Just in case the American people needed any more proof that the Democratic Party is the real party of corporate welfare, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-Wall Street) announced today that Senate Democrats will schedule a vote to reauthorize the corporate welfare Export-Import Bank later this month. Roll Call reports:
“I believe we will bring the bill to the floor in July, before the August break, and we hope that business around the country, small businesses in particular, will rally to our side and tell their Congress member that we have to get the Export-Import Bank reauthorized,” said Sen. Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., in a conference call with reporters.
Schumer better not hold his breath waiting for that small business support. Over 75 percent of all Ex-Im corporate welfare subsidies went to large corporations, not small businesses.
And the corporate welfare bank is set to cost taxpayers more than $2 billion over the next ten years while bank officials are being investigated for fraud and corruption.
Supporting corrupt corporate welfare programs is not new for the Democratic Party. In fact, they have been doing it for decades. The Big Government partnership with Big Business is actually at the very core of their political success. From this month's Townhall Magazine:
Progressives realized long ago that they needed deep-pocket partners to help run and popularize their treasured government programs. As Bill Scher of the liberal Campaign for America’s Future recently admitted in The New York Times, “The necessity of corporate support for, or at least acquiescence to, liberal policies is not a new development in the history of American liberalism. Indeed, it has been one of its hallmarks.”
More recently, this partnership of corporate and government interests was at the heart of President Obama’s signature domestic accomplishment, Obamacare.
Describing the legislation before passage, progressive journalist Glenn Greenwald noted the bill “forces millions of people to buy extremely inadequate products from the private health insurance industry regardless of whether they want it or, worse, whether they can afford it (even with some subsidies).”
“In other words,” Greenwald concluded, “it uses the power of government, the force of law, to give the greatest gift imaginable to this industry, tens of millions of coerced customers, many of whom will be truly burdened by having to turn their money over to these corporations.”
To his credit, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes wasn’t afraid to admit this governing model wasn’t limited to health care. “There’s a word for a governing philosophy that fuses the power of government and large corporations as a means of providing services and keeping the wheels of industry greased, and it’s a word that has begun to pop up among critics of everything from the TARP bailout to health care and cap and trade: corporatism.”
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If Republicans are going to beat Democrats in 2016, they are going to have to offer an alternative to this crony capitalist agenda. Defeating the Export-Import Bank in the Senate this month would be a great place to start.
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