[SPOILERS IF YOU HAVEN'T READ THE NOVELS TO FOLLOW]

I think the biggest question for me will be how the second season of the show handles the themes of governance that are so important to A Clash of Kings. Other than Jon Snow’s attempts to reform the Wall, the struggle between Joffrey and Cersei on one side and Tyrion on the other over how to run King’s Landing — and by extension, the realm — is one of the few experiments in and debates over governing philosophies we ever see in action. Cersei’s devoted all of her efforts to bolstering the hard power of King’s Landing, recruiting new men into the City Watch, spending coin on wildfire, displaying heads on walls, and paying for it all with a tax that’s throttled already constricted trade. Tyrion comes in and shifts the balance, opening up trade, making a deal with the city’s armorers that both bolsters their trade and lets him prepare to wage unconventional warfare, and takes the heads off the walls in an effort to make the regime less savage. He institutes actual diplomatic relations with Dorne, which you think someone else might have considered at some point earlier, given their utterly badass reputation.

He’s not perfect, of course. The riot that sweeps the city is an augury that neither Tyrion or Cersei read fully (much to the latter’s dismay later) — it always surprises me that Cersei and her advisers are caught off-guard by an upswing in religious fervor during times of insecurity. The fact that even the Lannister who loves learning, who actually has the intellectual curiosity to want to see the end of the world, can’t accept what Ser Allister Thorne is telling him about the White Walkers on the border suggests something powerful about the limitations of our collective ability to grapple with the monstrous and unthinkable. And Tyrion is too personal when it comes to reforming the Small Council, failing to appreciate Maester Pycelle’s abilities and connections (and given the scene the show gave us of his secret vigor, I wonder if he might not resist Tyrion more strongly than in the novels).

All in all, it’s a parable for the dangers of allowing your governance to become personal. Tyrion is doomed to failure when his rule becomes as much about discipling Joffrey and proving his father wrong about his abilities. Both are futile tasks. Joffrey’s already a hopeless sadist with an elevated sense of his own wisdom by the time Tyrion gets anywhere close to him. Tywin ultimately turns out to be flexible, but not in ways that lend him strength or reason. King’s Landing might have turned out to be genuinely salvageable, the unbreakable link in a chain of Lannister defenses. But disciplining these three generations of Lannisters or restoring them to decency isn’t a project worth Tyrion’s considerable talents.

An iconic photo of protesters being tear gassed.

In many ways, the modern American protest movement — one that is Internet-savvy, diverse, and inclusive — was born on November 30, 1999 — exactly 12 years ago today. On that day, thousands of Americans and foreign activists who visited to take part effectively shut down the World Trade Organization ministerial meeting in Seattle, angry at what they viewed as the organization’s disregard for labor and environmental rights.

Using widespread civil disobedience, protesters were able to keep international delegates from getting to the trade meeting. Police wildly overreacted, and engaged in brutality that often injured innocent bystanders. Future trade meetings met in remote locations like Cancun, Mexico just to avoid similar demonstrations. IMC and Big Noise Films made a short documentary about the protests. Watch it:

Interestingly, former Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper — who was in charge of the police force during the protests — has become an advocate for reforming policing in the United States. He recently condemned the militarization of the police and use of heavy-handed tactics against 99 Percenters.

This is great news for a couple of reasons. First, if it’s done right, the adaptation will be a great look at — in addition to the birth of the Church of England — European trade, the consolidation of church properties that led to the founding of Cardinal College at Oxford, and the allegations that Thomas More actively promoted the torture of Protestants during the lead-up to England’s split with the Catholic Church. Wolf Hall is a phenomenal novel about personal investment in politics. Watching Thomas Cromwell escape his father’s vicious abuse through the kindness of Amsterdam’s cloth merchants and the mercenary armies of the continent; Cardinal Wolsey fret over the future of the college he wanted to make a jewel; or the cold home More builds to prop up the edifice of his righteousness, the show builds a complicated definition of the means and costs of being a genuinely world-historical figure.

And for all that it’s big, it’s a strikingly personal novel. We see what it means to be sold off for your chastity, the cost of being an object of obsessive pursuit in a way that makes a mockery of Twilight. It’s a shame that Natalie Dormer already played Anne Boelyn in The Tudors so she can’t take on a more nuanced version of the role here. Cromwell’s relationship with his late wife, and later, with her sister, who is married to another man, are infinitely tender. The loss of his daughter, the disappointment of his son, sting like whips. And it’s a marvelous novel of friendship, whether it’s Cromwell and Wolsey or Cromwell and Imperial diplomat Eustace Chapuys. I don’t really know how a miniseries will capture the Cabinet of Wonders-like effect of the novel, which is one of the most effective evocations of a historic worldview I’ve ever read. But I’m glad it’s not getting reduced to a movie, and that some serious writerly fire-power will be behind it. HBO’s movie team has been wildly on their game lately, so I can’t wait to see what they do with this.

Chinese manufacturing is more likely to compete with low-wage manufacturing in other developing countries than it is to compete directly with U.S. manufacturing. Still, as Paul Krugman explains, that doesn’t mean that currency realignment wouldn’t alter our trade balance.

One mechanism Krugman doesn’t mention is that a pricier RMB would mean higher incomes for Chinese people. That means they’d buy more American stuff. That’s not just export-oriented U.S. manufactured goods, its also our bounty of agricultural exports and even things like taking more trips to the United States and buying stuff while they’re here. Net tourism is an important and growing export industry for the United States, and serves as a valuable form of stimulus for the large majority of Americans who don’t work in the manufacturing trade. Stronger foreign currencies mean more demand for our hotels, our restaurants, and our transportation system as well as for our manufactured goods.

Using a database of workers who benefited from Trade Adjustment Assistance — a program that aids workers who lose their jobs due to foreign trade — the public interest group Public Citizen analyzed the jobs records of these corporations and found that 18 of the 32 outsourced at least 18,600 American jobs to other countries since 2001 thanks to prior free trade agreements like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA):

We have a searchable form of the TAA database on our website. There you can see that some of these 32 corporations have shipped a combined 18,600 American jobs overseas since 2001. Consider that an example rather than a full accounting of the damage, as TAA is a narrow program that excludes many workers who may well have lost their jobs to trade pacts and imports but who do not meet the program’s criteria. [...] Just to pick out a few examples, Whirlpool took advantage of NAFTA and shipped over 1,000 jobs at their Fort Smith, Arkansas facility to Mexico in 2008. Caterpillar, a major backer of the proposed trade pact with Colombia, laid off 338 workers at its Mapleton, Illinois facility when it shifted their work to Mexico.

Advocates of the new trade agreements have long maintained that these deals will lead to American job growth. But the evidence from previous agreements and estimates of the job losses from the deals Congress will be deciding on does not bear this out.

At one point, Roemer was asked what it would take for Congress to enact reform of our trade policies. Roemer explained that monied interests would try to block reforms he was proposing, like eliminating foreign tax credits and tax deductions for overseas business expenses:

QUESTION: What would it take to convince Congress to pass significant trade reform?

ROEMER: Cut off the big checks. GE doesn’t want trade reform, they want it the way it is. [...] I would do away with the deduction in the tax code, I think it’s section 162, which allows them to make a call center, for example, overseas and they deduct the expense from their American taxes. It oughta be changed. [...] Corporations are free to do what’s in their best interests. But I think it’s in their best interests for America to be strengthened. [...] There are ways to do it, I’ve mentioned two of them already, the deductability of expenses and the foreign tax credits.

By criticizing a tax code that incentivizes American firms to outsource jobs overseas, Roemer is taking an approach that is distinctly different from many of his GOP colleagues. Some candidates, like former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (GA), have even gone as far as to praise tax dodging by major corporations, saying that we should let them decide their own tax rates.

Making it clear that GOP opposition to helping the workers who are inevitably hurt by expanded international trade isn’t confined to the Senate, House Republicans on the Ways and Means Committee refused earlier this week to even include TAA in their version of the trade deals at all. And when House Democrats proposed an amendment to insert TAA into the agreement, the GOP voted it down:

In the House, Democrats offered an amendment to include TAA in the Korea bill, but the effort was defeated by Republicans. The panel then approved the pact with Democrats voting no.

Last year, 280,000 workers were aided by trade assistance, with nearly half of them receiving aid under the expanded program that the GOP allowed to expire. And Republicans realize that the program is helpful to workers, as several of them have supported their constituents’ petitions to obtain benefits.

Expanding trade is going to produce winners and losers, so it is imperative that any expansion of trade include help for workers who wind up on the short end of the stick. Even 2012 GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney said recently that he supports aid for workers who lose their jobs due to trade.

But the GOP has obstinately opposed providing such assistance, with Republican leaders saying that they will actively oppose free trade deals that include aid for workers. As Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) — a staunch advocate of TAA — put it, Republicans “continue to want to do free trade on the cheap.”

Republican leaders in both the House and the Senate have come out in opposition to three pending trade deals if President Obama includes reauthorization of a program meant to aid workers who lose jobs due to outsourcing caused by international trade. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH), House Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp (R-MI), Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT), and other Senate Finance Committee Republicans plan to oppose the deals if the Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) program is included.

Despite widespread Republican opposition to the program, however, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R) endorsed the idea of assisting workers who lose their jobs due to free trade during a presidential campaign stop in Allentown, Pennsylvania yesterday, even touting a worker assistance program that exists in Massachusetts:

KEYES: The Senate is marking up three trade agreements right now, but Republicans are opposing assistance for workers whose jobs are shipped overseas. Is that assistance something you would support?

ROMNEY: I’m not familiar with the specific bill. I can tell you this –

KEYES: It’s the three trade agreements with South Korea –

ROMNEY: …I can tell you my experience in dealing with the issue, the very serious issue of people whose careers have been lost because industries are lost, is that in some respects the best way to help those folks is to, if you will, attach a bit of a bonus or a bounty to those who are unemployed for some period of time and let that money go to someone who actually hires them and puts them in a training program in their enterprise. I like people getting trained for actual jobs. And we did that in my state, we made it a $2,000 bonus that got attached to anyone who was unemployed for a year or more. That strikes me as an appropriate way to help get people back on their feet. I like helping individuals who’ve been out of work for a long time, whose industries have been decimated, and helping those folks get the skills they need to get better jobs is something that makes a lot of sense.

Watch it:

But as with anything Romney supports today, it’s hard to know if he will continue supporting it tomorrow. Though he touts Massachusetts’ Worker Training Development Fund now, he attempted to veto $6.3 million out of its budget in 2006.

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT)

Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) is evidently going to stand with McConnell on this one. “We have long said that TAA — even this scaled-back version — should be dealt with separately from the trade agreements, and that is how we expect to proceed,” a spokesman for Boehner said. And according to Reuters, at least four of the 11 Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee will vote against the South Korea Free Trade Agreement if it includes aid for displaced workers:

At least four of the 11 Republicans on the panel say they will vote against the South Korea deal if the White House sticks to a plan to include in the implementing legislation renewal of a retraining program for U.S. workers who lose their job because of foreign competition.

Those opponents include the panel’s top Republican, Senator Orrin Hatch, who is up for re-election next year and is under pressure from the Tea Party conservative movement to take a tough line on spending. Aides said Republican Senators Jon Kyl, John Thune and Tom Coburn would vote against the South Korea pact if the Trade Adjustment Assistance program, or TAA, is included in the bill, while other Republicans on the panel are considering that.

Leaving aside the merits of these particular trade deals, any expansion of trade is going to produce winners and losers. The GOP, however, only wants to acknowledge the former, while ignoring the latter, pushing through trade deals while neglecting those who inevitably wind up on the short end of the stick.

The administration had been refusing to move the pacts forward without Congress reauthorizing the Trade Adjustment Assistance program, which aids workers who lose their jobs due to international trade. Republicans allowed an expansion of TAA to expire back in February (even as they were advocating for their constituents to receive TAA payments).

Congressional leaders yesterday struck a deal with the White House that will reauthorize TAA in return for moving on the pending agreements. But McConnell is so adamantly opposed to helping workers who are harmed by trade that he vowed to vote against a free trade deal that includes a reauthorization of trade assistance:

“I’ve never voted against a trade agreement before — but if the administration were to embed TAA into the Korean trade agreement, I would be compelled to vote against it,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) told reporters.

McConnell’s distaste for trade assistance is well known. Earlier this month he called on the administration to move on free trade pacts and “leave Trade Adjustment Assistance out of it.” But now he will vote against the very deal he has championed if it includes provisions to help the workers who are inevitably hurt.

And McConnell is not the only Republican who wants trade deals to be approved without also approving measures to help workers who are displaced. For instance, House Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp (R-MI) called it “regrettable” that trade assistance is a part of the package.

Merits of the trade deals aside (and they have their issues), forging ahead without providing help to the workers who wind up on the short end of the stick is simply unacceptable. But for McConnell, including aid for displaced workers is reason to vote down what is otherwise a top GOP priority.

An iconic photograph of the funeral of an assassinated trade unionist in Colombia.

Across the nation’s capital, business lobbyists are working furiously to hash out the details of a new trade agreement with Colombia. Tentatively known as the Colombia Free Trade Agreement (FTA), the deal was approved by the Colombian Congress in 2007 and has awaited U.S. ratification since then.

While business groups have lobbied heavily in favor of the agreement, a number of human rights and labor groups have opposed it, saying that Colombia has failed to make needed progress on human and labor rights standards and that the agreement may further undermine these rules and regulations.

Over at ChamberPost, John Murphy, the Vice President of International Affairs at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, makes the argument that violence in Colombia has subsided and that it’s actually much more unsafe to be an American citizen than a Colombian union member:

Today, homicide rates are higher in the United States (5.0 per 100,000) than among Colombia’s labor union members (3.4 per 100,000). A resident of the District of Columbia is seven times more likely to be murdered than a Colombian labor union member. The allegation that labor union members are being targeted for assassination today comes from U.S. labor unions, not Colombians.

At the Huffington Post, Gary Shapiro, the president of the Consumer Electronics Association, makes a similar argument, saying, “Colombian union leaders visiting Washington this week are in more danger here than in their home country.” Shapiro then went on to point out in the comments that Murphy wrote an additional post mocking the AFL-CIO labor union for using a 13-year-old picture of a union member’s assassination to talk about violence against labor — with the suggestion that declining violence means that such scenes are not nearly as pressing.

Shaprio and Murphy’s statistics are deceptive. Victims of homicide are largely victims who aren’t targeted specifically due to occupation, while union members are being targeted specifically for their labor activism. Furthermore, both men leave out a crucial fact: Colombia is still the most dangerous place in the world to be in a labor union.

In fact, according to data from the International Trade Union Confederation’s (ITUC) Annual Survey of Violations of Trade Union Rights, Colombia had 49 assassinations of labor officials in 2010 — more than the entire rest of the world combined (41 deaths were recorded elsewhere in the world in 2010). ThinkProgress has assembled the following graph comparing killings of trade unionists in Colombia with several other developing countries:

As you can see, Colombia easily leads the world in killings of union members. It is simply disingenuous to factor in other forms of killings — like common homicide — to absurdly claim that Colombian trade unionists are safe. After all, if Shapiro and Murphy decided to compare the murders of trade unionists between Colombia and the United States, the numbers would look completely different, because there were no assassinations of trade unionists of the United States last year.

Rep. Dennis Ross (R-FL) wants workers who lose their jobs due to trade to go unhelped.

This past February, House Republicans allowed an expansion of the Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) program to expire. TAA is designed to help workers who lost their jobs due to trade agreements. Since then, the House GOP has been demanding that President Obama submit three new trade agreements for passage before a vote is held on TAA renewal.

But last week, Rep. Dennis Ross (R-FL) went one step further, introducing H.R.2165, which would abolish the TAA program entirely:

“It is near impossible to determine whether someone lost their job due to free trade,” Ross has said. “A government handout, borrowed from China, as a bone to Big Labor, won’t create a single job and is a needless distraction.” He also said trade assistance is “a federal wealth-redistribution program that has no business existing in a free society.”

Nearly 300,000 workers were aided by trade assistance in 2009. According to the Economic Policy Institute, the Korea-U.S. free trade agreement alone would cost 159,000 American jobs.

– Jen Kalaidis

But Republicans are digging their heels in against reauthorizing a program to help the workers who inevitably end up on the short end of the stick when it comes to free trade deals. Today, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) went so far as to claim that trade assistance has no place in negotiations over free trade agreements:

This morning I’m calling on the administration once again to send us the three pending trade agreements that the president himself has said would create tens of thousands of American jobs and to leave Trade Adjustment Assistance out of it.

McConnell is not the only one utterly indifferent to the plight of workers who lose their jobs due to trade pacts. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) said that trade assistance shouldn’t be reauthorized because “we’re broke.”

But while Republicans are content to demagogue trade assistance on the floors of Congress, back home is another story. Several Republicans lawmakers have sought help from the Labor Department or have supported constituent petitions for a program that the GOP allowed to expire. As The Hill noted, these GOP members “made a forceful case for petitions to the trade aid program.”

In a statement to ThinkProgress, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), a staunch supporter of trade assistance, said, “it’s unconscionable — and bad for our economic recovery efforts — to turn our backs on workers looking to retrain for new work after losing their jobs to unfair foreign trade with countries like China. Yet too many Washington politicians have obstructed extension of trade adjustment assistance, while arguing for more-of-the-same free trade agreements.”

Indeed, international trade pacts produce winners and losers, and the government has a responsibility to help those who lose their livelihood through no fault of their own. But the GOP wants only to talk about the positive aspects of trade, while pretending that the negative aspects simply don’t exist.

The World Trade Organization prohibits government programs that give preferences to companies using local products, such as China’s program of “indigenous innovation.” The wind power grants ranged from $6 million to $22 million, Kirk’s office says. “This outcome helps ensure fairness for American clean technology companies and workers,” Kirk says.

James Bacchus, a former World Trade Organization chief judge and member of Congress, says these types of trade subsidies “stand out as a sore thumb. They are patently illegal.”

This comes after the United Steelworkers Union filed a complaint last December with the U.S. trade representative, saying that China’s $216 billion in subsidies that specifically benefit domestic companies over foreign companies made it very difficult to compete. The U.S. government’s response:

“These subsidies effectively operate as a barrier to U.S. exports to China. Opening markets by removing barriers to our exports is a core element of the President’s trade strategy. Our decision today, along with the two other WTO cases that we recently filed against China, underscores our commitment to ensuring a level playing field with China for American workers and businesses.”

Manufacturers also claimed such incentives allowed Chinese companies to manufacture products in China, bring them over to America, take advantage of U.S. subsidies, and beat out American companies to projects. (Thus, a Buy American provision was enacted for certain portions of stimulus funds – a move that didn’t make Chinese companies very happy.)

So will this latest trade development open up the exploding Chinese market to American turbine and components manufacturers? Steve Sawyer, the Secretary General of the Global Wind Energy Council tells Climate Progress:  “I don’t think so…. the only American company ‘competing’ in the China market is GE … and they have a small market share and don’t appear to be aggressively pushing it.”

Still, the move is an important one for broader international trade relations:

Eswar Prasad, a Cornell University senior professor of trade policy, calls the action by China “symbolically very important.”

“Whether it opens the floodgates to a broader set of commitments remains to be seen,” Prasad says. “I think it is premature to declare victory, but it is certainly a hopeful step.”

A deep thirst for new sources of energy and consistent incentives for wind developers have allowed China’s wind industry to outpace America’s in recent years, raising concerns among U.S. and European manufacturers that China would strong-arm existing players out of the market. However, while Chinese companies like Goldwind, Sinoval and Dongfang Electric have crept into the top ten global manufacturers, they are not yet competing in bankability, branding and proof of long-term reliability.

Related Post:

• Will China’s 50 GW goal create a solar bubble? No.

One of the loudest voices against renewing the trade assistance program — which helped more than 100,000 workers last year cope with job loss that was a result of international trade — has been Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT). “[Tying trade agreements] to unrelated spending is hugely disappointing to American workers, farmers, and job creators, who are losing out to foreign competitors with every passing day. It makes no sense to shut the door on increasing U.S. exports by over $10 billion in order to fund a costly program,” Hatch said earlier this month.

But Hatch now has another justification for allowing workers hurt by trade to fend for themselves. According to Hatch, the country simply can’t afford to help them:

“One of the reasons I don’t think this will pass, is they want $7.2 billion at a time when this country is basically broke,” Hatch said. “Why hold up three agreements that are beneficial to the American worker?”

To push for more free trade deals while refusing to authorize more trade assistance to help the inevitable victims of such trade is bad enough. But to use the canard of “we’re broke” to justify it is even worse.

After all, the country is not broke. As the Center for American Progress’ Michael Linden and Michael Ettlinger note, “The notion that the United States is ‘broke’ is a popular talking point for conservative lawmakers…But we’re not broke. Not at all. If we were, it would mean that we were out of money, unable to pay our bills, or meet our financial obligations. We are none of those things.” Bloomberg’s David Lynch added that the notion the U.S. is broke “is a widely shared view with just one flaw: It’s wrong.”

Hatch and the rest of the Republicans standing against reauthorizing trade assistance refuse to admit that free trade has a downside, and that the government has a responsibility to help those most affected. As Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), “they continue to want to do free trade on the cheap.”

Republicans in the Senate then blocked consideration of the program’s renewal, saying they refused to move on it until several pending free trade agreements were approved. But at the same time that they have left the program to languish and die, Republicans have been making passionate defenses of it on behalf of their constituents, as the Hill found:

Several Republican lawmakers have sought help from a now-expired trade aid program that many in their party have bristled at reauthorizing. In letters and faxes sent to the Labor Department obtained by The Hill under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), 11 Republicans in the House and Senate forwarded constituents’ pleas or outright supported their petitions for aid under the Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) program. [...]

Many congressional aides dismissed the letters as constituent casework and not representative of where their lawmakers stand on renewing TAA. Nonetheless, several members made a forceful case for petitions to the trade aid program.

Rep. Sean Duffy (R-WI), for instance, asked the Labor Department to approve a constituent’s request for benefits because, “until lawmakers are able to solve the trade problems to level the playing field … it is incumbent upon us to provide assistance for the families who suffer as a result [of] these practices and conditions.”

But when asked for comment, Duffy’s spokesman parroted the Republican line regarding moving the trade agreements forward. Others who sent letters to the Labor Department looking to aid constituents in obtaining benefits include House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) and Sen. John McCain (R-AZ).

Regardless of the merits of the trade deals in question, trade assistance should be reauthorized. Inevitably, more free trade produces both winners and losers, and trade assistance helps those who wind up with the short straw. And as these letters make clear, several Republicans feel the same way, even as their party holds trade assistance benefits hostage.