Maybe someone whispered in the Administration’s ear about how bad this looks. In the first entry on this thread, I noted that the Administration’s refusal to release information on who was receiving Small Business Administration emergency loans, despite an earlier agreement, was simply another marker of corruption. Treasury Secretary and denizen of the Trump Swamp announced a reversal of policy:
The announcement came after several weeks of tense negotiations with congressional leadership, in which members of both parties pressed for some form of disclosure. The plan announced Friday amounts to an attempted compromise in which most loan recipients will be made public while specific details would be obscured.
“We are striking the appropriate balance of providing public transparency, while protecting the payroll and personal income information of small businesses, sole proprietors, and independent contractors,” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in a statement. [WaPo]
I am an American Citizen, so I can say I’m pleased that something is worked out, but very displeased that it took this beating around the bush to get there. And the news that most safeguards against fraud were not implemented due to the emergency situation is, of course, depressing. I have to wonder how many of Trump’s “friends” will unethically benefit from that.
But speaking of beating around the bush, I sometimes wonder if blunders like this might play a part.
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who played a lead role in designing the program, said he was satisfied with the plan announced Friday.
“The American people deserve to know how effective the PPP was in protecting our nation’s small businesses and the tens of millions of Americans they employ. That is the standard by which we must measure the success of the PPP: how many paychecks were protected,” Rubio said in a statement.
Deserve? Deserve? What the bloody hell have we done to deserve such information?
No, the proper reason is because American society will run more efficiently with that information out there. No one really trusts corporations, but if we have that information available, we can check to see who took advantage of the loans, and then go on to determine if they fit our mental criteria for those loans – or if they just supped illicitly at the buffet.
I don’t blame Rubio for such imprecise thinking, for it’s a common rhetorical device in today’s society. But, having become aware of the importance of how information is communicated as well as what is communicated, I do tend to twitch at such ludicrous assertions. The twitching is particularly large if I’ve just gotten off work, where a literal mindset helps the work proceed more smoothly. And I wonder how much such imprecise rhetoric reflects poor cognitive processes that lead players such as Mnuchin to, somehow, claim that such information is proprietary and confidential, when, as Rampell pointed out in the article that started this thread, the very application forms made it clear that the information would be public.
Or is he just trying to get away with anything possible?
