Senator Dorgan wipes floor with Bushworld apologist Tom Friedman

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Thu Sep-28-06 11:25 PM
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Senator Dorgan wipes floor with Bushworld apologist Tom Friedman

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/business/july-dec06/globalization_09-28.html

IMHO Friedman is an annoying, lying, corporatist-enabling hack, so I have only quoted Senator Byron Dorgan, saying what needs to be said.

Whether or not the republic survives the reign of King George, globalization and the wrecked American economy are topic #2, after the illegal, disastrous, failed preemptive war in Iraq.

Authors Debate Effects of Globalization on Society

SEN. BYRON DORGAN: This is a new world, after a century of progress and lifting American standards, building a middle class, lifting wages, and all the things that we did to make this the country it is. Now it's a new day, they say. It's a global economy, a flat world, corporations should search for the lowest, cheapest labor, lowest cost labor, produce there, ship here, sell in America, run the income through the Cayman Islands. We're up to our neck in debt, $800 billion trade deficit this year, downward pressure on wages and benefits. I'm saying this doesn't work. It's going to shrink the middle-class. It leaves us choking on debt, and we need a fair trade strategy. This free trade nonsense in which we sell out and pull the rug out from under American workers and American interests just has to stop.

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SEN. BYRON DORGAN: The fact is: There's a lot of trouble in this economy. You can't escape the fact that $2 billion a day in trade deficit we're ringing up every single day, the highest in history. It is not capitalism when we decide that we're going to have a product produced in China, with people living 100 to a room, in big, cinder brick rooms, and then working for $50 a month. And, by the way, that's what's happening for the production of the iPod. We engineered iPod in this country; now, it's being produced for $50-a-month labor in rooms that house 100 people to sleep at night. That's not capitalism; that's labor exploitation. And it's going on, not just with respect to textiles, not just manufacturing, it's going on in high tech. And that is not, in my judgment, what we fought for a century in this country to create.

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SEN. BYRON DORGAN: But exploiting foreign labor is not capitalism. That's about fattening the treasury of a corporation at the expense of workers. And so let me -- in my book, aside from this exploitation, fattening the treasury is also about running the income through the Cayman Islands. There's one little piece in my book about a five-story white building on Church Street in the Cayman Islands that is home to 12,748 corporations. They're not there, of course. It's illegal fiction so they can avoid paying taxes. Aside from that, what we need to do is to say free trade agreements don't mean anything. I know Tom has said he's written in support of free trade agreements just because it said "free" without knowing what the agreement meant. I could talk for hours about how unfair those free trade agreements are to our country and to our workers. And we have to stand up for the interests of this country. We just have to stand up for its interests.

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SEN. BYRON DORGAN: I read something yesterday, somebody said, "Well, that's a sign of economic health." A sign of economic health for us to be in the red $800 billion a year? We're selling part of our country everyday. Plus, we're diminishing standards in this country. I want to lift America up. I want to raise America's hopes. And I hope with this kind of discussion that perhaps we can find the best of what everyone has to offer, and bring this country back to where it can be, and describe the kind of global economy we want to participate in.

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