Take This Job and Ship It: How Corporate Greed and Brain-Dead Politics Are Selling Out America
Author: Byron L Dorgan
As big companies move their jobs to China, sell their products through the Cayman Islands to avoid taxes, they undermine American workers and threaten our future.
For some commentators, they world may seem "flat," but Senator Byron L. Dorgan knows better. With both barrels blazing, the senator from North Dakota contends in this forceful and provocative book that while exporting jobs may be good for the giant corporations, it is a disaster for America as a whole.
Trade can't be "free" when our small businesses and working people are expected to compete with exploited workers and slave labor in third-world nations that care little about the conditions in their factories and not at all about the pollution they generate.
Our trade deficit now increases by $2 billion a day, but pharmaceutical companies have such influence in Washington that Medicare, by current law, is not allowed to negotiate lower drug prices. We import oil on an ever-increasing scale, putting ourselves into debt with the Saudis, the Kuwaitis, and other Middle Eastern nations; with their windfall profits, they continue to buy American assets. China's booming economy and abundance of cheap labor is threatening our economic survival as America's manufacturing base is dismantled.
We have mortgaged our fortunes, our principles, and our way of life.
With biting wit and an unerring moral compass, Dorgan weaves colorful stories about the dancing grapes from Fruit of the Loom underwear, Fig Newton's escape to Mexico, the disappearance of the flag decal from Huffy bicycles, and how a trade agreement sent exotic dancers to Canada. He exposes the absurdity of our global-trade policies, and isn't afraid to name names.
Dorgan pulls no punches and, most important, he offers a refreshing, bold strategy for putting our country back on track. America can once again be a booming exporter as well as a good trading partner with the whole world, but to mindlessly cheer on the loss of more than 3 million jobs (and that's only the beginning) is just plain folly. In the long run, the United States cannot help the rest of the world by impoverishing its own people and bankrupting its own economy. With a little courage and some original thinking, the negative trade balance can be slowed, even stopped and reversed.
Senator Dorgan's is a message that must be heard -- before it's too late.
About the Author
SENATOR BYRON L. DORGAN has served for twenty-four years in the U.S. Congress. He spent twelve years in the U.S. House of Representatives and served on the powerful Ways and Means Committee, and is now serving his third term in the Senate.
Elected to the Senate in 1992, he has been a member of the Democratic leadership for ten years. He has served as the Assistant Democratic Floor Leader and is currently the chairman of the Democratic Policy Committee. He has become one of America's leading voices calling for a change in the economic and trade policies that have resulted in shipping American jobs overseas, under-cutting our farmers and workers, and creating a mountain of trade debt that threatens our country's future.
He lives in Bismarck, North Dakota, and in McLean, Virginia, when the Senate is in session. He is married to Kimberly Dorgan and has four children -- Scott, Brendon, Haley and Shelly (deceased).
Interesting textbook: Cooking Art or Spanish Dishes from the Old Clay Pot
Lincoln and the Court
Author: Brian McGinty
In a meticulously researched and engagingly written narrative, Brian McGinty rescues the story of Abraham Lincoln and the Supreme Court from long and undeserved neglect, recounting the compelling history of the Civil War president's relations with the nation's highest tribunal and the role it played in resolving the agonizing issues raised by the conflict.
Lincoln was, more than any other president in the nation's history, a "lawyerly" president, the veteran of thousands of courtroom battles, where victories were won, not by raw strength or superior numbers, but by appeals to reason, citations of precedent, and invocations of justice. He brought his nearly twenty-five years of experience as a practicing lawyer to bear on his presidential duties to nominate Supreme Court justices, preside over a major reorganization of the federal court system, and respond to Supreme Court decisions—some of which gravely threatened the Union cause.
The Civil War was, on one level, a struggle between competing visions of constitutional law, represented on the one side by Lincoln's insistence that the United States was a permanent Union of one people united by a "supreme law," and on the other by Jefferson Davis's argument that the United States was a compact of sovereign states whose legal ties could be dissolved at any time and for any reason, subject only to the judgment of the dissolving states that the cause for dissolution was sufficient. Alternately opposed and supported by the justices of the Supreme Court, Lincoln steered the war-torn nation on a sometimes uncertain, but ultimately triumphant, path to victory, saving the Union, freeing the slaves, and preserving theConstitution for future generations.
Publishers Weekly
McGinty (The Oatman Massacre: A Tale of Desert Captivity and Survival) offers a lucid review of the major Civil War Supreme Court cases. The Civil War, as McGinty explains, was a struggle over constitutional interpretation: did Lincoln have the constitutional authority to do whatever he thought necessary to compel seceding states back to the Union? He thought so, but Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney sometimes stood in his way. The first major clash was over Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus, which Taney declared unconstitutional in the 1861 Merryman case. In 1862 came another battle, the Prize cases, regarding the constitutionality of Lincoln's declaring a blockade of Confederate ports. The Court also heard cases about whether a Union citizen could criticize a president during wartime and whether the Treasury Department could regulate trade between a Union state and the Confederacy. McGinty says that the Court "could have struck down the president's major war measures" but "chose not to do so." The author covers some of the same territory as James Simon's 2006 Lincoln and Chief Justice Taney, and at times one wishes for more rigorous, subtle analysis of the meaning of the Court's role in the Civil War. Still, McGinty's engaging account, which treats a topic with obvious parallels to the present, will delight history buffs. 16 b&w illus. (Feb.)
Copyright 2007 Reed Business InformationCharles Lane - Washington Post
[A] fascinating book...The issue of presidential power in wartime is as fresh as today's headlines.
Margaret Heilbrun - Library Journal
It's not easy to find Lincoln territory where good, open grazing land remains, but McGinty has found it. Combining expertise as an attorney and historian with a style that welcomes readers, he gives us Lincoln the lawyer-president who worked with a Supreme Court to which he ultimately appointed five members. The Civil War brought forth numerous legal conflicts, and McGinty shows that the personalities and issues involved were as vital and fascinating as those we are more familiar with on the military side. Highly recommended.
School Library Journal
McGinty (The Oatman Massacre: A Tale of Desert Captivity and Survival) offers a lucid review of the major Civil War Supreme Court cases. The Civil War, as McGinty explains, was a struggle over constitutional interpretation: did Lincoln have the constitutional authority to do whatever he thought necessary to compel seceding states back to the Union? He thought so, but Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney sometimes stood in his way. The first major clash was over Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus, which Taney declared unconstitutional in the 1861 Merryman case. In 1862 came another battle, the Prize cases, regarding the constitutionality of Lincoln's declaring a blockade of Confederate ports. The Court also heard cases about whether a Union citizen could criticize a president during wartime and whether the Treasury Department could regulate trade between a Union state and the Confederacy. McGinty says that the Court "could have struck down the president's major war measures" but "chose not to do so." The author covers some of the same territory as James Simon's 2006 Lincoln and Chief Justice Taney, and at times one wishes for more rigorous, subtle analysis of the meaning of the Court's role in the Civil War. Still, McGinty's engaging account, which treats a topic with obvious parallels to the present, will delight history buffs. 16 b&w illus. (Feb.)
Copyright 2007 Reed Business InformationTable of Contents:
Introduction 1A Solemn Oath 12
Dred Scott 38
First Blood 65
Judges and Circuits 92
The Prizes 118
The Boom of Cannon 176
The Old Lion 193
A New Chief 212
A Law for Rulers and People 238
The Union Is Unbroken 265
History in Marble 292
Afterword: The Legacy 300
Notes 319
Bibliography 350
Acknowledgments 364
Index 365
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