From Reuters, “Germany gets mandate to extend nuclear life cycles“:

FRANKFURT (Reuters) – German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s majority for a new center-right government means she can rewrite a national nuclear phaseout deal by allowing reactors to run longer than laid down by her predecessors.

Nuclear operators’ shares rose on Monday, the day after the election, while carbon prices crept higher and power fell with oil, as Merkel’s conservatives and the pro-business Free Democrats (FDP) aimed for a quick coalition.

The election outcome may be a precursor for more nuclear projects in other European countries…”

But it is no carte blanche for nukes, Reuters adds, correctly. Being getting hammered so conclusively at the polls, the former coalition partner, SPD, may now feel free to go full-scale into opposition to nuclear power.

But the immediate lesson is that when faced with economic troubles and climate politics, German voters chose parties that support tax relief and nuclear power.

P.S.: Also, from the WSJ’s Green Ink blog: “German lessons, too: Chancellor Merkel’s re-election gives a boost to power companies long on nuclear, since the coalition will end the country’s nuclear phaseout, in the WSJ and Bloomberg.”

They should just sue their membership. From The Washington Times, “Trial lawyers lobby sinks $6.2M in debt“:

The trial lawyers lobby has been awash in debt and bleeding members – just as it embarks on a national campaign to block any clampdown on medical malpractice lawsuits as part of President Obama’s health care overhaul.

The American Association for Justice, the most prominent group representing plaintiffs’ attorneys, has seen a shake-up in its executive suite and has struggled to deal with what appears to be a mounting budget shortfall. To help it fight congressional efforts to make it harder for patients to sue doctors and lawyers, it recently sent out an extra solicitation to its members, asking them to fork over money for a lobbying campaign.

The most striking evidence of its financial woes is a swift decline in income, which resulted in a more than $6.2 million deficit in its operating budget for the fiscal year ending July 31, 2008, the most recent year for which data are available.

Congrats to the Wash Times for reporting the story, including the news about the group’s failed lawsuit against Wachovia over loans to finance the association’s building. When Jon Haber, AAJ’s CEO, resigned in April, no one covered the leadership issues at AAJ beyond the most perfunctory of reports. (See our commentary at Point of Law.) Considering the group’s major political influence — and now, we see, its financial problems — reporters missed a good story.

We also wrote about the trial lawyers’ latest anti-tort reform campaign on September 15. You can see the AAJ’s message here.

P.S. The group’s Florida affiliate, the Florida Justice Association, has suffered damaging public relations this month after trial lawyers financed a race-baiting mailing in a special state Senate race. The head of the FJA, Scott Carruthers, has apologized, saying, “We had a moral duty to stop it and we didn’t.” As TampaBay.com headlined the latest news, “Things can’t get much worse for trial lawyers in Florida.”

Not a good time to be launching the group’s first ever gala inaugural fundraiser, the FJA Justice Ball.

Foreign policy seems likely to dominate President Obama’s schedule this week: Iran, Afghanistan, and China marks the 60th anniversary of one-party Communist rule. Health care dominates Congress, although there is the little matter of the continuing resolution to keep the federal government open. The bill is in the Senate.

The House convenes at 12:30 p.m. Tuesday with 28 bills on the suspension calendar. Congratulations to Hillerich & Bradsby Co. on the 125th anniversary of the Louisville Slugger. The major floor debate of the week will be on the conference Report on H.R. 3183, the Energy and Water Development appropriations. For more, see the Majority Leader’s week ahead.

The Senate convenes at 11:30 a.m. today and marches forward with debate on H.R. 3326, the Defense appropriations bill. The Senate Finance Committee continues its mark up of health care legislation on Tuesday.

For a full list of committee hearings for the week, see the Congressional Digest here.

And here in Washington, The NAM and Department of Commerce cosponsor the U.S.-China High Technology Working Group Public-Private Sector Dialogue on Tuesday. NAM President John Engler speaks.

Senate Committees: Senate Homeland Security on Tuesday holds a hearing on federal contracting databases. Senate Small Business, a hearing Tuesday on health care. The full Judiciary Committee on Wednesday holds a hearing, “Advancing Freedom of Information in the New Era of Responsibility. (As opposed to the Old Era of Irresponsibility.) Senate Agriculture considers nominations of Bartholomew Chilton, Jill Sommers and Scott O’Malia to the CFTC.  Among many nominees the Senate HELP Committee considers Wednesday is George Cohen to head the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service.  A Senate Banking Committee Wednesday considers international financial regulation. On Thursday, Small Business looks at the reauthorization of SBA finance programs. Senate Judiciary tries yet again to markup the federal media shield bill,  among other things. Senate Energy and Natural Resources on Thursday morning, a full committee hearing on energy and global climate change legislation. An Energy and Natural Resources subcommittee later that day, managing federal forests in response to climate change.

House Committees: House Transportation subcommittee on Tuesday, a hearing on “Katrina Infrastructure Logjam.” An Agriculture subcommittee on Wednesday, a hearing on the research title of the 2008 Farm Bill. House Science on Wednesday marks up bills including H.R.3585, the Solar Technology Roadmap Act, and H.R.3598, the Energy and Water Research Integration Act. The full Financial Services Committee Wednesday, “Perspectives on the Consumer Financial Protection Agency“; a subcommittee Wednesday, “Reforming Credit Rating Agencies; on Thursday, full committee, “Federal Reserve Perspectives on Financial Regulatory Reform Proposals.” House Small Business subcommittee hearing on Wednesday on expiring tax incentives.  House Oversight Committee on Wednesday, more on credit rating agencies. House Transportation on Thursday, a full committee hearing on stimulus infrastructure spending. Ed&Labor, a hearing Thursday, “Ensuring Economic Opportunities for Young Americans. An Energy and Commerce subcommittee hearing Thursday on H.R. 3258, The Drinking Water System Security Act,  and H.R. 2868, the Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Act.

Executive Branch: The Rural Tour hits Gering, Neb., today with Agriculture Secretary Vilsack, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE). Commerce Secretary Gary Locke is in Chile, leading a U.S. delegation to the Americas Competitiveness Forum. (Gracias for eschewing the overused “summit.”)

Economic Reports: The big report of the week will be Friday’s BLS release of the September unemployment figures. Prediction: It will be sold as good news when joblessness comes in under 10 percent. More, from Reuters: “Final second-quarter GDP data also is on tap for Wednesday, and investors will be anxious to see if the report shows any downward changes from the prior estimate of a 1.0 percent contraction….Also expected next week are data on home prices from S&P/Case-Shiller, consumer confidence from the Conference Board and factory activity from the Institute for Supply Management.”

Finally, pre-Copenhagen United Nations climate talks begin in Bangkok. (This is an atmospheric video.) And speaking of Copenhagen, the International Olympic Committee votes there Saturday on the host city for the 2016 Summer Games. Speculation abounds about President Obama traveling there to tout Chicago. First Lady Michelle Obama, White House factotums and Mayor Daley are there. Will the City of Broad Shoulders Become the City of Broad Jumpers?

From Pajamas Media, “Germany Swings to the Center-Right”

During the campaign, Merkel repeatedly stressed that she wanted to govern with the business-friendly FDP, which has been out of power since 1998, in order to cut taxes in a bid to further revitalize a German economy that has been hit hard by the global recession.

And, indeed, the results (from Der Spiegel) put the Free Democratic Party, the strongest advocate of business and tax relief, jumping from 9.8 percent in 2005 to 14.6 percent today. The CDU slips a little, but its ruling partner, the Social Democrats, plummets from 34.2 to 23.1 percent.

* ARD and ZDF are the major national TV networks.

UDPATE (5 p.m.): From The Times of London, “Merkel Unleashed.”

Having established her political authority, she now has an unparalleled chance to carry out those reforms that have for years eluded both the SPD and the grand coalition. The first is to streamline Germany’s economy to bolster its emergence from recession and allow it again to capture lost export markets. She is helped by having as a new ally the FDP, the main winners from this election. This business-orientated party, strongly supporting market economics, will back CDU proposals for a small tax cut, for further reforms to lessen the cost to employers of labour and for more savings in the generous social security system. Some changes have been made in the past four years, but the SPD was a brake on changes that the recovering economy now make more urgent and less controversial.

On Friday, President Obama nominated Victoria A. Espinel to serve as U.S. Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator, Office of Management and Budget. From manufacturers’ perspective, protection of intellectual property is a priority in trade and international law enforcement. The White House summary:

Victoria A. Espinel is the founder and President of Bridging the Innovation Divide, a not-for-profit foundation focused on addressing the “innovation divide” and empowering all Americans to obtain the full benefit of their creativity and ingenuity. From 2007-2009, Ms. Espinel was a Visiting Assistant Professor at the George Mason University School of Law. Her areas of teaching and research were intellectual property and international trade. She has acted as advisor on intellectual property issues to the staff of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senate Finance Committee, House Judiciary Committee and House Ways and Means Committee. She also served as an advisor to Romulus Global Issues Management and is a member of the Brain Trust of the Global Innovation Forum. In 2005, Ms. Espinel was asked to serve as the first ever Assistant United States Trade Representative for Intellectual Property and Innovation at the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, serving as the chief U.S. trade negotiator for intellectual property and innovation. She testified on numerous occasions before the House Judiciary Committee and the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. Ms. Espinel also served as Deputy Assistant USTR for Intellectual Property and as Associate General Counsel at USTR. Before joining USTR, Ms. Espinel was with the law firms of Covington & Burling in London and Washington, D.C., and Sidley, Austin, Brown & Wood in New York. She holds an LLM from the London School of Economics, a JD from Georgetown University Law School, and a BS in Foreign Service from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service.

From Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), commenting on Senate inaction Thursday on her amendment to put a one-year moratorium on the EPA’s ability to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from stationary sources.

Democrats objected to consideration of the amendment, stifling debate on the devastating impact EPA regulations on carbon dioxide from non-mobile sources will have on the economy.

“There’s a legitimate policy debate that needs to be had on this issue,” Murkowski said. “Unfortunately, too many of my colleagues across the aisle are not interested in discussing the merits of my amendment.”

Murkowski has said the amendment would help avoid the “economic train wreck” that would result from the EPA regulating stationary sources of carbon dioxide under the Clean Air Act.

The Oil and Gas Journal has a good story about the politicking that went into blocking Murkowski’s amendment. The upshot is that the EPA could soon become the single most important economy policy setting actor in the nation. Hard to see how any elected lawmaker could support that. We’ll look forward to the re-election boasts: “During my tenure, we successfully abdicated our policymaking responsibilities to an executive branch agency.”

The NAM had “key voted” the amendment, but since the measure was not considered, the provision will not be used to rate Senators’ records on manufacturing policies during the 111th Congress.

The Senate ultimately passed H.R. 2996, the Interior and Environment appropriations bill. The vote was 77-21.

The leaders of the G-20 meeting in Pittsburgh might make headway in promoting world prosperity by reducing trade barriers and encouraging aggressive exporters like Germany and China to focus more on consumption, but after they have come and gone, our domestic challenges will remain. We are struggling to emerge from the longest and deepest recession since The Great Depression, and though there are signs of recovery, we are not out of the woods yet.

Manufacturing as always is a bellwether for the economy. The manufacturing dynamic where raw materials are forged into finished products is where our economy creates wealth. When the economy turns down and consumers lose confidence, manufacturing is first to feel the contraction. To date, one half of the jobs lost in the recession have been in manufacturing and construction, with most in manufacturing. Right now, the manufacturing capacity utilization rate is 65 percent, which means 35 percent of our capacity is idle. Until our factories are working full throttle again, the economy will continue to struggle.

Of course, when the economy comes out of recession, employment is the last thing to turn around. The unemployment rate is still climbing, albeit at a slower rate, and will likely top 10 percent by mid-2010. We don’t expect to start seeing meaningful improvement in employment until 2011. And consumers without jobs are unlikely to return to the marketplace. (See the NAM’s 2009 Labor Day report.)

In the long term, between now and 2014, we expect to see up to a million manufacturing jobs return, but that will depend at least in part on decisions made in Washington that will have tremendous impact on our ability to grow our economy and put people back to work.

Regrettably, our government today is focused not on making manufacturing more competitive and encouraging growth, but rather on priorities that – so far at least – seem likely to increase the cost of production. As currently being discussed, reforms to our health care system and climate change legislation would greatly increase the cost burdens of manufacturers who already shoulder a 17 percent disadvantage compared to our major trading partners.

Our greatest opportunities for growth lie beyond our borders. A full 95 percent of the world’s consumers are not in the U.S. To grow and prosper, we need a much larger commitment to increasing exports. Yet our government cannot bring itself to enact the free trade agreements with Panama, Colombia and South Korea that would greatly expand exports and create jobs.

We can all wish the G-20 attendees in Pittsburgh well. But in the final analysis, our economic future will not be determined in Brussels or Beijing, it will be determined in Washington. And so far, our leaders are not rising to the challenge.

This Saturday is one of the big annual cultural days in Washington, D.,C., the National Book Festival on the Mall. It’s an event sponsored by the Library of Congress but paid for by private sponsors. (AT&T, for example, supports the children’s events.)

There’s a long, long list of authors speaking. We’ll be trying to catch Mark Kurlansky, who has written the engaging, commodity-related history books, “Cod” and “Salt.” (Hoping he’ll do “Zinc” and “Sisal,” too.)

Here’s the official poster, which prominently displays familiar images from “Alice in Wonderland.” Hope it’s not a pre-1985 version, banned by the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act.

More seriously, one of our goals of walking through the exhibits tomorrow is to see whether there’s any reference to the CPSIA’s outlawing of children’s books that could conceivably, possibly, potentially have minute but not-dangerous amounts of lead in their inks or other components.

Walter Olson at Overlawyered.com today catches us up on the book-related damage from the CPSIA, noting that the Consumer Product Safety Commission has yet to issue guidance for pre-1985 books. He quotes from a Publisher’s Weekly article:

Thom Barthelmess, president of the Association for Library Service to Children, a division of the American Library Association, says most librarians are waiting to see what happens. “We’re hoping for a happy resolution, so our collections aren’t decimated,” he says. If the CPSC’s ruling results in libraries needing to pull books from shelves, “there would be huge ramifications,” he continues. “If we lose a lot of titles printed before 1986, many of which are irreplaceable, it would have a huge impact on the nature of our collections.”

If we had to guess, it would be that few people — if anyone — participating in the National Book Festival will be familiar with the CPSIA’s book banning. Hope to be proved wrong.

One of the first actions that demonstrated — removed any doubt — that a newly elected President Obama was going to align himself with organized labor was the President’s issuance of an executive order on February 6 (Executive Order 13502) instructing federal agencies to favor “project labor agreements” (PLAs) in federal construction projects of $25 million or more. The order revoked President Bush’s 2001 executive order which required neutrality toward PLAs. Yes, elections have consequences.

PLAs are agreements that govern general contractors’ handling of projects, and in practical terms they force the use of union labor in all phases of a project with no consideration of costs — or the taxpayers who are paying the bill. The argument for the PLAs is that they promote harmonious management-labor relations with efficiency the result.

But a new study by the economists at the Beacon Hill Institute in Boston disproves the premise and reinforces the negatives effects of the agreements. The Institute reviewed comparable projects from the Bush era and found no examples of labor strife that added to costs. From the news release, “New Study Reveals That President Obama’s Executive Order for Project Labor Agreements Will Harm Federal Taxpayers,” quoting David G. Tuerck, one of the study’s authors and the Beacon Hill Institute’s executive director.

“If President Obama, who used the labor peace argument in justifying PLAs, is to be believed on this matter, it should be possible to find dozens of examples of slowdowns and significant cost overruns that occurred during the Bush Administration,” said Tuerck. “Yet, we found no such examples.”PLAs do add to construction costs.”

By their nature, PLAs are anti-competitive since they discourage open shop firms from bidding in the first place. Previous research from the Institute has shown that PLAs add 12-18% to construction costs. Over the course of the Bush Administration, the federal government spent $147.1 billion on federal construction projects. Of that $147.1 billion, approximately $60 billion would have been subjected to President Obama’s Executive Order encouraging the use of PLAs.

Moreover, had President Obama’s Executive Order 13502 been in effect in 2008, and all federal construction projects worth $25 million or more been subject to PLAs, the cost to federal taxpayers would have increased by $1.6 to $2.6 billion.

The final rule to force PLAs onto federal projects funded by Housing and Urban Development goes into effect September 28. More expensive HUD projects help whom, exactly? It sure isn’t the taxpayer.

UPDATE and clarification: The HUD rule had to do with the repeal of the Bush Administration executive order. More significant and of broader application is the proposed rule from the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) agencies to implement the new executive order. [FAR Case 2009-005; Docket 2009-0024; Sequence 2] Comments closed on that on September 23, and a final rule will come out later this year.

Finally, a Friday Factory Tune with the word “factory” actually in it. And a timely one, too, since the G-20 is in Pittsburgh, the home of Andy Warhol (né Warhola), the subject of this song and live performance by Lou Reed and John Cale, part of the excellent 1990 tribute album, “Songs for Drella.”

Inspirational lyrics:

He was a lot of things, what I remember most
He’d say, “I’ve got to bring home the bacon, someone’s got to bring home the roast.”
He’d get to the factory early
If you’d ask him he’d tell you straight out
It’s just work, the most important thing is work

Clever, too, in that “The Factory” was the name of Warhol’s famous studio in New York City, where Reed and Cale performed in The Velvet Underground. Here’s a good video of Warhol, the band, and the looks-pretty-silly goings on from February 1967.

John Cale last month discussed Warhol’s contributions to work last month on the radio show, “Studio 360,” and performed another Drella song, “Style it Takes.”

Returning to Pittsburgh, we see the wives of dignitaries visited the Andy Warhol Museum. It’s just work. The most important thing is work.