The Democratic Party’s great populist hero on Friday came out in support of federal subsidies for some of the country’s largest corporations.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.), fresh off a speech to tone-deaf (literally) left-wing activists at the Netroots Nation conference, endorsed the U.S. Export-Import Bank amid calls to wind the bank down, Bloomberg reported.
Ex-Im finances the purchases of U.S. exports by foreign governments and corporations. It has come under withering criticism from conservatives who claim it is a wasteful means of subsidizing large corporations.
President Barack Obama himself called the bank "little more than a fund for corporate welfare" before reversing his position in the face of Republican opposition to the bank.
Warren, who has worked to present herself as an anti-corporate populist, "believes that the Export-Import Bank helps create American jobs and spur economic growth, but recognizes that there is room for improvement in the bank’s operations," according to a spokesman.
"The way I see this, Citibank, Goldman Sachs, all those other guys on Wall Street, they’ve got plenty of folks in the United States Senate willing to work on their side," Warren recently said.
In backing Ex-Im, she has staked out a position that provides major financial institutions with "free money," as one JP Morgan banker told the Washington Examiner.