Don't blame the gatekeepers

As COVID surges anew, small businesses deserve — and public health requires — the same sort of bailout already secured by banks and big business

Gov. Pritzker is working to keep the state safe. The federal government needs to provide small businesses like restaurants and bars with an alternative to basically being compelled to remain open in a pandemic. (Illinois.gov)

By Ameya Pawar and Ted Cox

Don’t blame the gatekeepers.

As COVID-19 cases spike across the state and the nation, Gov. Pritzker has threatened to renew a stay-at-home order as a last resort — one that seems increasingly imminent. His administration issued what amounts to a stay-at-home recommendation Wednesday, as the Illinois Department of Public Health “recommends” that Illinoisans stay home as much as possible to curtail the spread of the coronavirus. Mayor Lori Lightfoot followed that Thursday with a stay-at-home “advisory,” basically advising Chicagoans to do the same.

The response was immediate, with tavern and restaurant owners railing against the new threats and insisting they’re being made “scapegoats” in the pandemic. And who can blame them?

Bars, restaurants, small businesses — all small businesses — are truly in an impossible situation. They have workers to take care of, mortgages and bills to pay, and families to support. Their outrage, anger, and despair is totally justified.

But it is misplaced when aimed at Gov. Pritzker, Mayor Lightfoot, and any public official working to confront the coronavirus. Their responsibility, first and foremost, is to public safety. Besides, as we’ve seen in states across the nation, whether governors imposed stay-at-home orders or not, the pandemic exerts its own impact on the economy. If people don’t feel safe going out, they don’t, and businesses suffer as a result.

The problem is we haven’t given those small-business entrepreneurs, those restaurant and bar owners who are really just trying to serve their workers and their clientele, any alternative. In the current dynamic, they’re being compelled to stay open or fail outright. In a pandemic or any national or global crisis, it is the duty of the federal government to find a solution.

And it hasn’t met the challenge, not in stemming the spread of COVID-19, not in minimizing the economic and social fallout.

Oh, it has when it comes to big business, big banks, and Wall Street. The original CARES Act coronavirus relief package and other federal measures moved early and aggressively to throw trillions of dollars at major corporations — backstopping debt, providing no-interest loans, and basically propping up stock prices.

By comparison, the Paycheck Protection Program supposedly intended to keep small businesses afloat threw pennies at the problem, and besides much of that funding went not to small businesses but to national chains and major corporations. As Pritzker said in August in trumpeting the state Business Interruption Grant program meant to make up the difference: “The federal PPP program seems to have overlooked too many entrepreneurs and small shops.”

Republicans in Congress and the Trump administration gave big business everything it needed to feel a minimal impact from the pandemic. By contrast, they told small businesses, “You’re on your own, reopen now, sink or swim, figure it out,” and that is what has produced the desperation we’re seeing in bar and restaurant owners, who again have been placed in an impossible position with no way of resolving it.

That federal negligence is the real problem, and it has to end now as the pandemic surges across the nation.

Experts warned that the country would face a new wave of coronavirus infections in the fall, and that is exactly what has transpired. The virus spreads as people circulate. President Trump urged people to circulate and revive the economy in order to lift his reelection prospects. We are seeing the direct consequences across the nation and in Illinois.

A record one-day total of newly confirmed COVID cases Friday, 15,415. A record number of COVID patients hospitalized statewide, 5,362. Almost 1,000 of those patients under intensive care. Yet bars and restaurants clamor to stay open because they feel they must to survive, even as conditions are even worse in neighboring states.

Insanity.

Congress must pass, and President Trump must finally confront reality and sign another federal COVID relief bill that will pay businesses to stay closed and make workers whole.

It is not a choice of favoring the pandemic response over reopening the economy. That’s a false dichotomy. We have to address the pandemic first in order to restore the economy later, and in the meantime minimize the damage as much as possible.

Instead of forcing a bar owner to panic in a pandemic about putting food on the table or paying rent or a mortgage — or paying employees — we should be replacing lost revenues with grant money and replacing the wages of the workers.

These are vital businesses and essential members of our communities who — through no fault of their own — simply cannot operate in the current environment. And it’s not just bars and restaurants, but nightclubs, theaters, museums that have gone dark and have not received the aid they need to survive. They’re all ready to resume their parts in the economy — if given the resources they require to tide them over while the worst of the pandemic passes.

We need a national policy that acts on that in order to get the public health response we need to halt the pandemic; in order to guarantee the robust public commitment that is required, we need to pay businesses to stay closed and pay workers to stay home. Eight weeks of that support, administered as soon as possible, might not turn the United States into New Zealand where the pandemic is concerned, but it would allow Americans and American businesses to breathe and gather themselves for the tasks ahead.

Our outbreak today is directly because we said to people, “You’re on your own.” That made many small businesses even more desperate in what was already an anxious environment. Everyone is angry, and they’re blaming the governor and the mayor and their cities and the state. They’re finding a willing ear in the media, but perhaps reporters should be asking, why aren’t these businesses receiving the same sort of support that Wall Street received, that big banks got, that major corporations pocketed?

These small businesses are going to be much more critical to the economic recovery, when it inevitably arrives, but they need the same sort of commitment to their survival right now.