Last week, we noted below that there would be “More Stubborn Facts Coming on Friday”, and indeed they did. They came in the form of a press roundtable featuring Jerry Jasinowski, President of the Manufacturing Institute, Martin Baily, former head of the President’s Council of Economic Advisors, and the NAM’s trade VP and all around wise man, Frank Vargo. They were there to talk about the relationship between trade and jobs. Remember, these were facts.

Jasinowski opened by talking about the high cost — non-wage — of doing business in the US, citing the well-known 22% cost disadvantage which we face vs. our trading partners, in such areas as taxes, regulatory burdens and the queen mother of ‘em all, legal costs.

Baily followed by talking about imports and exports, concluding that “the loss of jobs from trade was a result of export weakness.” In other words, the effect of the strong dollar on exports was devastating. He also noted that it was a long, several-year cycle, and it takes time to get into the soup, takes time to reverse. He said that our slump in exports was because we were selling to countries that were growing slowly and because we had lost competitiveness. By his calculations, 50-80% of our loss of competitiveness was due to the overvalued dollar. We’ve said in this space many times before that even the AFL-CIO said that the dollar was the biggest culprit in the trade deficit. Here’s a link to an article from the McKinsey Quarterly by Baily on point, entitled, “Don’t Blame Trade for US Job Losses”.

Frank Vargo batted cleanup, echoing Baily’s comments and reminding us once gain that 90% of our manufacturing trade deficit is with countries where we have no trade agreement. Trade agreements lower barriers to entry of US-made goods. Here’s a link to Frank’s slides.

Here’s a link to Martin Baily’s presentation. A full transcript of the session will be posted on the Manufacturing Institute’s website some time on Monday.

Somebody forward this to Lou Dobbs, OK?

We’ve long contended that we have the smartest readers of any blog — or any publication , for that matter. Well, it’s been proved again. If you scroll down to the entry that says, “Energy – Food for Thought“, you’ll see a comment posted there by Richard Becker, an Industrial Education teacher from Colorado. He wrote to talk about the importance of manufacturing and a skilled workforce to all aspects of the economy. We thought it just hit the nail on the head, said it better than we could (and God knows we’ve tried….), and so herewith it is reprinted with his permission. Thanks again to Richard Becker for his insight and eloquence.

Part of the problem in the failure of many to understand natural gas requirements as energy is they are still laboring under the ’80′s misconception that manufacturing is “obsolete smokestack industry” and therefore does not exist to use energy. Energy is not only used to heat manufacturing facilities in colder climates, but energy is used to heat treat steel for tool & die, mold production and other uses.

They are also ignorant regarding natural gas (along with petroleum) as a source of raw materials for plastic material. Polyethylene — used to produce kitchen items and other applications — comes from natural gas.

The energy production opponents are also naive to the extent they fail to realize that even computer “high tech” hardware itself cannot exist unless assembled from precision components that are the direct and indirect result of machine tools and other manufacturing processes. Nothing suddenly materializes at a warehouse or retail store shelf!

As a former high school Industrial Education teacher, who tried to make a difference ’66-’72, I am now involved in an education reform effort. The objective is to convince the schools that, contrary to the naive academic beliefs since the mid ’60′s, an educated direct labor workforce is essential because manufacturing never was “dead”, only “wounded” but has recovered with CNC and other computerized processes.

Without an educated direct labor workforce, this nation will remain dependent on imports due to the need for importing that which is no longer made in the United States.

This is hard for us, as People has long been our Bible, our go-to source for weekly information, but this time they’ve gone too far, the ultimate snub. This week’s issue — “How Tom Proposed” is the cover story — there is a special section, “The Hottest Beach Bodies”. We quickly turned to the story — in the interest if manufacturing, you see — only to find that in among Jessica Alba, Elizabeth Hurley, David Beckham, Colin Farrel and Beyonce, there is not a manufacturer in sight! We just think this is a disgusting oversight. How on earth could they ignore the manufacturing sector, that represents one-eighth of our GDP? Does Beyonce represent an eighth of GDP? Don’t think so, she’s only like a tenth or something. Standing alone we’d be the 8th largest economy in the world, larger even than Oprah and several times larger than Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie combined! (By the way, any idea how hard it is to find a G-rated photo of Angelina Jolie to post on a family-friendly blog site….?)

So we figure it’s time to show a little of that economic muscle, gang. Time to send a message to People. Unless and until they start including some of those hard-bodied manufacturers out there, we’re reading Us, where it looks like Denise Richards is fixin’ to speak out at last — about manufacturing, we assume….

Things have been busy on so many fronts these days that we’ve not been able to pay proper homage to John Sweeney’s ineptness. The guy with the most up-to-date, consistently reliable information is Jonathan Tasini in his Working Life blog. He’s done some interesting analysis of the AFL-CIO budget and sees the potential for about a $30 million hit if the dissidents split from the AFL-CIO. Ouch. There’s a lot of potential wasted political contributions they could make with that money.

In any event, the Executive Committee meets again tomorrow and also — as we predicted back on the 17th of June — Carpenter’s President Doug McCarron (remember, he left the AFL-CIO already over frustration with Sweeney’s incompetence and their lack of focus on organizing) is expected to join the Change to Win Coalition tomorrow.

We posted a good natured tweak in the comments section under this entry on Jonathan’s blog. he really has been doing a great job with this story. If Sweeney goes, the members will have Jonathan to thank. In any event, Jonathan said “you heard it here first”, breaking the McCarron news. We felt compelled to say that no, we actually broke that story over a week ago. But on everything else, Tasini is way ahead of the curve.

Kudos to Darren McKinney of the NAM for another great show this week on WMAL radio in Washington. If you didn’t hear it, you can listen by clicking here. Leave the speakers cranked up — the boss will think you’re on a conference call.

OK, but here’s the punch line (you knew we wouldn’t just do a senseless plug for the 3d week in a row unless there was something in it for us, right?): If you click on this link, you will hear the mellifluous tones of the blogger-in-chief himself, doing a two minute audio version of an earlier blog rant on Louie-One Note. Not likely to displace James Earl Jones as the go-to spokesman for everything (or the voice of Darth Vader, for that matter), but you might find it entertaining. And, you’ll understand why the blogger-in-chief sticks to blogging.

We weren’t really in the habit of posting on Sunday (Father’s Day being a bit of an exception), but the blog traffic’s been staying pretty strong through the weekend, so we figured we’d better call the blogger-in-chief back from cruising in his low-rider all weekend so he can put up some content. What follows is our version of weekend content.

This one surprised even us. When you think about the CAFTA market as an export market for US goods, where do you suppose it would rank? These are a bunch of small countries after all and there are hundreds of countries with which we trade. Do you think they’d be in the top 100? The top 50? Top 30?

The truth is that the CAFTA market is our tenth largest export market. That puts them just ahead of Australia, a pretty large market for us, two ahead of Brazil, another large US export market and way, way ahead of India, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. All in all, we export over $15 billion worth of goods to CAFTA countries. This will only increase should CAFTA pass.

Washington Post reporter Dave Broder called CAFTA trade “small potatoes” just last week. Now, we don’t pick any fights with Dave Broder. He’s a great and seasoned writer, well-respected by every corner of the political landscape, but on this one he’s just wrong. In fact, since he used the term, “potatoes“, (only use the “e” when plural), we went ahead and checked. We exported some $700 million worth of potatoes around the globe last year. So that would make the CAFTA $15 billion market some 20x the size of the entire potato export market.

Hmmmm…… Not such small potatoes after all.

Much has been said and written about all the imagined ill effects of CAFTA, should it pass. However the US Department of Commerce has done a pretty exhaustive state-by-state analysis of current trade with CAFTA nations and the expected impact if CAFTA is ratified.

Take for example the Cradle of Civilization, New Jersey. The Garden State exported some $200 million worth of goods to CAFTA countries in 2004. Jersey, as it’s called, saw its exports to NAFTA countries increase some 81%. Is there any reason to believe the same wouldn’t happen once CAFTA passes?

All of this data, from the Commerce Department, the Agriculture Department and a collection of scores of favorable editorials and articles about CAFTA from local newspapers can be found in the Trade Resource Center done by the Business Roundtable. Don’t imagine Lou Dobbs will look at this one, either. He doesn’t cotton to dissent.

As promised, here are some facts (anybody remember facts…?) about CAFTA, designed to drive Lou Dobbs nuts.

Dobbs and his Perotistas are fond of decrying the “giant sucking sound” from NAFTA and, by extension, CAFTA. But in the years immediately after NAFTA’s passage, we added 300,000 auto jobs in this country alone. Since NAFTA passed, we’ve added 21 million jobs overall. Manufacturing output soared 44%. Here’s a fact sheet on CAFTA and NAFTA from the Office of the US Trade Representative. On their website there is a ton of information about CAFTA, none of which Lou Dobbs will be rushing to read any time soon.

OK, sorry we have nothing for the ladies this week, not even a nice parting gift. But don’t worry, what we have for the men will ultimately benefit the woman or women in their lives. We men, what do we do? We work, we sleep, we drink, we eat, we scratch, we apologize. Mostly we apologize. In fact, the average American adult male spends more than half of his adult life apologizing for something. (We don’t have a source for this, it’s purely anecdotal based on feedback from our regular blog readers…and if we are wrong on that…well, we’re…sorry)

Well, thanks to the wonders of technology, apologizing just got a whole lot easier. On Mark’s Apology Note Generator, there are pull down menus that cover most every eventuality that you can imagine. And, there’s even a space where you can fill in your own weepy entreaty for forgiveness, you pathetic wimp. It’ll take years — or at least weeks — to run through all the possibilities. The logo is priceless, or at least apt — two eyes peering out from a doghouse. We’ve all been there. For some of us, it’s less of a way station than it is a permanent residence.

So guys, have a good weekend and gals, what can we say? We’re sorry. More detailed apology to follow…