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Republicans are often seen as the party of business. So it's a little ironic that some of the most vocal opposition to the Export-Import Bank comes from conservative Republicans, such as Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan.

"If we're ever going to get rid of all the corporate connectedness, all the corporate welfare, you've got to start with the most egregious one and the most obvious one and that's the Export-Import Bank," he says.

The Ex-Im Bank, as it's called, does several things. It was created during the Depression to help U.S. companies that wanted to sell more products overseas. It provides insurance to these companies to make sure they get paid when they sell products overseas.

Today, it also underwrites many billions of dollars in loans to U.S. and foreign companies.

But some members of Congress see the Ex-Im Bank as a bastion of corporate welfare, and they want to see it expire later this month.

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Richard Beranek is president of Miner Elastomer Products Corp., which makes manufacturing parts. He says without the Ex-Im Bank, the Illinois company wouldn't be able to export as much as it does.

"Would it put me out of business? It would not. Would it slow my business down? I think it would," he says.

But John Murphy of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce says that, in many cases, U.S. companies have to have the backing of a big credit agency such as the Ex-Im Bank or they can't get foreign contracts.

"For instance, foreign infrastructure projects. If you want to bid most of the time you need to have Ex-Im support," Murphy says. "If it's a nuclear power plant project abroad, Ex-Im support is required and without it you can't even bid."

But the biggest thing the Ex-Im Bank does is guarantee loans to foreign companies so they can buy U.S.-made products.

For instance, foreign airlines that want to buy Boeing jets often do so with loans underwritten by the Ex-Im Bank. Murphy says a lot of countries now offer similar loan guarantees to help their businesses export more.

"So if the United States and our exporters don't have something similar, that's one knock against us," he says.

But to a lot of free-market conservatives, what the Ex-Im Bank does amounts to crony capitalism and they want Congress to let the bank's charter expire June 30.

Veronique de Rugy of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University says the Ex-Im Bank distorts the economy. For example, she says loan guarantees for foreign airlines may be great for Boeing, but they're bad for U.S. airlines.

"Domestic airlines can't have access to subsidies to buy airplanes, but they have to compete with foreign companies like [Emirates and] Air India," she says.

And those airlines are getting a subsidy, thanks to the Ex-Im Bank.

De Rugy says supporters of the bank are vastly exaggerating its importance. She says some companies reap benefits from it, but she says most U.S. companies will do just fine without it.

"All of the companies that export, a vast majority do it without any help from the government and yet there are those selected few who got cheaper financing," she says.

Critics acknowledge that the Ex-Im Bank has a lot of support in Washington, and that it may well survive if Congress ever gets to vote on it.

But if Republicans who control Congress succeed in keeping it from a vote, its charter will expire at the end of the month.

That means it would be unable to guarantee any more loans, and its role in the economy would diminish over time.

Ex-Im Bank

Export-Import Bank

international trade

"How much trouble can one poet be?" That's literature professor John Malcolm Brinnin's rhetorical response to his buttoned-way-down colleagues' fears about a writer's proposed visit to New York in 1950. Today, the query can't be heard as anything other than an inside joke. For the poet is Dylan Thomas, who was trouble for most of his 39 years.

Set Fire to the Stars takes its title from a line written by Thomas, who's played by Celyn Jones, the movie's co-writer. But the story is just as much about Brinnin, impersonated by Elijah Wood, the film's most marketable performer and its co-producer. The script was fictionalized from a section of Dylan Thomas in America, a 1955 memoir by Brinnin, who facilitated several tours by the poet — including the 1953 one on which he died.

As portrayed here, Thomas and Brinnin shared two enthusiasms: poetry and cigarettes. While the visiting Welshman drinks heavily, womanizes compulsively and offends promiscuously, the bow-tied, slick-haired Brinnin channels all his frustration into chain smoking.

Filmed by Chris Seager in satiny black and white, Set Fire to the Stars is a marvel of low-budget scene-setting. Director Andy Goddard, a Downton Abbey veteran who co-wrote, crisply stages such inherently theatrical set pieces as one where the poet reads to a group of leery Yale scholars. They're seated as if they're members of a jury.

In another memorable scene, Brinnin takes Thomas to a diner so large it must represent the visitor's fantasy of American bounty. Thomas is beguiled by the poetry of the waitress' slang and frequently supplements his consumption of beer and whiskey with milkshakes, candy bars, and comic books. This appetite for '50s Americana may also be something of private joke, since the film was shot entirely in Wales, with Swansea standing in for New York and Wrexham for Connecticut.

The only principal characters are Thomas, Brinnin, and a faculty handler (Steven Mackintosh) who's there to save the young prof from embarrassment — and smugly tell him off when he fails to sidestep it. There are several memorable cameos, however, notably from Shirley Henderson and Kelly Reilly.

Henderson plays the Connecticut next-door neighbor who turns out to be "The Lottery" author Shirley Jackson. In the most harrowing sequence, Thomas asks her for a ghost story. Then Brinnin tops it with a different sort of blood-curdling tale, one from his own life.

Reilly plays Thomas's wife, Caitlin, who eventually materializes from a letter the poet keeps neglecting to open. She may be just a wraith, but she's a more powerful presence than Sienna Miller was in The Edge of Love, the 2008 melodrama about Dylan and Caitlin's mutually assured destruction.

The film's dialogue can be excessively literary, and is jarred by the occasional anachronism. (No one said "big ask" in 1950.) The transitions from slightly stagey naturalism to full-blown fabulism — as when all the members of the cast hand off lines from Thomas' "Love in the Asylum" — also can be discordant.

Such missteps aside, Set Fire to the Stars is stylistically assured and tastefully appointed. The costumers and designers did fine work, as did composer Gruff Rhys, whose urbane jazz and chamber-music score is a long way from his work with eclectic Welsh rockers Super Furry Animals.

The high level of craft doesn't quite banish disappointment, though. Having decided not to depict the poet's fatal final tour, the filmmakers are left with a story that, rather than conclude, merely ends. Thomas, who was a playwright and screenwriter as well as a poet, would penned a more decisive sendoff.

Detroit has tens of thousands of abandoned homes. The city is experimenting with new ways to repopulate them — including auctioning them online for as little as $1,000. There are deals to be had. But the costs of repairs often exceed the value of the homes.

The city's worst homes end up with the Detroit Land Bank Authority, a quasi-governmental agency. Craig Fahle, the agency's director of public affairs, shows me around a 1,300-square-foot Tudor-style home on Detroit's far east side.

"Properties come to us, only after nobody else wants them anymore. They've gone through foreclosures and they come to us when in they're in this kind of condition," Fahle says.

Outside, the place is charming. Inside, it's a mess.

The radiator is gone. Windows are missing, now boarded up. Many of the kitchen cupboards are gone, as is the boiler. But the floors and the moldings look salvageable.

It's one of Fahle's better properties. He's hoping to get $25,000 for the place. But he'll take whatever he can to get it off the rolls.

"We have to cut the grass on the properties," he says. "We can't do it every week or anything. We'll do it a couple of times a summer because we own 88,000 parcels of land in the city, as a land bank. We own one-quarter of all the property in the city of Detroit."

Three-quarters of the land bank's parcels are vacant. Those sell for $100. Neighbors are snatching them up to double their land.

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A house that needs to be demolished in Detroit's MorningSide neighborhood. Jason Margolis/NPR hide caption

itoggle caption Jason Margolis/NPR

A house that needs to be demolished in Detroit's MorningSide neighborhood.

Jason Margolis/NPR

The land bank is auctioning off three houses a day online, eBay style. It has closed on just over 300 in a year since the auction site got going. That leaves more than 21,000 to go.

Mayor Mike Duggan says that's just not fast enough.

"Three months ago, we kicked off a program where city employees and their families, if they bid on a house on the land bank could get a 50 percent discount," Duggan said at a City Hall news conference last week.

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That discount puts bidders who don't work for the city at a deep disadvantage. But city officials say there's so much inventory, they have to do something to build up demand. Besides, only 44 city employees have won those auctions with the half-off discount.

Duggan says the main problem is, whether you work for the city or not, it's hard to get a loan on a dilapidated property.

"A typical house on the auction that you'll buy it for $10,000, you have to put $20,000 in to fix it up. It's almost impossible to get a mortgage in that circumstance," he says.

But now, the city has a partner: Flagstar Bank is offering mortgages to city employees, loans for up to 300 percent the value of the homes — that will cover the purchase price and many necessary improvements.

Flagstar is also offering $15,000 grants, paid out over five years.

City contractor Carolyn Abney was lured back to Detroit from the suburbs. In the home she's leaving, she says, "I have one bathroom, and I have to fight over [it]."

Her new home in Detroit has 2,200 square feet. "There are three bathrooms. There's a circular staircase. It's just cute," Abney says.

She bid $56,000. She could end up getting it for less than a quarter of that, after discounts and loans. And, she can get a loan to fix the place up.

Still, Fahle, the land bank official, wants people to know what they're getting into when they bid for a home online. In another home about to go up for auction, the gutters were missing, the garage door was detached from the hinges, and the neighbor parked his car on the back lawn.

Despite its flaws, it was an attractive colonial brick house. But if nobody fixes it up, neighbors' property values will likely keep declining.

"It's just a matter of time before somebody says 'enough' and they just do what a lot of other people have done and they leave," Fahle says.

And the spiral will continue.

Fahle says he's thrilled when he gets $1,000 for the worst houses. If he can't get that, it costs $15,000 to tear them down.

vacant lots

abandoned homes

Detroit

The same day that Apple did a splashy, star-studded introduction to its new Apple Music subscription streaming service, New York's attorney general posted a letter from attorneys for Universal Music Group indicating that prosecutors are looking at the streaming music business and that Apple is one of the companies being investigated.

The letter, from a law firm representing Universal, was addressed to the antitrust bureau of the attorney general's office. It stated that Universal currently has no deals with Apple or companies such as Sony Music that would "impede the availability of free or ad-supported music streaming services, or ... limit, restrict, or prevent UMG from licensing its recorded music repertoire to any music streaming service."

The letter did not specifically say Apple was among the targets of the investigation. But Universal's attorneys did say the company was not colluding with Apple or its two major rival labels, Sony Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group.

A spokesperson for New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman had this response:

"This letter is part of an ongoing investigation of the music streaming business, an industry in which competition has recently led to new and different ways for consumers to listen to music. To preserve these benefits, it's important to ensure that the market continues to develop free from collusion and other anti-competitive practices."

The investigation centers on whether Apple may have urged the labels to drop support for free, ad-supported streaming services such as Spotify and Google's YouTube. Such a move could be seen as anti-competitive.

Albert Foer, the founder of the American Antitrust Institute, says the current investigation may have been sparked in part by Apple's history. The company was found guilty last year of conspiring with book publishers to raise the price of e-books when it launched its online book store. Among those who brought the charges were 33 state attorneys general, including Schneiderman.

There are some parallels between the music industry and the publishing business. At the time Apple entered into the e-book market, publishers were upset by the prices Amazon was forcing on them. Apple had a business model that let publishers set the prices higher. In the case of music, the labels have been unhappy with the money paid out by free, ad-supported services. Most famously, Taylor Swift withheld her latest music from Spotify over the issue.

"The suspicion would be of the corporate culture and how they operate," Foer says about why the attorney general would investigate Apple Music. "It's just that investigators will have suspicions in some cases because of what happened in the past." But he says the investigation could also have been triggered by complaints from someone inside the music industry.

Chris Castle, a music industry attorney, finds it hard to believe that Apple would follow the same road that made it the target of an investigation that resulted in a $450 million settlement, along with supervision by an antitrust monitor. "The idea that these guys would blindly walk into this is crazy," says Castle. "It just doesn't seem plausible."

In fact, Connecticut State Attorney General George Jepsen, who is also focused on music streaming, told Reuters that his office was satisfied that Universal did not have anti-competitive agreements to withhold music titles from free services. However, Jepsen did not say he'd stopped investigating Apple. And European Union officials are also investigating Apple Music.

But Castle says he will be surprised if this goes anywhere. Apple, he notes, has a lot of competition in the streaming music space: Spotify, YouTube, GooglePlay, Amazon. "There are inquiries all the time" he says. "They ask a few questions. You send a response and that's it."

Music

Apple

streaming