Should government officials be marketing for Boeing?

A new Wikileaks cable dump reveals the ways in which U.S. diplomats work as part of Boeing’s sales force, the New York Times documents today (here’s the full set of documents). From my skimming the docs, there doesn’t seem to be a noticeable difference between the Obama administration and the Bush administration. This is just the way our government works.

The article doesn’t go into all the more direct corporate welfare Boeing gets, including an entire government agency that spends most of its resources subsidizing Boeing sales — the Export-Import Bank of the United States, which dedicated 90 percent of its loan guarantees to Boeing sales last year.