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Republicans are often seen as the party of business. So it's a little ironic that some of the most vocal opposition to the Export-Import Bank comes from conservative Republicans, such as Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan.

"If we're ever going to get rid of all the corporate connectedness, all the corporate welfare, you've got to start with the most egregious one and the most obvious one and that's the Export-Import Bank," he says.

The Ex-Im Bank, as it's called, does several things. It was created during the Depression to help U.S. companies that wanted to sell more products overseas. It provides insurance to these companies to make sure they get paid when they sell products overseas.

Today, it also underwrites many billions of dollars in loans to U.S. and foreign companies.

But some members of Congress see the Ex-Im Bank as a bastion of corporate welfare, and they want to see it expire later this month.

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Richard Beranek, president of Miner Elastomer Products Corp., which makes manufacturing parts, says that without the Ex-Im Bank, the Illinois company wouldn't be able to export as much as it does.

"Would it put me out of business? It would not. Would it slow my business down? I think it would," he says.

But John Murphy of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce says that in many cases, U.S. companies have to have the backing of a big credit agency such as the Ex-Im Bank or they can't get foreign contracts.

"For instance, foreign infrastructure projects. If you want to bid most of the time you need to have Ex-Im support," Murphy says. "If it's a nuclear power plant project abroad, Ex-Im support is required and without it you can't even bid."

But the biggest thing the Ex-Im Bank does is guarantee loans to foreign companies so they can buy U.S.-made products.

For instance, foreign airlines that want to buy Boeing jets often do so with loans underwritten by the Ex-Im Bank. Murphy says a lot of countries now offer similar loan guarantees to help their businesses export more.

"So if the United States and our exporters don't have something similar, that's one knock against us," he says.

But to a lot of free market conservatives, what the Ex-Im Bank does amounts to crony capitalism, and they want Congress to let the bank's charter expire June 30.

Veronique de Rugy of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University says the Ex-Im Bank distorts the economy. For example, she says loan guarantees for foreign airlines may be great for Boeing, but they're bad for U.S. airlines.

"Domestic airlines can't have access to subsidies to buy airplanes, but they have to compete with foreign companies like [Emirates and] Air India," she says.

And those airlines are getting a subsidy, thanks to the Ex-Im Bank.

De Rugy says supporters of the bank are vastly exaggerating its importance. She says some companies reap benefits from it, but she says most U.S. companies will do just fine without it.

"All of the companies that export, a vast majority do it without any help from the government and yet there are those selected few who got cheaper financing," she says.

Critics acknowledge that the Ex-Im Bank has a lot of support in Washington, and that it may well survive if Congress ever gets to vote on it.

But if Republicans who control Congress succeed in keeping it from a vote, its charter will expire at the end of the month.

That means it would be unable to guarantee any more loans, and its role in the economy would diminish over time.

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If the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal isn't revived in the next few days, labor unions will have helped defeat one of President Obama's main foreign policy goals. But what will defeating the TPP, an agreement that covers 12 nations along the Pacific Rim, do for labor?

Thea Lee, deputy chief of staff at the AFL-CIO, has had a front-row seat to the trade negotiations on Capitol Hill.

She opposes many of the provisions in the new trade deal, but she can't tell you exactly which.

"We are sworn to secrecy, so we can't talk about it — not to our colleagues, not to our members, not to the press, and so that's frustrating," she says. "If I talked to you specifically about what I think the shortcomings of the labor chapter are, I could lose my security clearance. I don't know if I'd go to jail, but ..."

So she's left talking in generalities.

"These deals make it easier for multinational corporations to move jobs overseas," Lee says.

She, as well as other union leaders, point first and foremost, to the North American Free Trade Agreement that took effect 21 years ago.

Roland Zullo, a University of Michigan labor and employment policy researcher, says that for organized labor, NAFTA's wounds still linger.

"Labor has enough of a institutional memory to know what happened with NAFTA," he says. "There was a theory behind NAFTA; there was a theory that by integrating Canada, U.S. and Mexico, there would be a sort of overall net economic benefit.

But that didn't happen for U.S. workers in sectors like manufacturing. Michigan auto workers, for example, lost more than 100,000 jobs in the years that followed NAFTA'S passage.

But it's not a clear case of cause and effect. This is the period when Japanese automakers were setting up shop in the U.S. and taking market share away from General Motors, Ford and Chrysler. Other industries, and consumers, did benefit from NAFTA.

Matt Slaughter, associate dean of the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, says he understands labor's concerns about a new trade deal. But, he adds, labor faces a paradox in opposing the TPP.

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"A lot of the academic research and policy work shows companies and their workers that are connected to the dynamism in the global economy tend to pay higher wages and create better jobs than do the purely domestic companies," he says.

He says labor should stop trying to kill the new trade pact, and instead push for a more robust 21st century social safety net for dislocated workers.

But that idea was torpedoed last week by House Democrats, who, ironically, support the idea. It was a political maneuver to scuttle the entire bill.

Slaughter also questions what kind of victory labor would gain by torpedoing the TPP. After all, the U.S. already has free-trade agreements with a handful of countries in the TPP talks.

"Even for countries in the TPP negotiations with whom we don't have a free-trade agreement already, we are already relatively open to those countries for bringing in imports of almost all of their goods and services," he says.

Tim Waters, the national political director for the United Steelworkers, strongly disagrees with talk like this.

"For us to just say, 'Oh well, it's inevitable, we shouldn't try to stop it, we shouldn't try to stand up, we should just try to get in there and cut some kind of deal that made it less sickening,' doesn't make any sense," he says.

Waters adds that unions aren't anti-trade; they want fair trade. He says trade deals need to put the concerns of American workers first.

And, he says, this new agreement, yet again, doesn't do that.

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What's one to do with a typical Tuesday in June? That is, of course, after you've savored the fine tang of your mutton kidney breakfast, taken your (extended) morning constitutional and stepped out into the glory of another humdrum day. If you'll accept a suggestion: Perhaps you might want to spend the day with a man who's prone to doing all of these things himself — and who, despite having never actually drawn a breath, has wandered in the minds of his readers for close to a century.

In other words, gang: Happy Bloomsday. No better day to spend some time with the holiday's namesake — one Leopold Bloom, star of James Joyce's high modernist tome Ulysses. It was into the confines of June 16, 1904, (and a few of the wee hours of the day afterward) that Joyce squeezed the events of his novel. And so it's natural that fans should have chosen this day to celebrate the work — and they have been doing so since Bloomsday's inaugural festivities in Dublin in 1954.

The holiday has picked up adherents ever since, and it's picked up different ways to celebrate along with them. Care to do the day classy? Head to the Symphony Space in New York City, where they'll be celebrating with a performance that includes Irish literary luminaries Colum McCann and Paul Muldoon. In New Orleans, they're rolling up their sleeves with a marathon reading — and they're doing the same in Washington, D.C., and in Buenos Aires, among many other places. If a marathon's not your speed, how about a slow stroll through Genoa, Italy, instead?

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In Auckland, New Zealand, unfortunately, you may have missed your chance at seeing the Kiwis' usual cabaret in the city's red light district. Apparently, according to The Guardian, last year's rendition — featuring a rowdy showing from Lucy Lawless, star of Xena, Warrior Princess — brought down the house. So much so, in fact, they've retreated to a simple night of readings and songs at the local pub this time around.

And there you have a pretty good indication of the whole point, and the joy, of the occasion. Generally speaking, this is no home for the monocle-twisting, bitterly harrumphing stereotype of the elbow-patched academic. Like the book itself, celebrations at times happily veer into the playful and profane.

(After all, it's not for nothing that the book was banned from publication in the U.S. for more than a decade over obscenity concerns; for many celebrants, it seems only fitting that its loyal readers act accordingly.)

The pub owner who helped organize Dublin's first Bloomsday in 1954, John Ryan, took some silent footage to remember the inaugural pilgrimage to the novel's notable sites. In this glimpse, you can get a good look at another great Irish novelist, Brian O'Nolan (better known as Flann O'Brien), lousy with drink by the mid-afternoon, and chumming around with fellow writers Patrick Kavanagh and Anthony Cronin.

For Joyce himself, though, the first Bloomsday was a slightly more hallowed occasion. Though Ulysses was published in 1922, he'd picked to set his book on this specific date — June 16, 1904, remember — because it was the day that he first went for a walk with his longtime love, Nora Barnacle.

As Time recalls, it was the day that "Joyce always liked to say that Nora Barnacle had come 'sauntering' into his life out of the Dublin hotel where she worked as a waitress."

james joyce

In April this year, on Earth Day, Pope Francis urged everyone to see the world through the eyes of God, as a garden to cultivate.

"May the way people treat the Earth not be guided by greed, manipulation, and exploitation, but rather may it preserve the divine harmony between creatures and creation, also in the service of future generations," he said.

On Thursday, the Vatican will release the pontiff's hotly anticipated encyclical on the environment and poverty. The rollout of the teaching document has been timed to have maximum impact ahead of the U.N. climate change conference in December aimed at slowing global warming — and has angered climate change skeptics.

Past popes have also spoken about man's duty to protect the environment. Pope Benedict XVI was known as the "Green Pope" for installing solar panels at the Vatican.

Francis has made it clear that he believes climate change is mostly man-made.

"It's man," he said earlier this year, "who has slapped nature in the face."

Safeguard creation, Francis warned — because if we destroy it, it will destroy us.

Francis isn't the only pontiff who has championed environmental issues: His predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, installed solar panels (seen here in 2008) at the Vatican. Alessandra Tarantino/AP hide caption

itoggle caption Alessandra Tarantino/AP

Statements like these are generating controversy in some quarters. For example, Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum — who is Catholic — believes the pope should focus on problems that Santorum says are more pressing than climate change.

"The church has gotten it wrong a few times on science, and I think that we probably are better off leaving science to the scientists, and focusing on what we're really good at, which is theology and morality," Santorum said.

As a young man, the future pope studied chemistry and worked as a chemist before entering seminary, so he may have more scientific training than most of his critics.

"It's nice — for once the Catholic Church is on the side of science," says the Rev. Thomas Reese, senior analyst for the National Catholic Reporter.

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The encyclical won't be just about economics and politics, he says, but will focus on a moral issue that could affect many millions of lives.

"This is a call to respond, to help people, to protect people from the disasters that can come from climate change," Reese says. "The pope sees it as one of the most important challenges that we face as humanity."

As the first Latin American pope, Francis warns against what he calls the myth of trickle-down economics and the "throw-away culture" whose primary victims are the poor. As a result, some conservatives have labeled the leading voice of the global south a "closet Marxist."

But Mary Evelyn Tucker, professor of religion and ecology at Yale University, says the pope focuses on inequities in incomes and distribution of resources in societies across the world. She believes the papal document will stress not just sustainability, but development centered on human beings and on justice.

"Not development that allows the poor to sink and the rich to rise," she says, "so this is a new integration called eco-justice."

The title of the document is Laudato Sii, or "Praised Be," a refrain from the "Canticle of the Creatures" written in the 13th century by St. Francis of Assisi, patron saint of the environment — and the man from whom the pope took his name.

The pope's encyclical, says Reese of the National Catholic Reporter, will help rid environmentalists of their image as tree-huggers and Gaia worshippers and bring the movement into the mainstream.

He's also convinced it will have a far-reaching impact, encouraging Catholics to make major changes in what they consume and how they live their daily lives, and inspiring leaders of other religions to pick up the challenge.

"Religion is one of the few things that can motivate people to self-sacrifice — to give up their own self-interest for something else," Reese says. "This is going to be extremely important because people are not going to change their lifestyles to save the polar bears."

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