A few days ago I mentioned to my wife that Linda McMahon, who failed to buy a Senate seat here in Connecticut despite two tries-much to the credit of Connecticut voters- had managed to avoid being openly corrupt in her administration of the Small Business Administration. But that doesn’t mean that the agency hasn’t been corrupt, only that she’s managed to keep her head down somewhat. Well, she can raise her head up high now, because if she’s not the most corrupt person in the administration, she is at least in the running, since there’s no way she wasn’t involved in the following.
The SBA administers the Paycheck Protection Program, which Congress passed last year, and, of course, it was fertile ground for corruption, given the inability of Congress to effectively oversee it, and the need to quickly implement it. Priority number one for the Trump administration has always been rewarding its supporters to the detriment of the rest of the country, including those who are supposed to benefit from a given program, and McMahon’s administration of the PPP has been, to say the least, questionable, and is also infected with unconstitutional support of “religious” organizations. Nowadays, many religious organizations are actually just massive grifts, but they dress up as religions.
“The federal government can’t take our money and give it to Joel Osteen or Robert Jeffress or Paula White—even in the wake of a pandemic,” I wrote back in May. But that’s exactly what Trump’s Small Business Administration has done by giving Paycheck Protection Program funds to churches. Paula White’s church took in between $150,000 and $350,000, Jeffress’s church grabbed between $2 million and $5 million and, now we know that Osteen’s megachurch pocketed $4.4 million. Other megachurches snagged millions of taxpayer dollars. As time passes, the inevitable abuses are coming to light. One megachurch televangelist even bought a private jet two weeks after receiving $4 million in PPP funds.
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The CARES Act extended eligibility for loans from the Small Business Administration to nonprofits, something new. But the law did not give the SBA the power to extend this eligibility to churches, nor could it—the Constitution prohibits government funding of religion. In fact, the CARES Act only mentions religion once, to prevent universities from using taxpayer funds for “capital outlays associated with facilities related to athletics, sectarian instruction, or religious worship.” However, the SBA ignored that language along with the centuries-old bar on taxpayer-funded religious worship, and instead issued rules and guidance declaring that the forgivable loans distributed under the CARES Act’s Paycheck Protection Program “can be used to pay the salaries of ministers and other staff engaged in the religious mission of institutions.” To do this, SBA had to suspend numerous rules that, correctly, prevented taxpayer funds from flowing to churches.
Read the entire linked article. It’s an outrage that religions got a dime, but it’s even more outrageous that they are effectively exempted from having to prove they used the funds as required by law, and there is a stench emanating from at least one big time grifter:
Lisa Guerrero of Inside Edition has been digging too, and she discovered a private jet likely financed with PPP money. Marcus Lamb runs Daystar Television, which may have as many as 2 billion viewers and is valued at a quarter of a billion dollars. Two weeks after it took $4 million in taxpayer PPP funds, it bought a private jet, a Gulfstream V, valued at between $9 million and $10 million.
Lamb denied using taxpayer funds to get the private jet two weeks after it got the loan: “We had our own money.” If so, why didn’t it use that money for their employees? But you know why. Like any kid caught with their hand in the cookie jar, they denied it and then paid the money back. But only because Guerrero caught them.
I believe the reference to 2 “billion” viewers is probably a typo, but the rest has been reported elsewhere.
Give McMahon credit, though she’s ultimately responsible for allowing these abuses, her name never seems to surface.
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