault lie, does it lie with the banks?

Answer: I'm hearing it's a very, very successful rollout.

Literally not one person has said it's a very, very successful rollout. Not even Marco Rubio. 

And that's a problem! Obviously our president doesn't read, and probably can't. So people have to tell him things. And if Fox News won't tell him, and nobody in his administration will tell him, because he is an abusive lunatic who does not let his people tell him bad news, well, that in fact is bad .

Has anybody told him coronavirus testing is insufficient?

 He has not heard that. 

And if anybody did, they would be "nasty" and "horrid" and probably "African American and also female." 

"Mad king" isn't fun in the best of times. When it's a global emergency, we R fucked.

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