The Left Rises To Protect Crony Capitalism

Headline:

Liberals go to the barricades to defend crony capitalism

"There's nothing like a good fight over corporate welfare to bring out the Left's love of Big Business.

In the current battle over the Export-Import Bank, Democratic politicians and liberal journalists have dropped their populist pretenses and openly embraced the corporate-federal collusion that Ex-Im embodies.

For some, it's largely partisanship or disdain for the Tea Partiers who want Ex-Im dead. For others, it's that increasing government's role in the economy takes precedence over railing against Big Business. And for a shrewd few, it's about raising money from K Street and Wall Street.

Liberal writer Michael Lind of the New America Foundation, who in 2013 mocked the notion of free-market populism as “Ayn Rand in overalls,” this year sees the free-market attack on Ex-Im as a grave danger to “Big Business,” and, by extension, all of America. Lind blasted “militants on the right.”

“Angry outsiders on the right are threatening to replace business-friendly market populism with real populism,” Lind warned. “And that, to the business community, is downright terrifying. It ought to frighten the rest of us, too.”

Margaret Carlson, a liberal commentator at Bloomberg, wrote that ending Ex-Im, and thus leaving the financing of exports to -- gasp -- banks, was as absurd as privatizing the U.S. Mint.

Simon Maloy at the partisan-Left Salon.com, foamed at the mouth about incoming Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy's decision to oppose Ex-Im, calling it “a pointless, cynical attempt to appease angry conservatives.”

New York Times opinion writers have published at least four defenses of Ex-Im this summer. Neil Irwin wrote that we ought to save Ex-Im because even without the subsidy agency, government is already involved in helping businesses, and so “we're all crony capitalists, like it or not.” In for a dime of corporate welfare, in for $160 billion!

Blogger and economist Paul Krugman gave a qualified defense of Ex-Im on the Times site, and liberal business writer Joe Nocera dedicated two columns to defending Ex-Im, which he laments has become a “Tea Party piñata.” Trying to cut export subsidies, Nocera writes, is an “attack on exports.” One of his authorities on the matter is Republican congressman Chris Collins, who received Ex-Im subsidies. It's an amazing turn when millionaire Republican congressmen who received corporate welfare are now heroes of the liberal New York Times."