As soon as we take a stand, any stand, someone is going to label us. And even if we don't there's still a label waiting. Such is the nature of our world. Since we have broad shoulders and been around a while, we understand you can't help yourself.
The uproar over the Export-Import bank and it's possible expiration rages on. Not everyone who opposes the Export-Import is a conservative, right wing veggieburger-head. That's a line MSM rehearses daily along with those multiplication tables they failed to learn in grade school.
Lobbyists, as is their bent, are out in flock, passing out little reminders to officials how the Export-Import bank helps businesses in their districts. In some quarters that 's viewed as buying votes. But apparently not in Potomac Land.
One of their arguments for preserving the controversial bank is other countries subsidize their companies to help with international trade. That's a page out of my dear deceased mother's Book of Warnings. Whenever I offered up the feeble excuse others were doing it, her reply: "If you see someone jump off a bridge, are you going to follow?"
It's too simple for these folks, too straight block-and-tackle forward. Everything in the vernacular of these pimps--and that's what they are, official paid ones to be sure--costs jobs. So no subsidies ever get carted off to the permanent bone yard.
You know when folks have a good gig going they'll do just about anything to preserve the handout. You can bet where there's smoke there's graft and payoffs. And you can bet the bigger the protest to preserve, the bigger the payoffs. Here's a quote from today's WSJ.
The business groups have brought in big names such as former House Majority Leader Dick Gerphart and former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barber, a Republican, to promote the bank's worth. Hamilton Place Strategies, hired to lobby on the issue for the manufacturers, have created a 'war room' to provide rapid response to counter critics with email and social media.
Now that's not to suggest that the opponents are not out in force also. If they weren't this boondoggle would just get rubber-stamped faster than you can spell gridlock backwards.We're talking about some big companies here, Boeing and GE, not just little guys.
Encyclopedia.com describes Ex-Im "as one of the most viable sources of financing for small- and mid-sized exporters." Pretty hard to figure out then why such giants as Boeing and GE are getting so riled up. We'd liked to know what's small or mid-sized about those two big bulldozers.
Apologists for this big boondoggle label anyone who opposes it as carrying on a "real crusade (that) is ideological." As if paying lobbyist to lobby for keeping it isn't.
GE Power and Water Executive Steve Bolze "laid out the case for reauthorizing the bank and asked workers using a website to generate a letter to their representative in Congress." At a time when corporations are bitching about employees stealing work time on the Internet, apparently Mr. Bolze doesn't mind wasting shareholder money.
If companies as big as Boeing and GE need Ex-Im subsidies, all of GE's high paid executives should back up to the pay window every month. This isn't about saving jobs. It's about taxpayer subsidies. The subsides raise another legitimate issue: Why are shareholders in these behemoths paying all those humongous executive salaries if the companies still require subsidies?
Sounds like someone is over paid and under effective. Mr. Immhelt, are you listening? If you're a shareholder of GE--and we are as is some of our clients--perhaps Mr. Immhelt and Mr. Bolze will grasp what we're doing here. We're calling you out, gentlemen.
And for all you other shareholders, the water feels just fine.
t.m. hatter
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