(FORTUNE Magazine) – Matters. Your correspondent was recently reviewing all the reasons it would be a great idea to burn the Export-Import Bank down to the ground, or at least politely abolish it, and in the process he came up with a new one. Friends, it turns out that Ex-Im is even weirder than previously supposed. In addition to subsidizing deals not good enough to hack it in a free market, and then trying to kid us into thinking this is a reasonable way to create jobs, the bank is in the rope business. Metaphorically, that is. It turns out that Ex-Im has been going around making loans whose effect and possible purpose is to support the tottering Marxist- Leninist dictatorship in Angola, an enterprise whose only other visible means of support are Cuban and Soviet troops, all of which instantly recalls the famous line about the capitalists selling the rope required to hang them with, which Lenin never actually said, although you can assume he meant it. To be sure, many of the news stories you've been reading recently are not totally accurate. It is not true, as alleged by Evans and Novak and others, that Ex-Im has recently arranged for $130 million or so of loans to the Angolan government. The only Western loans to the government this year came from various private consortiums (one of them led by Bankers Trust). And yet, incredibly, preposterously, and hempishly, the Ex-Im has in fact done some deals in Angola. Its total exposure there -- mostly loans to the government, including one to ensure that the Reds got a good deal on a Boeing 737, plus guarantees and insurance -- is on the order of $230 million. We're inclined to agree in this case that the loans really are helping to create jobs; unfortunately the jobholders are Marxist bureaucrats who might otherwise suffer unemployment or possibly, if you can stand another rope allusion, end up on a lamppost.