Tom Harkin: “I rise to follow up on what the Democratic leader was talking about in terms of the statement of the chairman of the…”

“I rise to follow up on what the Democratic leader was talking about in terms of the statement of the chairman of the President's economic advisers saying: Outsourcing of jobs in this country is a good thing. I read the followup comments by White House spokeswoman Claire Buchan, who said: The President's view is that American workers are the best workers in the world and he is committed to free and fair trade. He is committed to a level playing field. That all sounds very nice, but is it level when you have a worker in China making 61 cents an hour and a worker in America making $12 or $13, $14 an hour? What kind of a level playing field is that? As the leader said, this is a race to the bottom. You can always find someone someplace who is lower down on the totem pole, who is more hungry, more destitute, willing to work for less than you. If that is what we are looking for, we might as well go back to slavery. If you want to talk about efficiency, that is what they are saying: When a good or service is produced more cheaply abroad, it makes more sense to import it than to provide it domestically. That has to do with efficiency, they said. Efficiency? Is that what we as human beings are now looked upon, as a machine, how efficient a machine we are or is there more to life than that.”