Our guest blogger is Sabina Dewan, Associate Director of International Economic Policy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

House Republicans are on a roll, doing everything in their power to mar job creation and to pull out the rug from underneath millions of American workers already struggling to make ends meet in these tough economic times. This week, they proposed a $93 million (17 percent) cut from the International Trade Administration’s budget, most of which goes toward the National Export Initiative –- an initiative seeking to double US exports in five years from 1.5 trillion at the beginning of 2010 to $3 trillion by 2015. This initiative is aimed at supporting 2 million American jobs, and increasing the presence of our small and medium businesses in overseas markets.

But that’s not all. Not only do House Republicans want to cut spending for a program that seeks to create jobs, but they also want to disadvantage thousands of workers that have been affected by the restructuring of the economy that comes with trade.

House Republicans are proposing to cut $2 billion (51 percent) for job training programs that will help unemployed workers play an active role in retooling their skills to be productive members of the economy. What more some conservatives are now holding the extension of Trade Adjustment Assistance hostage until the White House moves on the pending free trade agreements with Colombia and Panama.

The merits or demerits of these particular agreements aside, trade is complicated and it is anything but free — its benefits come at a cost. On the one hand, increasingly open and unrestricted trade in goods and services contributes to economic growth. Trade allows consumers to enjoy greater variety and cheaper goods. But on the other hand, trade sets off a restructuring of economic activity favoring some sectors and industries over others. In the process, some workers gain jobs while others loose them; some workers see their wages rise while others see them stagnate or worse, decline.

But the conservative schizophrenia on trade — pulling funding for the National Export Initiative designed to support American jobs, while threatening to let Trade Adjustment Assistance expire unless the administration ‘moves’ other trade agreements amounts to little more than a conservative anti-jobs and anti-worker agenda.

We have to harness the benefits of trade while giving workers the tools to readjust to changes in the economic landscape that come with trade. Reducing the deficit and making America more competitive entails creating just jobs and investing in our workers.

Earlier today, ThinkProgress published an exclusive report that the law firm representing the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a right-wing trade association representing big business, is working with set of “private security” companies and lobbying firms to undermine their political opponents, including ThinkProgress. According to e-mails obtained by ThinkProgress, the Chamber hired the lobbying firm Hunton and Williams. Attorneys for the firm solicited a set of private security firms — HBGary Federal, Palantir, and Berico Technologies (collectively called Team Themis) — to develop a sabotage campaign against progressive groups and labor unions, including ThinkProgress, the labor coalition Change to Win, SEIU, US Chamber Watch, and StopTheChamber.com.

New emails reveal that the private spy company investigated the families and children of the Chamber’s political opponents. The apparent spearhead of this project was Aaron Barr, an executive at HBGary. Barr circulated numerous emails and documents detailing information about political opponents’ children, spouses, and personal lives.

One of the targets was Mike Gehrke, a former staffer with Change to Win. Among the information circulated about Gehrke was the specific “Jewish church” he attended and a link to pictures of his wife and two children (sensitive information was redacted by ThinkProgress):

Another target was Brad Friedman, co-founder of The Brad Blog. Barr’s profile of Freidman included information about his life partner and his home address (sensitive information redacted by ThinkProgress):

This tactic of targeting opponents’ personal lives and family was not simply a random event. Rather, it was a concerted and deliberate effort to use anything possible to smear the Chamber’s political opponents. To dramatize his firm’s intimidation tactics, Barr sent an email to Hunton & Williams attorney John Woods that contained personal details about fellow Hunton attorney Richard Wyatt, who was representing the Chamber. The email was intended to show Woods and Wyatt how “vulnerable” they are:

ThinkProgress will continue to report on this developing story as more details emerge.

- With reporting from Lee Fang

House Republicans on the Budget Committee spent a hearing yesterday scolding Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke for instituting what’s known as quantitative easing — or QE2 — in an attempt to entice consumers and businesses into spending and spurring economic growth. With interest rates already at the zero bound, and the prospects of further fiscal stimulus coming from the Congress virtually non-existent, QE2 — which involves the Federal Reserve purchasing long-term Treasury bonds to push down interest rates — is essentially the last policy option that the federal government has to try to increase the sluggish rate of job growth.

Republicans, however, fear that this policy will bring on rampant inflation that the Fed will not be able to control:

“There is nothing more insidious that a country can do to its citizens than debase its currency,” [House Budget Committee Chairman Paul] Ryan (R-WI) warned. “My concern is that the costs of the Fed’s current monetary policy — the money creation and massive balance sheet expansion — will come to outweigh the perceived short-term benefits.”

The Financial Services Committee’s subcommittee also held a hearing yesterday on the threat of QE2, chaired by long-time Fed critic Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX). In fact, Republicans are so concerned with the threat of inflation that they are putting forward legislation stripping the Fed’s mandate to ensure full employment, so that it can focus solely on fighting inflation.

But is there any concern about inflation that would make it worth stopping efforts to boost employment in their tracks? As this graph from the New York Times’ David Leonhardt, the short answer is no:

As Leonhardt wrote:

Does it look dangerously high? Or might the slow pace of economic growth and the high level of unemployment be larger problems?

This is simply one more instance of House Republicans turning a blind eye towards job creation, in favor of picking ideological fights.

ThinkProgress has learned that a law firm representing the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the big business trade association representing ExxonMobil, AIG, and other major international corporations, is working with set of “private security” companies and lobbying firms to undermine their political opponents, including ThinkProgress, with a surreptitious sabotage campaign.

According to e-mails obtained by ThinkProgress, the Chamber hired the lobbying firm Hunton and Williams. Hunton And Williams’ attorney Richard Wyatt, who once represented Food Lion in its infamous lawsuit against ABC News, was hired by the Chamber in October of last year. To assist the Chamber, Wyatt and his associates, John Woods and Bob Quackenboss, solicited a set of private security firms — HBGary Federal, Palantir, and Berico Technologies (collectively called Team Themis) — to develop tactics for damaging progressive groups and labor unions, in particular ThinkProgress, the labor coalition called Change to Win, the SEIU, US Chamber Watch, and StopTheChamber.com.

According to one document prepared by Team Themis, the campaign included an entrapment project. The proposal called for first creating a “false document, perhaps highlighting periodical financial information,” to give to a progressive group opposing the Chamber, and then to subsequently expose the document as a fake to undermine the credibility of the Chamber’s opponents. In addition, the group proposed creating a “fake insider persona” to “generate communications” with Change to Win. View a screenshot below:

The security firms hoped to obtain $200,000 for initial background research, then charge up to $2 million for a larger disinformation campaign against progressives. We don’t know if the proposal was accepted after Phase 1 was completed.

The e-mails ThinkProgress acquired are available widely on the web. They were posted by members of “Anonymous,” the hactivist community responsible for taking down websites for oppressive regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, and American corporations that have censored WikiLeaks. Anonymous published the emails from HBGary Federal because an executive at the firm, Aaron Barr, was trying to take Anonymous down. Barr claimed that he had penetrated Anonymous and was hoping to sell the data to Bank of America and to federal authorities in the United States. In response, members of Anonymous hacked into Barr’s email and published some 40,000 company e-mails.

It is widely believed that Wikileaks has sensitive information about Bank of America, and plans to expose it later this year. This revelation prompted Bank of America to hire the law/lobbying firm Hunton and Williams, which in turn, according to the e-mails posted online by Anonymous, hired HBGary Federal and other firms to go after Anonymous and supporters of Wikileaks. For instance, one proposal from HBGary Federal and its associates proposed targeting Salon reporter and Wikileaks-supporter Glenn Greenwald with “actions to sabotage or discredit” him.

ThinkProgress has published a series of articles investigating the Chamber and its activities. We exposed the Chamber’s efforts to coordinate a lobbying campaign on behalf of large banks, including JP Morgan, to kill significant portions of financial reform. In October, we published a series looking into the Chamber’s efforts to solicit donations from foreign corporations for the same account the Chamber used to run partisan attack ads during the midterm campaign, as well as the Chamber’s participation in secret fundraising meetings convened by the billionaire plutocrats David and Charles Koch.

ThinkProgress will be posting more details of the Chamber lobbyist campaign to target progressives soon.

– With reporting from Scott Keyes

A slew of Republican governors, even as their states face deficits in the billions of dollars, have decided to propose new corporate tax breaks as a way to boost their state economies. Gov. Rick Scott (R-FL), for instance, has suggested $700 million in corporate tax breaks. Gov Rick Snyder (R-MI) proposed $3.3 billion, while attempting to cut the states Earned Income Tax Credit. Gov. Terry Branstad (R-IA) wants to do away with universal kindergarten in order to finance corporate tax breaks, and Gov. Chris Christie (R-NJ) has lined up corporate tax giveaways, while cutting education funding.

However, a new paper from Peter Fisher, Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Iowa and Research Director of the Iowa Policy Project, shows that these sorts of breaks yield very little in terms of real savings for companies, and therefore are of little use in attracting businesses to different states:

State and local taxes on businesses (corporate income taxes, sales taxes, local property taxes) represent only about 1.8 percent of total business costs on average for all states. Corporate income taxes, in turn, are only about 9.5 percent of the small amount of state and local taxes on businesses, according to one estimate. A large corporate tax break that reduces corporate income tax revenue by half thus represents a cost savings to the average firm of 50 percent times 9.5 percent times 1.8 percent, or just .09 percent. In other words, such a sizeable corporate income tax break would reduce total business costs by just nine-hundredths of 1 percent in the average state.

“The tax breaks to corporations do not stimulate consumer spending, and it is not clear how retailers can collect more sales tax if consumers are not spending any more money,” Fisher wrote, explaining why the breaks will do little to promote economic growth. “The tiny reduction in the costs of doing business cannot be expected to translate into retail price reductions, which is the only way sales could increase in the absence of a shift in the consumer demand curve.”

Some of these states, including Iowa and New Jersey, already collect very little in terms of corporate tax revenue, already. So it seems that these Republican governors are hoping against hope that even more corporate tax reductions will do what past reductions, credits, and giveaways did not.

The House Appropriations Committee yesterday released its first set of proposed cuts under the spending cap unilaterally imposed by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI). As I pointed out, the committee has suggested draconian cuts in programs that help women and children, but that is by no means where the downside of their suggestions ends.

Also on the chopping block is nearly 50 percent of federal job training funding (about $2 billion). Republicans recently have a had a preoccupation with gutting job training programs. Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN suggested that the government simply “eliminate federal job training programs,” while Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) said on MSNBC that job training is on the list of things he could “whack from this budget and [have] nobody feel it.”

This is the same set of House Republicans who rode into the majority asking “where are the jobs?” and pledging to make job creation their top priority. Since then, however, House Republicans have:

– Passed a repeal of the Affordable Care Act that was doomed to failure;

– Attempted to restrict abortion and redefine rape;

– Changed the budget rules to allow for unlimited, unfinanced tax cuts;

– Proposed a spending plan that could cause the loss of 600,000 jobs;

In their proposed spending cuts, House Republicans also want to do away with all funding for high speed rail, even though such work could employ plenty of workers. In fact, the only relatively job-related piece of legislation that the GOP planned to vote on was reauthorizing the Trade Adjustment Assistance program — which helps workers who lose their jobs due to the effects of trade — but some staunch conservatives revolted, causing the Republican leadership to pull the bill from the floor without a vote.

Of course, federal job training programs are by no means perfect, and plenty could use a refocus toward skills that workers need in a 21st century economy. The main avenue for job training programs — the Workforce Investment Act — was written in 1998 when, as the New York Times put it, “simply teaching jobless people how to use computers and write résumés put them on a path to paychecks.” Current job training programs are often too short and not specific, leaving workers in a thankless cycle of low-paying, low-skill jobs.

As CAP’s Louis Soares has pointed out, channeling job training through community colleges could be a good way to get more out of these programs. But instead of offering ways to reform job training so that they actually work, Republicans want to simply lop off half their funding and call it a day.