Bernie Sanders is right on the crony Ex-Im Bank

From Reason.  Relevant chunks: “The Export-Import Bank is an outfit that mostly extends loans to powerful foreign companies in exchange for buying products from large and well-connected U.S. companies. As Sanders asked Clinton, “Do you know what the other name of the Export-Import Bank is, what it’s called in Washington? It’s called the Bank of Boeing because Boeing itself gets 40 percent of the money discharged by the Export-Import Bank.” Sanders is right.

Moreover, close to 70 percent of the bank’s loan guarantees benefit Boeing alone. In spite of what most Democrats in Congress try to argue, the Ex-Im Bank is indeed in the “big business” business, with about 65 percent of its activities benefiting 10 domestic firms. The same is true for the bank’s beneficiaries abroad. The Ex-Im Bank’s own data show that such wealthy companies as Mexican state-owned oil giant Pemex and the airline Emirates are the top beneficiaries of the U.S. taxpayers’ largesse.”

Hillary, of course, supports the Ex-Im Bank, as this Washington Times editorial explains.

US sending tanks, helicopters, and other war goodies to Europe to “counter” Putin

Bloomberg.  It is laughable to think that Russia, a country bleeding citizens and fast spiraling to Third World status, is any kind of a threat to Europe, the US, or the world.  Putin’s “incursion” into Crimea was nothing of the sort, Crimeans are Russian, and want to be a part of Russia, in the same way that the borderlands of Georgia wished to secede from the Western-installed stooge government in 2008.  How much NATO build-up can ride on those talking points of an “assertive” Russia?  American taxpayer-funded NATO surrounds Russia, and weapons paid for by those same taxpayers are now being sent to the “front lines”, goading Putin into making one tiny wrong move.  Trip-wires have been set up via recklessly expansive NATO membership, and if Russia gets into a skirmish with one, we all have to chip in.  Auto-interventionism.