Senator Byron Dorgan, a Democrat from North Dakota, has just published a book that not only damns corporate greed, but blasts Congress for serving as its handmaiden. Unlike you and me, not to mention the latest neocon scribe du jour, this man is actually in Congress and knows what he's talking about. "The influence that many of these corporations have over our government is enormous...Big business develops," he says, "with the support of our government, a set of trade policies that create opportunities for them to hire foreign workers to do what American workers used to do. Uncle Sam is selling out the American worker and, in the process, allowing these corporations to pole-vault over standards such as safe workplaces, minimum wages, labor unions, child-labor laws and environmental protection."

He is a skeptic of economic globalization, believing that it hurts foreign nations as much as it hurts the United States. He cites the case of Wal-Mart, which can sell its merchandise cheaply because 70 percent of it is manufactured in China under virtually Dickensian conditions, thereby perpetuating those conditions at the same time as it undercuts homegrown American competition. Dorgan shrewdly observes that, instead of reaching out to foreign nations to help elevate wages and labor conditions worldwide, our government exploits those very conditions to drag down the living standards of American workers as well. The current administration even gives tax breaks to encourage outsourcing American jobs to foreign labor - tax breaks that he vehemently wishes to repeal.

He would also repeal laws that forbid the U.S. government from negotiating lower prices for prescription drugs or from importing less expensive drugs from Canada, a suggestion that even Bush's own Secretary for Health and Human Services privately applauded as "right".

Senator Dorgan is one of the few individuals in public office with the courage to speak out against the subordination of Congress to the whims of the corporate world. Get ahold of his book and listen to what he has to say.

"Take this book and read it: The Dorgan manifesto" from The Bismarck Tribune
"Dorgan authors book on U.S. trade policy" from the Grand Forks Herald
"A Rallying Cry for Democratic Populism" from the Washington Post
Take This Job and Ship It: How Corporate Greed and Brain-Dead Politics Are Selling Out America by Byron Dorgan at Amazon.com