The preliminary tariffs were issued after a lengthy investigation by the Commerce Department into whether Chinese companies are “dumping” solar panels into the U.S. market below cost. These tariffs follow a March decision to issue small countervailing duties on Chinese module producers that are getting illegal domestic subsidies, according to Commerce.

Today’s issued tariffs are as follows: Trina, 31.14 percent; Suntech, 31.22 percent; and 31.18 percent for all other Chinese producers that participated in the investigation. For companies that did not participate, Commerce has slapped a massive preliminary tariff of 249.96 percent.

The combination of these new tariffs and the countervailing duties will add substantial cost to imported Chinese solar panels. With panel prices hovering in the $1 per watt range, it could add around 30 cents a watt to each panel for leading producers, and vastly more for producers that didn’t get involved in Commerce’s investigation.

These are preliminary fines and can be negotiated and changed before Commerce makes a final decision. The solar industry’s trade group, the Solar Energy Industries Association, has called on the U.S. and Chinese governments to negotiate a settlement — potentially resulting in more moderate tariffs:

“The solar industry calls upon the U.S. and Chinese governments to immediately work together towards a mutually-satisfactory resolution of the growing trade conflict within the solar industry.  While trade remedy proceedings are basic principles of the rules-based global trading system, so too are collaboration and negotiations.

“Importantly, disputes within one segment of the industry affect the entire solar supply chain–and these broad implications must be recognized.  In addition, the U.S. solar manufacturing base goes well beyond solar cell and module production and includes billions of dollars of recent investments into the production of polysilicon, polymers, and solar manufacturing equipment, products which are largely destined for export.  If the U.S.-China solar trade disputes continue to escalate, it will jeopardize these U.S. investments.

“Given these broader implications, it is imperative that the U.S., China, and other players in the dynamic global marketplace work constructively to avert or resolve trade disputes that will ultimately hurt consumers and businesses throughout the solar value chain.”

The solar industry has been on edge since last October, when the manufacturer SolarWorld and six other anonymous companies issued a complaint about illegal trade practices. They argued that China’s subsidies were allowing companies to dump panels below cost, thus driving U.S.-based manufacturers out of business.

However, downstream developers have enjoyed falling panel prices — a factor that has allowed the industry to expand 109% in 2011. A group of solar companies known as the Coalition for American Solar Energy has been staunchly opposed to tariffs, saying they’ll dramatically drive up the cost of solar installations in the U.S.

by Kate Gordon

A simmering trade dispute between the U.S. and China will likely come to a head tomorrow when the U.S. Department of Commerce issues its determination on alleged trade violations by Chinese solar manufacturers.  Surprisingly, the U.S. solar industry is not in agreement on the need to hold the Chinese accountable.  It should be.

On one side are those who claim China has been illegally subsidizing and dumping its solar products in the U.S. market, forcing many American manufacturers into bankruptcy.  These companies, mostly manufacturers of solar panels and related products, claim Chinese solar companies have benefited from government largesse in the form of free land and facilities, electricity and water, and low- or no-cost loans that keep prices for Chinese-made solar products artificially low.  In addition, they claim these Chinese companies are illegally “dumping” their cheap solar panels into the American market, making it nearly impossible for U.S. manufacturers to compete.

On the other side are those, mostly solar installers, who have benefited from the ability to buy low-cost solar panels, which they claim has allowed them to do solar installations at a lower cost and therefore expand the use of solar power in America.  This group of U.S. companies argues that U.S. manufacturers can’t compete with the Chinese when it comes to solar panel production, because the Chinese are simply more efficient and can do production at a lower cost.  They also worry that pursuing a trade case will incite a “trade war” with China, which will erode their profit margins, slow U.S. industry growth across the value chain, and make it even harder for solar energy to compete with traditional fossil fuels.

Both sides have compelling arguments.  So who’s right?

One way to answer that question is to say that we’ll find out who’s right when the Department of Commerce issues its findings.  Commerce has already found that China is unfairly subsidizing its solar industry, and has imposed tariffs on Chinese solar manufacturers as a result.  The upcoming decision, on whether China is also illegally dumping those panels into the U.S. market, may bring larger tariffs if China is found to be in violation of our mutually-agreed-upon, and heavily negotiated, trade agreements.  The entire point of the trade enforcement regime is to figure out whether a country is in fact breaking the rules, and if so, to issue sanctions. It’s a system based on the rule of law, something we Americans hold dear, and for good reason.

But would a decision against China undermine America’s emerging solar energy industry? There is no question that solar energy faces an uphill battle in the U.S.  The combination of century-old subsidies to fossil fuel companies and the lack of any real national commitment to renewable energy makes it difficult for emerging energy technologies to compete here.  But that doesn’t mean that the United States needs cheap Chinese solar panels so badly that we should just roll over and let a foreign government break enforceable international trade rules.  If Commerce finds that the Chinese government has acted illegally, then the Chinese government and the industry it is subsidizing should pay a price for that behavior.

Our faith in the rule of law is too important for us to abandon our international trade obligations in favor of cheap imported solar panels.  So, too, is our need to support the U.S. manufacturing sector by protecting it from unlawful trade practices.  Manufacturing is a crucial piece of the U.S. economy. Our ability to stay innovative and competitive in a time of intense global pressures relies on manufacturing companies, which contribute fully 70 percent of all the private research and development spending in America.  And these companies are major job creators: a recent report by SEMI found that manufacturing jobs had the highest job multiplier of any segment of the American economy.

That’s why we should be supporting clean energy manufacturers in their efforts to compete with China, through programs like the Clean Energy Manufacturing Tax Credit program that President Obama recently urged Congress to extend, or through Senator Sherrod Brown’s “Security and Energy in Manufacturing Act,” rather than punishing them for trying to compete on a level playing field. Because that’s the crucial point:  every American company should be able to compete on a level playing field in the international marketplace.  That’s good for solar manufacturers in the current case, but it’s good for all American companies – and for our economy as a whole – in the long run.

Kate Gordon is vice president for energy policy at the Center for American Progress.

Related Posts:

• Commerce Department Announces Small Tariffs On Chinese Solar Panels
• 5 Myths and Realities About U.S.-China Solar Trade Competition: Our Nation Cannot Capitulate to China’s Solar Technology Ambitions

One of the loudest corporate voices arguing against the bank’s reauthorization is Delta Airlines, while one of the loudest arguing against it in Congress is House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA). And as Politico noted today, Delta and Cantor have more than this policy agreement in common:

A sleepy Export-Import Bank debate in Congress has blossomed into a corporate political brawl matching the powerful Boeing Co. lobby against Delta Air Lines, represented here by a close friend and supporter of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor.

The issues are bigger than the personalities, affecting billions of dollars in U.S.-backed loan guarantees supporting the overseas sale of Boeing aircraft. But with pivotal Senate votes now scheduled for Tuesday, Cantor is without a doubt the crucial broker for the House. And Boeing is hammering away at his close ties with Delta lobbyist and confidante Andrea Newman — even as it fields a small army of its own.

If it seems David vs. Goliath, Newman, as Delta’s senior vice president for government affairs, comes with a BlackBerry instead of a slingshot. In an anecdote Cantor’s office denied Friday, he is said to have once emailed her about an aviation bill while still in a members-only meeting with the White House on the subject. And the two enjoy what’s described as a genuine family — University of Michigan — friendship even as she helps him raise campaign funds.

In addition to gumming up the works on the ExIm bank, Delta has been on the wrong side of many a policy fight recently. It’s worst work was pushing Republicans to include a union-busting provision in a bill reauthorizing the Federal Aviation Administration, while ultimately led to an FAA shutdown.

As CAP’s Sabina Dewan has explained, the ExIM bank (yes, in addition to providing some help to giant manufacturers like Boeing) is crucial for smaller exporters that have a hard time accessing financing. But it’s evidently more important for Cantor and crew to throw Delta yet another bone, at the expense of the wider economy.

Republican lawmakers are moving to block a job-creation package because it includes a provision that would help U.S. companies access the capital they need to sell their products and services abroad. The party of no’s latest target is the U.S. Export Import Bank (ExIM) — the government agency that provides loans, guarantees and insurance products to enable US companies, especially small businesses, to export.

The ExIm Bank’s charter caps its overall outstanding commitments at $100 billion and Senate Democrats are seeking to raise the cap to $140 billion and reauthorize ExIm for another four years.

But this doesn’t sit well with conservative lawmakers. They object to the reauthorization calling Ex-Im’s activities “corporate welfare” that distorts the free market. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor suggested that, instead of reauthorizing the bank, the U.S. talk to our major trading partners to get them to “end subsidized export financing programs and other forms of export subsidies.”

By all means, lets talk. But in the meantime, there’s no need to pull the rug out from underneath firms and workers that export now. After all, at a time when millions of Americans are unemployed, we need to do everything in our power to create jobs by helping businesses export more — not cut off their financing to do so.

What GOP lawmakers forget is that state-capitalist economies like China don’t abide by our free market rules. Their state-owned enterprises provide seemingly unlimited access to cheap capital. Cutting off ExIm’s ability to finance exports, especially for some of our most competitive sectors like aerospace, will seriously hurt American workers and firms.

What’s more, phasing out Ex-Im’s financing will disproportionately affect America’s small businesses, which are a critical source of middle class jobs and incomes. While large firms with big operating budgets can either afford to finance their own operations or obtain bank financing, small businesses don’t have access to credit because they are considered a riskier bet. They turn to ExIm for their export financing instead.

Not only should Congress immediately reauthorize Ex-Im to operate for another four years, it should raise the bank’s statutory cap well beyond $140 billion to benefit America’s companies, their workers and to create more jobs. And this doesn’t cost us anything — Ex-Im is self-sustaining and even profitable.

This latest ploy by conservative lawmakers is no more than an attempt to stymie the real progress the Obama administration has made on boosting our nation’s exports.

There are limitations, of course—those 14 movies all have to be Imax or 3D editions of movies. So the pictures that can make it overseas are somewhat limited by what the studios are already shooting in those formats or willing to convert, and that likely means more big blockbusters rather than small but clever indies. I’m torn between wanting to see more of that money come back to American moviemakers and knowing that it’ll likely increase the profit margins on precisely the movies that don’t need the extra proof that they’re successful. Maybe I can have it both ways, and those jacked-up margins will give studios a little more permission to experiment with smart original ideas because they’ll have more of a cushion to absorb those projects if they fail.

It’s also worth a reminder that at the same time that China’s opening up its movie market, it’s banned all imported television during primetime broadcasts and issued new regulation saying that no channel can have more than a quarter of its programming be imported. Abiding by one World Trade Organization ruling doesn’t mean that China’s given up on trying to protect the growth of its domestic entertainment industry. And it doesn’t mean the regime’s about to let in a lot of entertainment that might undermine the values it’s trying to promote. If I was trying to maintain a vaguely Communist economic system, I’d be a lot more concerned about the plucky entrepreneurialism of 2 Broke Girls than the loud and goofy fantasies of the Transformers movies.

[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.