President Obama used his weekly radio address to push the renewal of the Export-Import bank. As the Associated Press reported:
President Barack Obama is trying to rally support for a taxpayer-subsidized bank that he says creates jobs.The bank provides loans, loan guarantees and credit insurance to foreign buyers of U.S. products. But it will cease functioning unless Congress renews its charter before October. Some Republican lawmakers who supported the bank in past years now want to put it out of business.
President Obama has proven time and again he's a friend of big business, and it'd be hard to find a bigger giveaway to big business than the Ex-Im bank. As David Williams wrote for Townhall:
The greatest benefactors of these favorable financial guarantees have been foreign airline carriers. The Boeing Company receives the largest portion of Ex-Im’s loan guarantees, taking 82 percent of its total portfolio in 2012, meaning that foreign airlines often purchase Boeing aircraft at a better rate than American carriers. Obviously, this has economic implications for the U.S. airline industry with The Wall Street Journal recently reporting that the Ex-Im Bank has wreaked havoc on domestic carriers causing them to shed as many as 7,500 jobs and lose $684 million.
As that New Yorker article posited, big business has been one of the major supporters of President Obama. His signature legislative achievement, Obamacare, was a massive sop to insurance companies and got a huge boost from the pharmaceutical industry when they got on board. It's not surprising that President Obama has urged the reauthorization of the Ex-Im Bank, but the American people need to understand that the Democratic Party has been the bigger friend of big business than the Republican Party.
