NAM President John Engler called in from Japan this morning to the Paul W. Smith program on WJR in Detroit. The first half of the interview deals with global competition and the potential of the Doha Round of WTO talks. (The second half was unrelated Michigan politics, which Engler tends to steer clear of.) You can listen to the interview here in streaming audio. The background noise picks up toward the end; the Nagoya Train Station is a bustling place. Highlights of Engler’s comments:

“This is still the second largest manufacturing economy in the world, by a long shot. We have tremendous economic ties back and forth. There are a number of things that I think are important in that bilateral relationship, plus, they’re going to play a major, major role as a manufacturing nation in these Doha discussions that are under way, these talks that have gone on year after year after year. The Japanese presence at the table there is going to be critical, so we want to talk a little bit about that.”

Smith comments about protectionist sentiments here in the United States. Engler responds:

The one thing we know from our own economic history, from what lies ahead, we’re such a global economy in the United States today, so many of our major companies, shipping 50, 60 percent of the products they make in the U.S. out into the global marketplace, so it’s just a strategy that won’t work if we close the door and say we’re going to turn inwards.

There’s some talk about the MSU-UM football game. And there was an earthquake in Japan?

The NAM has a web resource section about Doha here.

From the Ways & Means Committee:

WASHINGTON – The House Committee on Ways and Means today approved implementing language for the US-Peru free trade agreement (FTA). The legislation, H.R. 3688, passed the Committee 39-0, indicating strong bipartisan support for the agreement. The US-Peru FTA is the first agreement to include, in its text, core standards for labor and the environment. The measure now moves to the House Floor for consideration by the body next week. Chairman Charles B. Rangel (D-NY) offered the following opening remarks during today’s markup:

“I want to reinforce the importance of the changes that took place in our American trade policy earlier this year to make it clear that, at the end of the day, no matter what agreement we are talking about, certain basic principles would be included in a bipartisan way. The inclusion of core standards for labor and important environmental protections, including an historic agreement on logging and greater access to life-saving medicines represent the culmination of a decade-long effort to incorporate these principles into the text of US trade agreements. By including these provisions, we make it possible for members to consider these agreements on their merits and substance, rather than feel as though they have been excluded from the process.

House vote next week, probably. For the NAM’s resources on this agreement, please go to www.nam.org/tradetoolkit.

We should also note that President Bush’s nominee to be the next Secretary of Agriculture, former North Dakota Governor Ed Schafer, has broad experience in the world of manufacturing and telecommunications.

Before his life in elective politics, Ed — “call me Ed” is a byword — held a variety of positions small and large at the Gold Seal Company, the household products manufacturer. Here’s his bio from a recent consulting venture:

Ed Schafer has extensive, top-level leadership experience in both government and business sectors. In addition to his two terms as governor of North Dakota, he developed a successful business career that included leading the Gold Seal Company, an international market leader in consumer cleaning products. His tenure at Gold Seal included moving the company from an entrepreneurial heritage to a professionally managed company. He also founded several North Dakota-based businesses. Most recently, Ed was co-founder of Extend America, a telecommunications company focused on connecting rural areas of the Midwest to the world. His strengths include priority-based budgeting, team building, product development, start-up and expansions, crisis management, consensus building, and international marketing. Schafer has a business administration degree from the University of North Dakota and a master’s degree from the University of Denver.

Gold Seal was founded by Harold Schafer, Ed’s father, and grew from a small, one-man operation selling Glass Wax to a multi-million-dollar, international operation.

UPDATE (3 p.m.) Positive reactions from the people who know him, even his political critics, back in Nodak.

UPDATE (4 p.m.) White House fact sheet here.

Associated Press is reporting that President Bush will name former North Dakota Gov. Ed Schafer to be Secretary of Agriculture.

Schafer, who chose not to run again in North Dakota in 2000, will replace Mike Johanns, who resigned as U.S. agriculture secretary last month to launch a bid for the Nebraska Senate seat being vacated by Republican Chuck Hagel at the end of next year.

Bush will make the announcement at 2 p.m. EDT in the Roosevelt Room.

This is a very good appointment. Governor Schafer is strong supporter of trade and exports as a way to bolster the ag economy, a politically brave position to take in a state where too many politicians promote protectionism and subsidy as the sole path to prosperity. We would expect him to become another strong advocate of the pending free trade agreements, especially with the Latin American countries. The governor has traveled extensively abroad and speaks fluent Spanish.

Schafer was also a contemporary of NAM President John Engler during Governor Engler’s service in Michigan.

And, as the AP reports: “His energy, friendliness and optimism, Schafer’s political friends and foes both agree, made him a popular governor.” That’s right.

On a personal note, as a former employee of the Governor — on his 1996 re-election campaign and as a policy advisor on his senior staff — your Shopfloor.org blogging correspondent is very, very pleased. Ed Schafer is a good man, and as governor, he was a fine and dedicated public servant. He’ll be an excellent Ag Secretary.

(Reuters story here.)

The Senate Judiciary Committee just opened a hearing on amending the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, legislation dealing with the federal government’s ability to conduct surveillance of terrorist activities overseas. A key question in the debate has been whether to grant telecommunications companies’ retroactive immunity from civil lawsuits for their cooperation with intelligence gathering in the wake of the mass murder of Americans by terrorists on September 11, 2001.

In an online column in today’s Wall Street Journal, “Surveillance Sanity –
Companies that help protect the U.S. against attack deserve immunity from frivolous lawsuits,” three former attorneys general explain why such immunity is necessary. Benjamin Civiletti, Dick Thornburgh and William Webster make important points about corporate citizens as citizens.

America’s front line of defense against terrorist attack is communications intelligence. When Americans put their loved ones on planes, send their children to school, or ride through tunnels and over bridges, they are counting on the “early warning” system of communications intelligence for their safety. Communications technology has become so complex that our country needs the voluntary cooperation of the companies. Without it, our intelligence efforts will be gravely damaged.

Whether the government has acted properly is a different question from whether a private person has acted properly in responding to the government’s call for help. From its earliest days, the common law recognized that when a public official calls on a citizen to help protect the community in an emergency, the person has a duty to help and should be immune from being hauled into court unless it was clear beyond doubt that the public official was acting illegally. Because a private person cannot have all the information necessary to assess the propriety of the government’s actions, he must be able to rely on official assurances about need and legality. Immunity is designed to avoid the burden of protracted litigation, because the prospect of such litigation itself is enough to deter citizens from providing critically needed assistance.

Read the whole thing.

NAM President John Engler was on the Asian version of CNBC’s Squawkbox in Japan. He explained one reason for the trip by manufacturers to Japan and China. From the interview:

“Policymakers back home need to understand that there’s a lot of competition in the world; there are very, very good competitors out there and we’ve got work to do in order to be able to compete. So in the Congress, when they’re going slow on even the South American free trade agreements — with Peru, Colombia or Panama — or they’re talking about billions of dollars in new taxes, all of these things have an impact. Certainly energy policy has an impact.

“I want to be able to go home and say, look, here are all the things being done in place like Japan and China to become more competitive, here’s the investment being made, what are we doing?”

Engler also made the case for slogging ahead on the Doha round of the WTO Talks as the only way to lower global barriers to trade and U.S. exports.

In pulling out Energy Secretary Sam Bodman’s comments about government mandates (they may be necessary), the AP reporter found the news, but didn’t capture the full range of the energy conference in Bismarck. No complaint, just the way it is.

You get a fuller sense of the event from another report, this from the Forum newspapers, whose reporter included comments from Steve Hinchman, Marathon Oil’s vice president of worldwide production.

“I’m not here to compete with alternative fuels,” said Steve Hinchman, Marathon Oil’s vice president of worldwide production and one of three keynote speakers. “There’s enough demand for energy for all (sources).” He said the conference is “more about what we have in common.”

Marathon, he noted, has its own ethanol plants and facilities that blend petroleum with ethanol.

Hinchman also cites Marathon’s role in North Dakota’s current oil boom: The company has acquired 200,000 acres of mineral leases, plans to drill 150-300 new wells in western North Dakota’s Bakken shale formation, and recently opened a permanent office in Dickinson. In this story from the KX Networks, he reports that Marathon is trying new technologies in the Bakken formation, “blowing up” the rock to extract more oil. That’s a typical sort of innovation in the energy industry that often gets overlooked.

In a visit to Bismarck this summer, we were struck by the amount of economic activity in the town. The energy boom — oil, coal, ethanol, biofuels, even wind — is a big reason for the prosperity.

Since we advanced Secretary Sam Bodman’s Monday remarks at an energy conference in Bismarck, N.D., makes sense to see what he said….

Oh, that’s too bad.

BISMARCK, N.D. — Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said Monday that government mandates are not ideal but might be a necessary part of efforts to boost the use of alternative fuels.

Bodman made the remarks at an energy conference sponsored by Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., who used the occasion to unveil legislation aimed at boosting renewable energy.

Dorgan said he and Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., plan to introduce legislation calling on refineries to blend 36 billion gallons of biofuels annually by 2022, and on automakers to make 80 percent of their production fleet as “flex fuel” vehicles by 2015.

Bodman said he had not seen details of the legislation. President Bush, in his State of the Union speech earlier this year, called for reducing U.S. gasoline use by up to 20 percent by 2017, mainly by increasing alternative fuel production, he said.

“Sure, I’d like to get things done without mandates,” Bodman said. But they have “proven to be a requirement in order to get a lot of these things done more effectively,” he said.

Have they, really? Been proven a requirement?

If you mean politically, well, yes, there’s an argument. Economically? Not so much.

From The Washington Post:

Roy L. Pearson Jr., the administrative law judge who lost his $54 million lawsuit against a Northeast Washington dry cleaner, lost his job yesterday and was ordered to vacate his office, sources said.

Pearson, 57, who had served as a judge for two years, was up for a 10-year term at the Office of Administrative Hearings, but a judicial committee last week voted against reappointing him.
The panel had a seven-page letter hand-delivered to Pearson about 3:30 p.m., directing him to leave his office by 5 p.m. Pearson’s term ended in May, at the height of his battle with the dry cleaners. Since then, he has remained on the payroll, making $100,000 a year as an attorney adviser.

Pearson had no business being appointed to a judicial position in the first place, and it took an astonishingly long time to get rid of him. Such, unfortunately, are the swamps of D.C. government and politics. But at least this abuser of individuals and the legal system will no longer hold a position of authority.

Does nothing for the Chungs, though, the family whose drycleaning operations Pearson sued over a pair of apparently misplaced pants. They’ve been forced to close two of their three outlets.

From The Examiner newspapers, an editorial, “Who’s watching the trial lawyers?”

If the lords of Congress really mean to be responsible watchdogs, they should investigate the gangrenous rot sown in the American judicial system by corrupt class action lawyers like courtroom firebrand William Lerach.

Lerach and several associates from his former New York law firm Milberg Weiss recently pleaded guilty to assorted felonies stemming from their long-running participation in an $11.8 million kickback scheme uncovered by a federal investigation launched in 1999. Federal prosecutors say the scheme funneled bribes to lead plaintiffs favorable to Milberg Weiss in more than 225 cases and resulted in an estimated $250 million in tainted fees being paid to the firm over a period of nearly three decades. Melvyn Weiss, the firm’s co-founder, goes on trial next year in the case, which also resulted in the government’s first-ever use of anti-racketeering laws to indict a law firm. Two prime issues to be addressed by Congress: How could Milberg Weiss go undetected so long and who should be held accountable?

We made the same argument for Congressional hearings on the class-action lawsuit industry in a post yesterday, but mostly as a sarcastic poke at Congressional investigators who would never hold their political benefactors accountable.

Mark Tapscott at The Examiner makes the case today in a more serious way, and the case is a good one. He concludes:

Class-action lawyers have given millions of dollars in campaign contributions to Democrats and a few Republicans. If lawmakers do not mount a credible oversight investigation, they will lend credence to the charge that they, like the lead plaintiffs suborned by Milberg Weiss, have been bought and paid for.

It is indeed a serious point, one to which Congress should pay attention.