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Take This Job and Ship It
How Corporate Greed and Brain-Dead Politics Are Selling Out America
By Senator Byron L. Dorgan
Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press
New York, 2006
I feel strongly that some important American values are being sacrificed in order to find the lowest-priced gallon of mustard or twelve-pack of underwear.
The role of government is to help create a society beneficial to people. People are the priority. Not corporations. Certainly commerce plays a huge role in the betterment of any great society, but any society that forgets that its primary purpose is to serve the people cannot ever be great.
We are engaged in more than an academic debate over philosophy. I believe this to be a contest for the soul of a great nation, with immense ramifications for the entire world. It is about values.
*** PEOPLE ARE THE PRIORITY? THE ROLE OF THE GOVERNMENT IS TO CREATE A SOCIETY THAT BENEFITS THE PEOPLE? Where does Dorgan get this stuff? Ask a KKKonservative and they'll sputter that the role of government is to cut spending on the poor, lower income taxes, and increase government contracts and lower the acccountability of rich people under the law.
Byron Dorgan, the junior senator from North Dakota, may well have laid out in his new book, Take This Job and Ship It, the first rough roadmap for Democrats to find their way back into the hearts and heads of the anxious working and middle classes of America, our natural constituency at which Republicans have been nibbling away for the past decade or so.
Dorgan's main thesis, as the subtitle indicates, is that corporate greed and the egregious effects of outsourcing are destroying this country. Through tracing the consequences of our free trade policy on middle America, the senator is able to crack open the door to related discussions on global human rights and child slavery, corporate tax evasion, national security, energy independence and planetary environmental problems. This exploration of ever-expanding cause and effect allows him to sketch the outlines of an emerging muscular liberal populism for the Democratic Party, shorn of populism's historical nativist rhetoric and permitting Americans to see themselves both as citizens of a great country and responsible residents of the world.
***Populism, real people powered politics. This is what is scaring Senator Joe Lieberman, and what is going to kill Hillary's Presidential aspirations. Look out Hillary, here comes Byron Dorgan, John Edwards, and Russ Feingold. The book opens with a mind-numbing list of personal stories and specific closures of once-great American companies - the makers of Etch-a-Sketch, Hula Hoops, Fruit of the Loom, Fig Newtons, Levis ... the list goes on and on. A particularly poignant anecdote relates how the workers at Huffy Bikes spent their last days on the job peeling the trademark American flag off the handlebars and substituting stickers of the globe in its place.
I have seen a little of Dorgan on C-Span and also through reading internet articles. From the little I have seen, I like him.
For years now, I have wondered when the dumb**s democrats were going to find a real leader. I thought that all hope was lost. But I see a light at the end of the tunnel, and for the first time in a long time, it may not be an oncoming train!
I look forward to your upcoming articles on "histiography."
I plan to buy Dorgan's book.
It would be nice if V of AZ had a Book Recommendation section. It could include recommendations for magazines, periodicals, etc. It is hard to keep up.
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