Byron Dorgan: “this is, it seems to me, a time to talk about change in this country. I think the central question is what kind of…”

“this is, it seems to me, a time to talk about change in this country. I think the central question is what kind of change will make this a better place in which to live? We have had a lot of struggles in our history in this country about what the role of government is. Is there a role for government? What kind of government, and how much government do we want? We have struggled over the decades with that question. I go back to the early 1900's which relates to the struggle we had over the question of food inspection. I have told my colleagues this before. Some know it because of the readings they have done. But even then we began the struggle over all of these issues. On the issue of food inspection, Upton Sinclair wrote a book at the turn of the century. He did an investigative book on his discoveries in the meat, packing plants, I believe in Chicago, where he discovered that in the meat packing plants they had rats running around the plants. And they were trying to, of course, control the problem of rats in the meat packing plants. That is a pretty big problem. So they would put out bread laced with arsenic and lay it around the meat plants. And the rats would eat the bread, and die. And they would throw the rats and the bread and the meat down the same chute, and out comes mystery meat on the other side sold as sausage in some location somewhere in America to an unsuspecting consumer. Rats, arsenic, poison bread, meat and sausage.…”