Yesterday found the blogger-in-chief in the City of Brotherly Love, once a great manufacturing city and still an area buzzing with hundreds of manufacturers (and NAM members) large and small. Went up to visit with the nice people at Fernley & Fernley, who manage manufacturing and other associations including the Wood Machinery Manufacturers Association, the American Flooring Alliance and a bunch of others. The topic on everyone’s mind today was blogs, a fast-growing topic among the association world. Not surprisingly, the audience was much smarter than the blogger-in-chief (a low bar), asking some very good and insightful questions. Whenever we speak on the topic, we give thanks first and last to John Engler, who had the foresight to let us run with this thing while others are wringing their hands on the sidelines. As we always point out, he didn’t say, “What’s a blog?” when we teed it up. He said, “Sure, give it a try.” And so we have. We’ve learned a few things as our traffic has grown, thanks to the smartest damned blog readers on the planet.

All in all a good day. Thanks to the folks at Fernley & Fernley — CEO, top dog and top angler Taylor Fernley, SVP Suzanne Pine, VP and Champion of Manufacturing Ken Hutton, Bill Norton, Rick Doyle and the rest of the gang — for their hospitality and their forward thinking. We predict more blog activity around their client base in the months and years to come. We welcome them to the burgeoning blogosphere.

Just when you think California can’t get any wackier, they do. The state estimated by some to be the most hostile to business (despite the Governator’s best efforts) just got a little more so, thanks to Attorney General Bill Lockyer. It’s as if they need to run the last few businesses out of the state, leaving it all to the activists, not a great tax base, really.

On Friday, Lockyer asked for a court order demanding that Burger King, Wendy’s, McDonald’s, Frito Lay and other companies put a warning on french fries and potato chips, alerting them that said food may contain acrylamide, a chemical the state says causes cancer. Only one problem: it doesn’t. Or at least the evidence doesn’t point in that direction. No matter, never let the facts get in the way of a good story — or a good lawsuit — right?

The problem all started a few years back when some Swedish scientists — no doubt on a break from perfecting Swedish Fish (how more perfect could they be?) — stumbled upon a discovery

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We spent a bunch of time this past weekend — especially yesterday — like many others, just watching the coverage of Hurricane Katrina and the wave that’s bearing down on the poor folks in New Orleans.

Looking through our prism of manufacturing, we allowed ourselves some cautious if righteous pride, however. All the technology of the new 21st-century war on hurricanes is driven by manufacturers. From the latest modeling software made by software manufacturers, to the satellites themselves, that our guys and gals make and the government is kind enough to launch into space, to the Hurricane Hunter planes, made with the latest and greatest manufacturing technology. And yes, we make the sandbags and the plywood and hurricane shutters, too.

We can’t stop the hurricanes, but we can be much smarter about them. Early warning is a life line. Our thoughts and prayers are with the people of New Orleans, and we hope they can ride this out. However hard the impact of Hurricane Katrina’s impact might be felt, it would be worse without the constant hard work and innovation of American’s manufacturers. And, should she hit as hard as it appears she might, if past is prologue, the generosity of America’s manufacturers will help all the victims get back on their feet.

As we fire the last shots into August and the summer of 2005, this will be a fairly busy week. We will be releasing our annual Labor Day Report on Wednesday morning. There will be some interesting stuff in there, of that we are certain. (We’ve seen it.) We’ll post a thing on here this week about a few former environmental activists who have seen the light and have come over to the side of right and might, i.e., our side. You don’t hear much about them, so we’ll help in that regard. We’ll also toss in the Wednesday Poster of the Week. We’ve seen that one, too. It’s a good one, a vintage version. And there will be at least one “Report from America”, from the City of Brotherly Love.

On Tuesday, the AFL-CIO will issue its annual poll on the attitudes of American workers, so we’ll be ready to comment on that. We have entered the realm of the near-victory with these guys, as they have no more victories, it seems, to crow about. So every year, they release these ridiculous polls showing ever-escalating numbers of workers who really, really, really want to join a union — 50%, 60%, 70%, maybe even 99% this year. To them we say, “Bully!”, In other words, “God bless you, have at it.” If the numbers are really that high, then why the heck don’t they stop issuing press releases about how popular they are and start stemming the hemorrhage that is their membership numbers? It’s a head-scratcher to us, we admit. We’ve not seen this year’s study but if the last 20 are any indication, it’ll either be a river of gloom and bad news about the economy and the state of the American worker, or great good news about how much workers love unions. Either way, it’s a re-heat of old stuff and spells no end to their declining fortunes.

Stay tuned, should be an interesting week.

OK, it’s Sunday and for those news junkies among us, this behemoth, this ten-pound lump of paper has landed on our doorstep. It is the New York Times, that straight-arrow, impartial, right-down-the-middle publication we all know and love. Sometimes it’s just daunting to pick it up and read it. We’ll admit to occasional ire upon reading — only every now and then, understand — when we see something that’s just way, way off course. This is rare for the Times, we know.

Well, any-hoo, we stumbled upon this site, The Annotated New York Times. It really is fascinating in that it has all these stories from the Times, but with running commentary from just plain folks and blog readers like us. So we’ll say have a good Sunday, enjoy your day. Maybe you’re reading the hometown paper — we hope so, for your sake. But if you are reading the Times, swing on over to this site and feel free to share your thoughts, or to see what readers are saying, unvarnished and unfiltered, the way it was meant to be.

Interesting piece in yesterday’s Washington Post by Harold Meyerson entitled, “Workers of the World Uniting“. It reports on a meeting of the UNI Global Union in Chicago this past week and their efforts to increase labor’s clout around the globe. UNI is a multi-national organization of “skills and services” unions. It sure is nice for all these folks to come together and spend their money here in the good ol’ US of A, but their rhetoric is just so divisive. Meyerson says in his column, for example, that absent the international pressure that a group like this can bring, ” a model employer in Europe that abuses its workers in the United States is more likely to bring its European standards down than its US standards up.”

How’s that again? “Abuses its workers in the US?”

This is part of the problem with organized labor, something we pointed out while they were busy rending themselves back in July, in answer to the question, “Why can’t labor organize?” We said at the time that one of the reasons is that their view of the workplace — and increasingly, the world — is of a divisive “us vs. them” universe. Yet increasingly over the past two decades or more, there is far less “us vs. them” and far more cooperation, in the hopes of beating the real adversary which is not inside the plant, but outside. If they are looking for abuse of workers, they likely won’t find it here.

Meanwhile, groups like UNI are clearly preparing for a divided world. Some of it is so retro as to be quaint. In their Q&A, there is this exchange:

Q. Could UNI Global Union call a global strike?
A. Never say never.

Global strikes? Yeesh! It seems to us that in light of the AFL’s split, that the folks on both sides of the split — and both sides of the Atlantic — ought to tend to their knitting, the business of blocking and tackling, of organizing here at home. As they do, they should begin with a realistic assessment of what life is like in today’s workplaces. They might be shocked to find that at least in most manufacturing plants, the workers in this part of the world are already united.

In the face of Lou Dobbs’ (and others) inability to let the recent CAFTA vote go, we wanted to take this opportunity to remind folks of some very important facts. Dobbs & Co. were fond of invoking NAFTA as a reason to oppose CAFTA. They rhymed, which made it even neater. The truth (nobody on that side much cares about the truth, it seems) is that NAFTA didn’t cause the trade deficit, and neither will CAFTA exacerbate it. Yet Lou continues to harp on it, even linking to an anti-trade site to further his antediluvian views.

A study conducted in the heat of the CAFTA battle showed that manufacturing imports from NAFTA countries actually declined during the 2001-2003 manufacturing recession. More than half our trade deficit with NAFTA countries is in oil. Since NAFTA took effect, manufacturing exports to NAFTA countries have grown 55% faster than to the rest of the world. And, NAFTA countries are now the largest export market for 46 of the 50 states. Here’s a link to the full study. As we like to say, facts are stubborn things.

Let’s hope we have this kind of “bad experience” with CAFTA, no?

This week’s video comes to us from the nice people at Deere & Company in Moline, Illinois, one of those great American manufacturing names. This is an 18-minute video touting their various combines (a huge farming machine, for you city folks). The step-by-step manufacturing action begins at about the 12 minute mark, but the rest of it is interesting for its description of these behemoth machines that are central to agricultural productivity.

And, did you know that agricultural exports equal some $60 billion/year, thanks to farm equipment like the combine? By the way, manufacturing exports are also $60 billion — a month! Yup, we export 12 times as much as the agricultural sector. Ain’t manufacturing grand?

In any event, sit back and click here to enjoy the show. Makes you want to run the combine over the front lawn. Like the man says, nothing runs like a Deere.

We were sitting at our desks yesterday playing solitaire when all of a sudden up on our screens pops an e-mail from Charles Simpson, Research Analyst at the Media Research Center. He was sending along to us a just-released study on Lou Dobbs entitled, “Trade Secrets: ‘Lou Dobbs Tonight’ Hides Good News Behind Negative View of Free Market“. As the blogger’s apprentice said, this was manna from heaven. It is an exhaustive study (it’s exhausting for us just to watch him for a week!) of the content of Dobbs’ show. Among the findings:

– CAFTA “never even received neutral consideration” on Dobbs’ show. Seventeen separate stories took the hard anti-CAFTA position. How’s that for balance?

– Dobbs continually uses the phrase “so-called” as a modifier for “free trade”. This from a so-called journalist?

– Lou devoted some 33 stories to China during the four-month period of the study. (Actually it was a week — it just felt like four months). Of those, 89% criticized trade with China. More balance from the big man. This is journalistic vertigo!

– In his haste to further his obsession with outsourcing, he failed to mention the 5.4 million jobs that are insourced by non-US companies doing business here. It’s why they call it “global” trade, Lou.

Of course, all of this was well-chronicled on the blog, but we were very excited to see an independent and scientific assessment of the same car wreck from an outside viewpoint. The report concludes with some recommendations (fat chance!) for improved business coverage from this so-called business reporter: give free trade a fair hearing; separate news from commentary; don’t be selective with the facts (what facts?); stop harping on the trade deficit and find and utilize free market experts (what, get somebody on the show who disagrees with King Lou?).

Here’s a link to the Executive Summary, and here’s a link to the full report. There are also video clips of the one-sided Dobbs in action on there as well. As Dan Rather said, the camera never blinks (but it must doze off some times, no?) We will do our best to disseminate this report far and wide and will post it on www.dobbswatch.com, a site for the fair-minded.

Congratulations to Charles Simpson and the Media Research Center for some great research and a great report!

In this world of inflated (or misleading) titles, where it seems that everybody is a Vice President or a Senior Vice President or Executive Vice President of something-or-other, during our most recent foray into middle America, to Oconomowoc (see below), we ran across Cindy Thomas of BarnCams.com. Her business card says, simply, “Vice President of Everything Else”. We just thought we had to pass this along. It just seemed such an apt description. We’re sure many of you have had a job like this at one time or another, not really precisely defined but rather with a little — how do we say? — wiggle room. Next time the boss asks you to do something that falls under “other duties as assigned”, just think of Cindy, our favorite Vice President of Everything Else.