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(IPS) SAN FRANCISCO --
On
any given day U.S.-made bulldozers can be spotted crawling through the Amazon or hauling their way up hillsides in the Andes, crunching through forests and watersheds as they do the work of road and dam builders, of mining and oil companies.
The money for these operations is provided under an scheme launched by a small bank situated directly across from the White House in Washington: the Export Import Bank (Ex-Im), run by the government of the United States. This week, Congress will be asked to decide if Ex-Im should continue to exist, a routine matter that has to be voted on every four years. Although some voices have been raised in protest over some of the bank's projects, this year is unlikely to be any different.
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Bulldozers
are only a small portion of the projects financed by the Ex-Im Bank. Nuclear power plants and military transport upgrades -- programs that even the World Bank has rejected -- receive loans from this agency. But like the World Bank, Ex-Im also is willing to finance the building of massive coal power plants, dams that force thousands of people from their homes, and pulp mills that dump deadly chemicals into local rivers.
All this is done in the name of creating jobs in the United States, the principal mandate of the 60-year-old government agency which has 440 employees and a budget of $776 million. Ex-Im spokeswomen Judy Nath agrees that the Bank supports projects that creates jobs in the United States. "In an ideal world we would not exist because the market would provide jobs," she told IPS. "But the reality is that every industrialized country has an agency which makes loans to national corporations to help them win foreign contracts. We provide the same service for United States corporations." And Ex-Im's brochures boast of creating more than one million jobs for Americans in the last five years by supporting nearly $66 billion of U.S. exports. The agency also claims to provide a return of $20 dollars worth of U.S. exports on every dollar of government money used to back the agency. This is achieved by adding up the financial value of the project and dividing by the amount of money needed to create one job. Technically the foreign projects that benefit from Ex-Im loans are not supposed to compete with American jobs, but in reality the companies often turn around and do the opposite of what they promised, according to observers.
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In 1994,
the Boeing Corporation of Seattle borrowed $1 billion from Ex-Im to export 21 Boeing 737s and seven 757s to China. Part of the construction work was performed in Xian, China. Two years later the Xian factory signed a major contract with Boeing, displacing workers in Wichita, Kansas. General Electric, a energy company and a big Ex-Im client, cut its workforce from 243,000 to 150,000 between 1985 and 1995.
In fact, during this period when export sales of the 15 largest exporters in this country have nearly doubled with the generous help of programs like the Ex-Im Bank, the same companies have dramatically slashed their workforces. Exporting low wage jobs to developing countries may not be illegal but it runs contrary to the agency mandate, argues Grieder. "Why should American taxpayers subsidize export deals contingent on foreign production or even offloading portions of the American industrial base?" he asks. Some members of Congress are asking why the agency needs hundreds of millions of dollars a year in subsidies to help companies that already have vast cash reserves, but Ex-Im believes it will survive the criticism. "We have already worked out a deal with environmentalists to rewrite our rules. The heat is off," says one a Ex-Im staff member who asked to remain anonymous. |
Albion Monitor July 21, 1997 (http://www.monitor.net/monitor)
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