A Conversation with Senator Byron Dorgan

FROM DAILY KOS:

Senator Byron Dorgan of North Dakota, author of Take This Job and Ship It: How Corporate Greed and Brain-Dead Politics Are Selling Out America (reviewed at Daily Kos here, last week spoke with me for half an hour about outsourcing, corporate tax dodges, economic weakness tied to national security and other issues facing working Americans.
Is there a particular reason you decided to write this book now or is it that you finally had time for it?
There's no particular reason for the timing. I began writing it about a year and a half ago. I decided to write a book because I was so frustrated on the floor of the Senate debating trade issues, seeing what's happening to jobs because of bad trade agreements. So I finally just decided, you know, there's another way to deal with this: Write a book and talk about these issues in a different forum rather than just going to the floor of the Senate and having votes. I think it's good timing in the sense that I hope it will stimulate a debate about these issues during this campaign.
So your hope for it is that will filter back to different districts and people will start talking about these issues?
Well, I hope so. I mean, the fact is that every single day we are importing about $2 billion more than we export, which means we're selling this country every day, about $2 billion worth of America, to foreigners. The result of all of that, of course, is that we're also moving American jobs overseas and we're moving economic strength. There are those who say, "Look, the economy is just wonderful. It's humming along like a perfectly tuned engine on the ship of state."
The fact is, in the cargo hold, we're loaded with debt. On the budget deficit, you can make the case that that's just money that we owe to ourselves, although we're off track on the budget deficit; obviously, George W. Bush has a real serious fiscal policy problem. But on the trade deficit, you can't make that argument. The trade debt is debt that we owe to other countries and that's going to be resolved with a lower standard of living in the United States, ultimately. You can't consume 6 percent more than you produce for a very long period of time and believe that that doesn't have a significant undermining effect.
How do you translate that to people that are not up on trade, not up on a lot the complicated issues? How do you get them understand that in a visceral way?