Manufacturing

Here's what I'm thinking: We get La Famille DeBeaufre to establish a second bakery in Sparrows Point and ship their beloved Berger Cookies all over the world — to China, India, Brazil, Mexico and other nations with rising economies. And maybe we send some cookies to North Korea to give those poor people a treat and the inspiration they need to rise up against the rocket club president who serves as their dictator. Think of it: Berger Cookies as an instrument of international influence, revolution and peace.

With President Barack Obama holding his ground on tax increases for the wealthy, congressional Republicans appear intent to make a tactical retreat from the fiscal cliff to an issue where they believe they have more leverage: the nation's debt ceiling. It's the same trick they pulled to disastrous effect in 2011, and they try it again at their - and the nation's - peril. As we lurch toward the automatic tax increases and spending cuts that go into effect on Jan. 1, it's worth a brief recap of how we got here.

Drew Greenblatt's company has grown every year for the past six years - something many other firms, buffeted by the sharp recession, can't claim. What makes that all the more notable: It's a manufacturer. In Baltimore. With 35 employees, up from 20 five years ago, Greenblatt's Marlin Steel Wire Products is a small but notable standout in an area with devastating losses in the sector. Nearly half of Maryland's manufacturing jobs vanished in the past three decades, and in the city, the drop was 80 percent.

Protenergy Natural Foods Corp. expects to add as many as 100 workers to its Eastern Shore operations by next spring, the state announced Tuesday. The Canadian food processing company, which currently employs 53 in Cambridge, is ramping up faster than originally anticipated. When it opened the site a year ago as its U.S. headquarters, Protenergy told the state that it expected to have 100 employees by 2016. As part of the expansion, the company purchased the 67-acre site it had been leasing.

Update: The American Chemistry Council disputes the study. Here is a statement: “It is concerning that the authors could be over-interpreting their results and unnecessarily alarm workers. This study included no data showing if there was actual chemical exposure, from what chemicals, at what levels, and over what period of time in any particular workplace. Although this is an important area of research, these findings are inconsistent with other research. This study should not be used to draw any conclusions about the cause of cancer patterns in workers.”  The original blog post is below: Women who worked ten years or more in jobs that exosed them to cancer-causing substances and endocrine chemicals increased their odds of getting breast cancer, a new study has found.

William E. Ferrell, a retired manufacturers' representative who earlier had been a patternmaker, ended his life Oct. 26. The Parkville resident was 79. "Lately, his health had declined precipitously and his passing came quickly," said a son, William R. Ferrell of Wilmington, Del. William Edward Ferrell, was born and raised in Trenton, N.J., where he graduated in 1950 from Trenton Catholic High School. He had been working as a patternmaker at DeLaval Steam Turbine Co. in Trenton, when he enlisted in the Army and served with the infantry in Korea for two years.

That a batch of tainted vials from a single company could put thousands of people across the country at risk for a deadly form of meningitis is a sign the system for regulating pharmacies that mix drug compounds and ship them nationwide needs to be overhauled. Roughly 14,000 people may have received contaminated shots of a steroid used to treat back pain from the New England Compounding Center in Framingham, Mass. So far, 304 people in 17 states have become ill - including 13 in Maryland - and 24 have died, with those numbers expected to rise.

This is bigger than Big Bird or even binders full of women. The first two presidential debates and vast public reaction have raised too many media-related questions to be addressed in one column. But the ones involving huge conversations in social media demand a closer look - especially in terms of who's doing the talking and how representative or biased they might be. Tuesday's town hall showdown generated 12.24 million comments on Twitter and Facebook, making it the top political event of all time in social media.

The number of manufacturing jobs in Maryland seems to go in only one direction - down. The state lost 21,000 positions in the past five years. More than 40,000 in the past decade. Nearly 70,000 in the past two decades. But advocates think employment decline - driven by technology, consolidation, closures and offshoring - isn't inevitable. The nonprofit Regional Manufacturing Institute of Maryland is trying to organize employers and local officials to get the sector growing again. First step: reminding local officials that manufacturing, which employs 111,000 in the state directly and more indirectly, is not dead.

The Maryland Food Bank said it handed out food Wednesday to hundreds of families affected by the mass layoffs at Sparrows Point. About 2,000 workers lost their jobs after RG Steel filed for bankruptcy in late May and idled the Baltimore County steel mill. The property since has been sold to owners who are trying to find a steelmaker to restart operations but will liquidate the mill and redevelop it if they can't. The food bank, which also handed out food on Tuesday to laid-off steelworkers and others buffeted by the shutdown, said it expected to distribute more than 60,000 pounds to more than 1,700 people between the two days.