Byron Dorgan: “this reminds me of Madam Tussaud's wax museum. It looks like there are people here, except there is no movement. Month…”

“this reminds me of Madam Tussaud's wax museum. It looks like there are people here, except there is no movement. Month after month after month, we hear the results of unbelievably bad trade agreements that pull the rug out from under our workers and farmers, pulling the rug out from under our economy, ringing up the highest trade deficits in the our history, shipping American jobs overseas, even as we import cheap labor through the backdoor, and no one says a thing. No one does a thing. We today have a proposal before us to approve the nomination of a new U.S. trade ambassador. For what purpose? Let me describe what is happening with our trade deficit. This is the trade deficit from the most recent year going back to 1995. We are hemorrhaging in red ink. These are the largest trade deficits in the history of humankind, by far, not even close with any other country. What does this mean? This means that we are selling part of our country every day to those who live outside of our country. It is called the selling of America. We seem to think that it is all right to have a trade deficit of $2 billion a day. That means that we import products more than we export to the rest of the world, and we pay for those imports with our currency or debt instruments. The result is at the moment the bank of Korea holds $200 billion of our currency; the Chinese, $750 billion; the Japanese, $800 billion; the Taiwanese, $250 billion.…”