I've seen Byron Dorgan, Senator from North Dakota on T.V. a couple of times lately, most recently on The Colbert Report.
He makes some simple and seemingly obvious points that we can only hope begin to sink in and cause a change in the people we elect to represent us in Congress.
For example - 35 years ago the biggest corporation was General Motors where people went to work for a lifetime with good pay and benefits. Now the largest corporation in America is WalMart which provides it's workers an average pay of 18 to 19 thousand dollars a year, with few if any benefits, while buying products from countries that provide no labor rights or environmental protections, and undercut American workers by accepting wages that are pennies on the dollar.
We have a 200 billion dollar a year trade deficit with China. We imported 700,000 cars from Korea and exported 4,000 cars to Korea last year. Neither China or Korea are interested in balancing trade - they are perfectly happy to take our jobs and sell us goods. At some point the American public needs to realize that what's good for corporations and what's good for America are not always the same thing.
We can't have a free market until the countries we trade with make it a fair market by paying living wages, providing worker protections, labor rights, and benefits - comparable to what we enjoy in America. Asking American workers, or their children, to buck up and work harder, or in the case of Thomas Friedman - to educate themselves out of this, is ludicrous. The world is anything buy flat - it's a tremendously unlevel playing field.
Byron Dorgan says we as a nation need to operate from the point of view that we will help other countries pull themselves up - not allow them to pull us down.
Byron Dorgan sounds like a reasonable person talking about common-sense ideas for maintaining the standard of living and opportunities that the U.S. has achieved though decades of work, sacrifice and legislation. If not for ourselves for our children.
Listen to an interview with Byron Dorgan on "Take This Job and Ship It" on Bill Thompson's Eye on Books site.
