Far Left NC Political Orgs Rake in Millions in ‘COVID Relief’ PPP Cash

RALEIGH – The Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) was implemented to help small-business owners avoid laying off employees due to forced closures emanating from governor’s and mayoral offices around the country. The money ran out quickly, and so another bill was passed to throw hundreds of billions more at the issue. Then, revelations that not-so-small-businesses were raking in PPP (forgivable) loans, and even blatant non-businesses, like partisan political organizations, were raking it in as well.

It’s a pretty good business model: help stir up hysteria and panic to the point of shutting down the economy because it benefits your side politically, point to the halted economy as justification for trillions in relief packages, and then apply to receive millions of taxpayer dollars from said relief packages.

That’s what more than a dozen Far Left political non-profits in North Carolina did, soaking up as much as $15 million in PPP funds while at the same time complaining that PPP funds weren’t making their way to the very small-business owners the program.

That’s according to a report from the News & Observer using data from the Small Business Administration, and highlighted by the Civitas Institute.

From Civitas:

“[…] over a dozen progressive groups have used it as a tool to get taxpayers to fund their advocacy. Each of the groups has earned a spot on Mapping the Left for their leftwing advocacy. See the table below for a list of those organizations and links to their entries on Mapping the Left.

Data Sources: News & Observer and the Small Business Administration

To underline the political nature of those organizations, a majority of the groups on the list have been aligned with Blueprint NC (including, obviously, Blueprint NC itself). Blueprint NC is probably best known for its infamous 2013 “eviscerate” memo in which they laid out a campaign strategy for progressives to “cripple” their political opponents and regain power in North Carolina.

To make matters worse, if those groups can document that at least 60% of the loans were used for payroll, the loans will be fully forgiven. Of course, money is fungible, so they can use taxpayer money to make payroll while using other funds for their advocacy.

The Progressive Pulse recently put out an editorial complaining about how it was hard for some small businesses to access PPP loans. Perhaps a first step in freeing up that money is for progressive groups to stop taking in millions of dollars in PPP funds for themselves. […]”

So North Carolina taxpayers have now funded the political advocacy for such things as abortion, social justice, anti-racism (Racism), woke indoctrination, abortion, and probably registering Democrats to vote or merely ballot harvesting training in North Carolina.

Great.