Astonishing Greed And Corruption By Ashford Hospitality Trust + CEO, Monty Bennett; $76 million in 117 Separate Loans From COVID-19 Pandemic CARES Act

Reprinted from Chicago Based www.TBTNewsService.com; April 27, 2020

#MontyBennett “We plan to keep funds received under the PPP, which were provided as a result of the application established for our industry,” expressed Bennett

Corporate Greed: Even as the U.S. small business relief program is set to reopen Monday with fresh funding, the full extent that public companies tapped the emergency facility is only now becoming clear. More than 200 public companies applied for at least $860 million from the government program that was billed for small businesses without access to other sources of capital.

That includes $126.4 million for three public companies affiliated with Texas hotelier Monty Bennett. One of those firms, Ashford Hospitality Trust, applied for $76 million in 117 separate loans, the most by a single company, according to regulatory filings. The government’s Paycheck Protection Program sparked outrage after the initial $350 billion allotments quickly ran out and it was revealed that big public companies secured loans while hundreds of thousands of small businesses seeking relatively tiny amounts were left in limbo.

Last week, the Small Business Administration attempted to close that loophole, saying that big public companies “with substantial market value and access to capital markets” aren’t eligible and that firms that already tapped the fund had two weeks to return the PPP money. Since then, companies including Ruth’s Hospitality Group and sandwich chain Potbelly have followed Shack Shack in returning their PPP funds.

But the data shows the full extent that public companies have successfully navigated the government’s program. Last week, Morgan Stanley analysts found that public companies had gotten $243.4 million from PPP. That figure quickly ballooned as more companies filed disclosures. Banks including JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America have also come under fire after reports that bigger customers got better treatment and were generally much more successful in tapping the PPP than small mom-and-pop businesses, leading to allegations that lenders unfairly prioritized some clients. The loans are forgiven if business owners can show they used the money for approved purposes like payroll.

After media reports flared up last week, so far, 11 companies have returned $75 million to the PPP. Another $310 billion has been approved for the program, and demand is expected to be high when it reopens Monday. To deal with the expected volume, the Small Business Administration told lenders Sunday that it would pace entries into its loan portal and capped any single bank to 10% of the dollars in the program.

Notably, the total excludes massive car dealer AutoNation, which says it applied for — and will return — $77 million from the PPP because the firm hasn’t disclosed the moves in regulatory filings. When reached by CNBC last week, several companies said they had no intention of returning the funds, claiming that they had limited access to other sources of money and the program would help them to pay their employees.

The same goes for the three companies affiliated with Monty Bennett. Ashford Hospitality Trust, where Bennett is chairman and a large shareholder, was able to treat each individual hotel property as a separate business when filing for PPP. They applied for 117 of the loans, getting $38 million so far, the most disclosed by any company. Loans for another $38 million were still being processed.

“We plan to keep all funds received under the PPP, which were provided as a result of the application process and other specific requirements established for our industry by Congress,” the Bennett-run companies said April 25 in a statement. - Robert Frank / Dawn Giel / Nate Rattner

Political Corruption: The current Coronavirus pandemic is more than a medical crisis, it is also a political and ideological crisis. It is a crisis deeply rooted in years of neglect by neoliberal governments that denied the importance of public health and the public good while defunding the institutions that made them possible. At the same time, this crisis cannot be separated from the crisis of massive inequalities in wealth, income, and power. Nor can it be separated from a crisis of democratic values, education, and environmental destruction.

The Coronavirus pandemic is deeply interconnected with the politicization of the natural order through its destructive assaults waged by neoliberal globalization on the ecosystem. In addition, it cannot be disconnected from the spectacle of racism, ultranationalism, anti-immigrant sentiment, and bigotry that has dominated the national zeitgeist as a means of promoting shared fears rather than shared responsibilities.

The plague has as one of its roots a politics of depoliticization, which makes clear that education is a central feature of politics and it always plays a central role — whether in a visible or a veiled way — in any ideological project. For instance, it has been a central pedagogical principle of neoliberalism that individual responsibility is the only way to address social problems, and consequently, there is no need to address broader systemic issues, hold power accountable or embrace matters of collective responsibility.

As a politics of containment, neoliberalism privatizes and individualizes social problems, i.e., wash your hands as a way to contain the pandemic. In doing so, cultural critics Bram Leven and Jan Overwijk argue, “it seeks to contain any real democratic politics; that is to say, a politics based on collective solidarity and equality [because] democratic politics is a threat to the market.” Additionally, as Pankaj Mishra states, “for decades now, de-industrialization, the outsourcing of jobs, and then automation, have deprived many working people of their security and dignity, making the aggrieved … vulnerable to demagoguery.”

The social contract has been all but eliminated while notions of the public good, social obligations, and democratic forms of solidarity are under attack. This is a form of gangster capitalism that speaks only in the market-based language of profits, privatization, and commercial exchange. It also legitimates the language of isolation, deprivation, human suffering, and death. Ravaged for decades by neoliberal policies, U.S. society is plagued by a series of crises whose deeper roots have intensified the stark class and racial divides.

Such a divide is evident in the millions of workers who do not have paid sick leave, the millions who lack health insurance, the hundreds of thousands who are homeless, and the fact that as the Boston Review points out, “One in five Americans cannot pay their monthly bills in full, and 40 percent do not have the savings needed to cover an unexpected $400 expense.” Neoliberal capitalism is the underlying pandemic feeding the current global shortage of hospitals, medical supplies, beds and robust social welfare provisions, and increasingly an indifference to human life.

Some say we are facing much, much larger issues than the Coronavirus outbreak. Our society is shutting down. People are getting restless. Grocery stores cannot keep up with demand. Children are not in school. Jobs are lost forever. Businesses are closing for good. It is time to reopen America.

This is a failed experiment in an attempt to limit the number of deaths during the flu season. Many people have already lost their jobs and many more will. These people and their families will endure economic hardships and in many cases homelessness. The economic crash, the wipe-out of retirement/pension plans, and the Washington bailouts will have a crippling effect on real folks and on the national debt.

Isolated at home, our children are not receiving a quality education. Stuck indoors, we are teaching them to fear others. This is not a healthy atmosphere for adults, but for children and teenagers, the detrimental effects will be permanent. Children shouldn't grow up in a society that teaches fear, separation, and blind compliance with overreaching measures. We have suffered enough.

There are flu deaths - hundreds of thousands - every year. This year will be no different in spite of the draconian and illegal shutdowns imposed by our governments. There is major deception in our news about this outbreak. Our media is doing everything possible to instill an unprecedented level of fear. This level of panic would be appropriate for a scenario in which half the world's population will die. Even if 5% were the death rate of the Coronavirus, this reaction is not worth driving tens to hundreds of millions of people into homelessness.

Our political government is using this crisis to steal and enrich their cronies. See major big cities and how they're conducting business, trying to control the purse strings of how federal dollars are spent and divided. Now, they have asked Americas to stay at home for another 30 plus days while they secretly sneak the cash out the back door because no one is watching--they're all at home--practicing social distancing, away from the corrupt political crooks celebrating together.

Health Disparities: Coronavirus is exposing all of the weaknesses in the US health system. High health care costs and low medical capacity made the US uniquely vulnerable to the coronavirus. The international response to the novel coronavirus has laid this bare: America was less prepared for a pandemic than countries with universal health systems.

There is a real concern that Americans, with a high uninsured rate and high out-of-pocket costs compared to the rest of the world, won’t seek care because of the costs. Before the crisis even began, the United States had fewer doctors and fewer hospital beds per capita than most other developed countries. The rollout of Covid-19 testing has been patchy, reliant on a mix of government and private labs to scale up the capacity to perform the tens of thousands of tests that will be necessary.

“Everyone working in this space would agree that no matter how you measure it, the US is far behind on this,” says Jen Kates, director of global health and HIV policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation. “The U.S. performs worse than average among similarly large and wealthy countries across nearly all measures of preparedness for a pandemic,” Cynthia Cox, director of the Peterson-Kaiser Health System Tracker, told me. “The coronavirus outbreak is already exposing inefficiencies and inequities in our health system, and it is likely to put much more strain on the system in the coming months.”

And the slow start of testing in the US is only going to exacerbate those problems. Testing is important not only because it gets people diagnosed and on appropriate treatment if they do have an infection. It also establishes how widespread a virus actually is. But the United States has faltered in rolling out coronavirus tests, putting us far behind our economic peers in tracing the outbreak. A manufacturing problem with the test kits that were initially sent out in the field, and a delay in approving commercial tests, set the nation back in stopping or slowing down Covid-19.

“The testing failure is putting additional strain on our already challenged health system,” Cox said. “The combination of all of these factors will make the U.S. worse off than similar countries.” Universal health care is not a perfect treatment for emergencies like this. Italy has a universal health care system, a federalized national health insurance program similar to Canada’s, but an uncontained outbreak has still forced the country to lock itself down as cases and deaths continue to pile up.

Nevertheless, other countries are still generally better prepared for a pandemic than the US is, and we are seeing right now the consequences of that gap. For the time being, US politicians are proposing to make American health care more like these other nations: making carefree or cheap at the point of service, either by having the government cover more of the cost or by mandating private insurers cover services related to the outbreak. They are, however, only a temporary patch on these structural problems.

Why America is less prepared for a pandemic than other countries

On many measures, the United States has one of the worst health systems among developed economies. A bigger share of the population lacks health insurance. We carry more medical debt. We die more often from preventable causes. The weaknesses in this system, which already puts the US behind its peers on many health outcomes, are exposed to an outbreak. And the biggest single problem, the one most unique to the American system, is costs. - MG Media / Dylan Scott