Byron Dorgan: “I am part of the Old West out in the northern Great Plains. They used to say about wagon trains: You don't move a wagon…”

“I am part of the Old West out in the northern Great Plains. They used to say about wagon trains: You don't move a wagon train ahead by leaving some wagons behind. This country is best when it works together. Will Rogers described this in the 1930s: The unemployed here ain't eating regular, but we'll get around to them as soon as everybody else gets fixed up OK. Wall Street got fixed up with hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars and untold trillions from the back door of the Federal Reserve Board. They got fixed up. Now they are seeing record profits again. There are a whole lot of folks at the bottom of the economic ladder who are not fixed up and are out of work--not from their fault, nothing they did; they are just out of work because they lost their jobs during a severe economic downturn. It seems to me that is what requires our leadership. In this Chamber, at this moment, nobody is out of work. Everybody puts on a white shirt, a suit, and comes to work. Nobody is out of work. But a whole lot of Americans are. We ought to keep our priorities on that every single day.”