Byron Dorgan: “I also say this is not about nostalgia. It is about a country having to choose the kind of future it wants, a country…”

“I also say this is not about nostalgia. It is about a country having to choose the kind of future it wants, a country measuring what it wants to achieve with its economy, and a country that determines what has value. It is so much a disconnection to me that we are the largest arms seller in the world by far--somewhere around $10 to 12 billion a year. A fair amount of those purchases are from countries that can least afford to purchase jet fighter planes, tanks, and weapons of war, and, yet, they do. In those same Third World countries that are purchasing arms, people are desperately hungry. At the same time that people are desperately hungry for food in so many places in the world, and hundreds of millions of people go to bed with an ache deep in their belly because they haven't had enough to eat, then in Mohall, ND, in the morning someone will load a two-ton truck with wheat and drive to the elevator and will be told by the grain trade: Your food doesn't have value. Your food just doesn't have value. Yet we know it costs you $4.50 a bushel to produce it, but it is only worth $2.30 a bushel because it just doesn't have value. What a serious disconnection.”