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Tea Party Loses Fight with Big Business
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Dan Clore
May 18, 2012, 9:54:26 PM5/18/12
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News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
[It's significant that Bernie Sanders, a socialist, voted with the Tea
Partyers. Corporate welfare is not socialism.--DC]
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=107814
U.S.
Tea Party Loses in Fight with Big Business
By Jim Lobe*
WASHINGTON, May 16, 2012 (IPS) - For leaders of the right-wing populist
"Tea Party" who have bragged about their growing influence – if not
domination – of the Republican Party, the past week's battle over the
future of the U.S. Export-Import Bank (Ex-Im) has been a humbling
experience.
It's also been a reminder of the power enjoyed by Big Business, the
corporate empires with globe-straddling interests, in both major parties
in Congress.
While bipartisanship is an increasingly rare commodity in Washington
these days, the interests of U.S.-based multinational corporations is
something both Democrats and Republicans can agree on.
Such giants as the Boeing Company, backed by the U.S. Chamber of
Commerce (USCC) and the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), not
only coaxed a three-year extension for Ex-Im operations out of Congress
supposedly preoccupied with reducing the federal deficit, they also got
an increase in lending authority from 100 billion dollars last year to
140 billion dollars by 2014.
"The three-year extension and healthy increase in lending level sends
the right message to our foreign competitors," said John Hardy, the
president of the Coalition for Employment Through Exports (CEE), one of
an alphabet soup of business associations that lobbied for the extension.
"American companies that export have the support of their government to
level the playing field and help make those sales," he added.
Created in the early days of Franklin Roosevelt's "New Deal", Ex-Im has
survived and prospered under Republican and Democratic administrations
alike. This despite occasional complaints on the right side of the
political spectrum that its operations amounted to government
interference in the free market, and, on the left, that it amounted to
"corporate welfare", a phrase ironically adopted by then- Sen. Barack
Obama to describe the bank when he was running for president in 2008.
As originally conceived, Ex-Im's mission has been to create jobs at home
by financing sales of U.S. exports to buyers overseas. Over the years,
it has become a model for similar institutions, called export credit
agencies (ECAs), established by other export-hungry industrialised
countries.
In recent decades, its single biggest beneficiary by far has been
Boeing, the giant Chicago-based aerospace firm, which has long depended
on Ex-Im's support in its competition with Europe's Aerobus Industries.
Last year, the bank provided 11 billion dollars in financing for
Boeing's foreign customers – nearly a third of its total financing of
nearly 33 billion dollars in deals in 2011.
While much of the bank's opposition in the past has come from Democrats
who have described it as a corporate giveaway, not a single Democratic
lawmaker in either house opposed its extension this year. This is in
major part because it was successfully depicted as a key jobs programme
at a time when official unemployment exceeds eight percent and could
jeopardise the re-election of Democrats, from President Barack Obama on
down.
"With our trade deficit and job situations, exports keep both labour and
liberals quiet," said Robert Borosage, founder and president of the
progressive Campaign for America's Future.
But the re-authorisation, with higher lending limits, also fits
perfectly with Obama's two-year-old "National Export Initiative" which
calls for doubling U.S. exports from 1.57 trillion dollars in 2009 to
more than three trillion dollars in 2015.
Opposition to the bank this year came from the right, particularly from
the "Tea Party" Republicans, who won dozens of seats in Congress in the
party's 2010 landslide, and their wealthy backers, including the Club
for Growth, a coalition of 527 right-wing and libertarian organisations
which raises money for like-minded candidates, and Heritage Action for
America, the lobbying affiliate of the far-right Heritage Foundation.
Stressing Ex-Im's origins in the New Deal – whose many government
programmes are viewed as "socialistic" or worse by Tea Party adherents
and donors – right-wing critics have argued that it constitutes a
destructive interference in the free market similar to the "bank
bail-out" that followed the September 2008 financial meltdown on Wall
Street.
By funding the bank, argued Sen. Jim DeMint, who is widely considered
the de facto leader of the Tea Party in the Senate, "Washington sends
competitors the signal that the easiest way to get ahead isn't to make
better companies, but to lobby Congress for special taxpayer benefits."
"And so a vicious cycle emerges. Washington's attempt to centrally
manage the economy only transfers wealth from taxpayers to corporations,
it takes those corporations' eye off the ball, dulling our economy's
competitive edge and slowly making America less and less competitive in
the increasingly competitive global market," he wrote in the Washington
Examiner in March.
But a month-long multi-million-dollar lobbying campaign mounted by
Boeing and the big business associations apparently worked its magic,
and, when the votes were counted in the more Tea-Party-heavy House, only
93 members – all Republicans – out of the total 435 members voted
against re-authorisation. That was slightly more than a third of the 242
Republican House members.
"In the end, the vote appeared to show that old guard business groups
still have muscle in the Tea Party era," the 'New York Times' observed.
One week later, the Senate voted by a 78-20 margin to extend the Bank's
charter through 2014. Of the dissenters, 19 were Republican, while the
20th was Sen. Bernie Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist who
normally votes with the Democratic caucus.
"It shows the limits of Tea Party power in the Republican caucus,"
Borosage told IPS. "For all the talk about how they control the caucus,
when the business community talks, they seem to get rolled."
The reauthorisation was applauded by the business lobby, with U.S.
Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Thomas Donohue saying, "When other
countries are providing their own exporters with an estimated one
trillion dollars in export finance – often on terms more generous than
Ex-Im can provide – failure to reauthorise Ex-Im would amount to
unilateral disarmament and cost tens of thousands of American jobs."
In addition to Boeing, other big recipients of Ex-Im's largesse include
KBR (previously known as Kellogg Brown & Root and owned by Halliburton,
Inc.), the global engineering, construction, and private military
contracting company; General Electric; and Caterpillar, Inc.
*Jim Lobe's blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at
http://www.lobelog.com.
(END)
--
Dan Clore
New book: _Weird Words: A Lovecraftian Lexicon_:
http://tinyurl.com/yd3bxkw
My collected fiction: _The Unspeakable and Others_
http://tinyurl.com/3tyj9cq
Lord Weÿrdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
http://tinyurl.com/292yz9
News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
Skipper: Professor, will you tell these people who is
in charge on this island?
Professor: Why, no one.
Skipper: No one?
Thurston Howell III: No one? Good heavens, this is anarchy!
-- _Gilligan's Island_, episode #6, "President Gilligan"
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
[It's significant that Bernie Sanders, a socialist, voted with the Tea
Partyers. Corporate welfare is not socialism.--DC]
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=107814
U.S.
Tea Party Loses in Fight with Big Business
By Jim Lobe*
WASHINGTON, May 16, 2012 (IPS) - For leaders of the right-wing populist
"Tea Party" who have bragged about their growing influence – if not
domination – of the Republican Party, the past week's battle over the
future of the U.S. Export-Import Bank (Ex-Im) has been a humbling
experience.
It's also been a reminder of the power enjoyed by Big Business, the
corporate empires with globe-straddling interests, in both major parties
in Congress.
While bipartisanship is an increasingly rare commodity in Washington
these days, the interests of U.S.-based multinational corporations is
something both Democrats and Republicans can agree on.
Such giants as the Boeing Company, backed by the U.S. Chamber of
Commerce (USCC) and the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), not
only coaxed a three-year extension for Ex-Im operations out of Congress
supposedly preoccupied with reducing the federal deficit, they also got
an increase in lending authority from 100 billion dollars last year to
140 billion dollars by 2014.
"The three-year extension and healthy increase in lending level sends
the right message to our foreign competitors," said John Hardy, the
president of the Coalition for Employment Through Exports (CEE), one of
an alphabet soup of business associations that lobbied for the extension.
"American companies that export have the support of their government to
level the playing field and help make those sales," he added.
Created in the early days of Franklin Roosevelt's "New Deal", Ex-Im has
survived and prospered under Republican and Democratic administrations
alike. This despite occasional complaints on the right side of the
political spectrum that its operations amounted to government
interference in the free market, and, on the left, that it amounted to
"corporate welfare", a phrase ironically adopted by then- Sen. Barack
Obama to describe the bank when he was running for president in 2008.
As originally conceived, Ex-Im's mission has been to create jobs at home
by financing sales of U.S. exports to buyers overseas. Over the years,
it has become a model for similar institutions, called export credit
agencies (ECAs), established by other export-hungry industrialised
countries.
In recent decades, its single biggest beneficiary by far has been
Boeing, the giant Chicago-based aerospace firm, which has long depended
on Ex-Im's support in its competition with Europe's Aerobus Industries.
Last year, the bank provided 11 billion dollars in financing for
Boeing's foreign customers – nearly a third of its total financing of
nearly 33 billion dollars in deals in 2011.
While much of the bank's opposition in the past has come from Democrats
who have described it as a corporate giveaway, not a single Democratic
lawmaker in either house opposed its extension this year. This is in
major part because it was successfully depicted as a key jobs programme
at a time when official unemployment exceeds eight percent and could
jeopardise the re-election of Democrats, from President Barack Obama on
down.
"With our trade deficit and job situations, exports keep both labour and
liberals quiet," said Robert Borosage, founder and president of the
progressive Campaign for America's Future.
But the re-authorisation, with higher lending limits, also fits
perfectly with Obama's two-year-old "National Export Initiative" which
calls for doubling U.S. exports from 1.57 trillion dollars in 2009 to
more than three trillion dollars in 2015.
Opposition to the bank this year came from the right, particularly from
the "Tea Party" Republicans, who won dozens of seats in Congress in the
party's 2010 landslide, and their wealthy backers, including the Club
for Growth, a coalition of 527 right-wing and libertarian organisations
which raises money for like-minded candidates, and Heritage Action for
America, the lobbying affiliate of the far-right Heritage Foundation.
Stressing Ex-Im's origins in the New Deal – whose many government
programmes are viewed as "socialistic" or worse by Tea Party adherents
and donors – right-wing critics have argued that it constitutes a
destructive interference in the free market similar to the "bank
bail-out" that followed the September 2008 financial meltdown on Wall
Street.
By funding the bank, argued Sen. Jim DeMint, who is widely considered
the de facto leader of the Tea Party in the Senate, "Washington sends
competitors the signal that the easiest way to get ahead isn't to make
better companies, but to lobby Congress for special taxpayer benefits."
"And so a vicious cycle emerges. Washington's attempt to centrally
manage the economy only transfers wealth from taxpayers to corporations,
it takes those corporations' eye off the ball, dulling our economy's
competitive edge and slowly making America less and less competitive in
the increasingly competitive global market," he wrote in the Washington
Examiner in March.
But a month-long multi-million-dollar lobbying campaign mounted by
Boeing and the big business associations apparently worked its magic,
and, when the votes were counted in the more Tea-Party-heavy House, only
93 members – all Republicans – out of the total 435 members voted
against re-authorisation. That was slightly more than a third of the 242
Republican House members.
"In the end, the vote appeared to show that old guard business groups
still have muscle in the Tea Party era," the 'New York Times' observed.
One week later, the Senate voted by a 78-20 margin to extend the Bank's
charter through 2014. Of the dissenters, 19 were Republican, while the
20th was Sen. Bernie Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist who
normally votes with the Democratic caucus.
"It shows the limits of Tea Party power in the Republican caucus,"
Borosage told IPS. "For all the talk about how they control the caucus,
when the business community talks, they seem to get rolled."
The reauthorisation was applauded by the business lobby, with U.S.
Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Thomas Donohue saying, "When other
countries are providing their own exporters with an estimated one
trillion dollars in export finance – often on terms more generous than
Ex-Im can provide – failure to reauthorise Ex-Im would amount to
unilateral disarmament and cost tens of thousands of American jobs."
In addition to Boeing, other big recipients of Ex-Im's largesse include
KBR (previously known as Kellogg Brown & Root and owned by Halliburton,
Inc.), the global engineering, construction, and private military
contracting company; General Electric; and Caterpillar, Inc.
*Jim Lobe's blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at
http://www.lobelog.com.
(END)
--
Dan Clore
New book: _Weird Words: A Lovecraftian Lexicon_:
http://tinyurl.com/yd3bxkw
My collected fiction: _The Unspeakable and Others_
http://tinyurl.com/3tyj9cq
Lord Weÿrdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
http://tinyurl.com/292yz9
News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
Skipper: Professor, will you tell these people who is
in charge on this island?
Professor: Why, no one.
Skipper: No one?
Thurston Howell III: No one? Good heavens, this is anarchy!
-- _Gilligan's Island_, episode #6, "President Gilligan"
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