Oink! The pigs are out. And they're eating up the money.

Much of the $350 billion intended for mom-and-pop businesses
instead got snarfed up by corporate pigs at public companies. Oink!

Silly me! I looked at all the small businesses currently closed in my New York nabe — the nail parlors, barbershops, hardware store, shoe store, clothing stores, restaurants, picture framer — and I foolishly thought the recent Federal $350 billion loan program enacted by congress was for them.

You know, maybe a fifty grand loan to the local Greek diner so they could pay the rent, keep the power on, and pay the cooks and waiters until the curve flattens out enough for them to open.

Maybe ten grand for the shoemaker, so he doesn’t lose his lease before he’s permitted to open his doors and let me safely bring in my shoes for new heels.

Maybe the bikini wax lady who…well, you know what she does, although I don’t understand why anybody other than a porno performer would want it done to them, but who am I to judge?

As I said, silly me.

Here are bits and pieces of an article from the New York Times explaining who really got the biggest and juiciest pieces the nearly $350 billion bucks.

Another company, AutoWeb, disclosed last week that it had paid its chief executive $1.7 million in 2019 — a week after it received $1.4 million from the same loan program. 

Oink!

Intellinetics, a software company in Ohio, got $838,700 from the government program — and then agreed, the following week, to spend at least $300,000 to purchase a rival firm. 

Oink!

Several others have recently showered top executives with seven-figure pay packages.

Oink!

And furthermore, we may never learn who the biggest pigs of all are, or what they got by shoving everybody else away.

The government isn’t disclosing who receives aid, leaving it up to individual companies to decide whether to disclose that they obtained loans. That makes a full accounting of the loan program impossible.

But you can find a list of the 40 largest PPP loans disclosed by public companies, here. And they ain't the neighborhood nail parlor. Who are they? Big manufacturers. A radio and TV station conglomerate. A company that distributes natural gas. And on and on. Read ‘em and squeal.

However, just because the pigs are snarfing and gobbling up a trough full of money meant for the little business guy doesn’t mean you’re going to find any pork on your own table. Or beef. Or chicken. A big meat shortage is coming. (On your mark, meat hoarders, get set, go!)  Turns out our very stable genius of a president has decided that meat processing plants are “critical infrastructure” and has ordered them to stay open.

Well, I’d be for that, except 

• A lot of the people who used to work in those plants were deported by the same very stable genius. The work is backbreaking, dangerous, exhausting, and pays chickenfeed. So who do you think is going to replace those workers now that the borders are sealed off to immigrants? Right. Nobody. Trump's people have painted themselves into a corner and then stepped in the paint bucket.

• Lots more meat plant workers are sick and dying of COVID-19. At least 20 of them have already died. Even if they don’t drop dead into your chopped meat, do you really want to eat any kind of meat after infected, deathly ill people have been handling it, breathing on it, packing and shipping it?

So our very stable genius has a problem. It's that food shortage he's been warned about by the chief high poobah of Tyson Foods. Because if everybody’s too sick to come to work, and maybe even attached to ventilators in intensive care units, the food processing plants can’t process the food. I mean, you try slaughtering a pig by beating it over the head with a presidential proclamation. 

At least that's the way I see it. But there's another point of view:

By declaring meat processing plants as critical infrastructure and ordering them to process on, the Trump administration, in its own words, will insure — insure! — plenty of “protein for Americans.” Because heaven forbid we should get it from peas, legumes, soy, eggs, milk, cheese, or anything but chicken and red meat until the plague dies down.

Of course, some of the unions don’t seem prepared to necessarily go along with our very stable genius, so there could be an, umm, confrontation.

Then what to do? If we simply can’t give up our chicken, pork, and most especially our red meat “hamberders,” there’s always another solution.

We could eat the pigs who’ve been eating the money. As the old Wall Street saying goes, bulls make money, bears make money, pigs get slaughtered.

With any luck next November, the voting booths of America will be a Republican blood bath.