SEN. BYRON DORGAN: Well, let me tell you what's going on. Let me tell you what's going on. Wages and salaries, as a percent of our GDP, is at its lowest level since they started measuring in 1947. That's probably not true for journalists or politicians; it's true for American families.
And this notion all these statistics people use -- I know the story about the nine guys sitting on a barstool, and Bill Gates walks in. On average, they're all now wealthy.
The fact is: There's a lot of trouble in this economy. You can't escape the fact that $2 billion a day in trade deficit we're ringing up every single day, the highest in history. It is not capitalism when we decide that we're going to have a product produced in China, with people living 100 to a room, in big, cinder brick rooms, and then working for $50 a month.
And, by the way, that's what's happening for the production of the iPod. We engineered iPod in this country; now, it's being produced for $50-a-month labor in rooms that house 100 people to sleep at night.
That's not capitalism; that's labor exploitation. And it's going on, not just with respect to textiles, not just manufacturing, it's going on in high tech. And that is not, in my judgment, what we fought for a century in this country to create.