The bipartisan 2020 corporate bailout is destined to rank behind only the British Raj and the Spanish conquistadors for most extreme pillaging in history. When faced with today's corporate criminals, even Genghis Khan would have to blush and say, "Leave a little something for the widows and orphans, guys."

You can't commit a theft of this magnitude in broad daylight unless you've paid all the cops to look the other way.

the provisions they did force into the CARES Act seem almost quaint, like artifacts of some once upon a time when those in power may have respected norms of good governance: a special inspector’s office; an accountability committee made up of permanent inspectors general from relevant agencies, which can subpoena nongovernment witnesses and write reports but not punish; and a congressional commission. None of these bodies is empowered to oversee the Fed’s independent spending. Nor is any yet up and running. And there is no legal deadline for appointing their members. Conditions explicitly attached to the bulk of the CARES loans are weak: a ban on stock buybacks, executive-pay limits, and moratoria on layoffs and evictions only last a year, and can be waived at Mnuchin’s discretion.

Here we are in mid-May, trillions have already been loaned out, and those extremely weak oversight committees are yet to be fully staffed. What's more, even these "cops" are a joke.

For instance, just today a Senate committee voted to advance the nomination of White House lawyer Brian Miller to be Special Inspector General for Pandemic Recovery. You might remember Miller from denying the Government Accountability Office’s request for information during its probe of the administration’s handling of Ukraine aid.
If that wasn't enough, Trump intends to censor the Inspector General.

Trump, though, said Friday he believes the Inspector General needs his permission in order to make such reports to Congress.

“I do not understand, and my Administration will not treat, this provision as permitting the [the Inspector General] to issue reports to the Congress without the presidential supervision,” he wrote in a signing statement.

However, the real gap in oversight, the biggest opportunity for theft and fraud, comes at the Federal Reserve, which will have no oversight whatsoever.

For example, the Fed can lend directly to corporations, as well as guarantee bank loans to them; it can buy unlimited amounts of low-grade exotic assets like commercial mortgage-backed securities, off-limits even in 2008. It will be free to choose which assets to buy and from whom, and what to accept as collateral. Treasury and the Fed will pick certain firms to help do the actual buying, a task rife with potential conflicts of interest. All these decisions can be made in secret.

An organization that supports lying to the public while managing trillions of dollars, now has unlimited money and no oversight.
As for potential conflicts of interest, the Federal Reserve has hired Blackrock to steer tens of billions of dollars in bond purchases, again.

BlackRock found itself in a similar situation during the last crisis. After Bear Stearns and American International Group collapsed, the New York Federal Reserve retained Blackrock to help oversee billions of dollars in ailing assets that had belonged to them. The firm helped price and sell those assets for the government at the same time it was helping private clients buy similar assets.

Conflict of interests is Blackrock's business model.

Which brings us to Jerome Powell, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, and his conflict of interests.

Powell is a member of that one percent class. According to his 2019 financial disclosure, his net worth could run as high as $55 million. Much of his investments are with Goldman Sachs (a Wall Street bank that is supervised by the Fed) or with BlackRock and its iShares Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs). The government mandated financial disclosures report investment values in a range. The upper value of Powell’s holdings with BlackRock is $11.6 million. The upper range of Powell’s holdings with Goldman Sachs is $16.55 million. The name Goldman Sachs has been shortened to “GS” in the disclosure document.

These would appear to be large conflicts of interest. BlackRock has been selected to manage the unprecedented buying of both investment grade and junk bonds on behalf of the Fed to the tune of approximately $750 billion according to the most recent term sheet from the Fed. Even more conflicted, the Fed will allow BlackRock to buy up its own sinking junk bond ETFs using taxpayer and Fed money.

There are multiple conflicts of interests at every level on the bailout, and a deliberate, intentional lack of oversight. Fraud is assured.

"Clearly he's planning to corrupt the $2 trillion in spending Congress just approved, whether it's by steering the money to political favorites, negotiating more favorable terms with certain parties or punishing his enemies with a failure to provide aid. Who could have seen this coming? Literally everyone."
- Bartlett Naylor, financial policy advocate with Public Citizen