Take This Job and Ship It: How Corporate Greed and Brain-Dead Politics Are Selling Out America

Name: Take This Job and Ship It: How Corporate Greed and Brain-Dead Politics Are Selling Out America
Author: Byron L. Dorgan

by Byron L. Dorgan

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“A populist manifesto against the hollowing out of American prosperity by a self-serving alliance of corporate power and political capitulation.”

Key Takeaways

1Reject the myth of cost-free global free trade. The current model systematically exports high-wage jobs and industrial capacity, eroding the national tax base and long-term economic security for short-term corporate profit.
2Recognize outsourcing as a direct threat to national sovereignty. Reliance on foreign manufacturing for critical goods, including defense components, creates dangerous strategic vulnerabilities and funds potential geopolitical rivals.
3Confront the corrupting influence of corporate lobbying on trade policy. Legislation is routinely crafted to benefit specific industries through tax loopholes and relaxed regulations, prioritizing shareholder returns over citizen welfare.
4Demand the repeal of tax incentives for exporting jobs. Current tax codes actively reward corporations for moving operations offshore, creating a perverse economic incentive against domestic investment.
5Understand the human cost behind cheap consumer goods. Low prices are often subsidized by exploited labor abroad and the disappearance of domestic middle-class livelihoods, creating a net loss for communities.
6Advocate for balanced trade to halt the hemorrhage of national wealth. Chronic, massive trade deficits transfer billions daily from the U.S. economy, starving public investment in infrastructure, education, and innovation.

Description

Senator Byron Dorgan’s polemic serves as a forensic audit of America’s economic decline, tracing a direct line from Washington boardrooms to shuttered Main Street factories. He dismantles the central dogma of neoliberal globalization, arguing that so-called "free trade" agreements like NAFTA have functioned not as engines of mutual prosperity but as carefully engineered mechanisms for capital flight. The book meticulously documents the human fallout: the loss of millions of manufacturing and white-collar jobs, the stagnation of wages, and the deliberate offshoring of entire industrial sectors to nations with minimal labor and environmental protections. The narrative exposes the political architecture enabling this exodus, detailing how corporate lobbying has secured tax breaks for relocation and blocked legislation aimed at protecting domestic industries. Dorgan presents vivid case studies, from the pharmaceutical industry’s profitable arbitrage between U.S. and foreign drug prices to the retail sector’s reliance on overseas supply chains that exploit workers. He challenges the reader to see beyond the immediate allure of cheaper goods to the broader erosion of community stability, tax revenue, and national self-sufficiency. Dorgan positions this economic strategy as a profound security failure, noting the dangerous dependency on foreign nations for essential goods, from medicine to military hardware. The argument extends beyond partisan critique, implicating both Democratic and Republican administrations in a bipartisan consensus that privileges corporate interests over those of the American worker. The book functions as both a chronicle of loss and a counter-narrative to the optimistic, technocratic visions of a flat world. Ultimately, the work is a call for a recalibration of first principles, advocating for a form of economic patriotism that prioritizes the rebuilding of domestic productive capacity. It targets readers feeling the visceral anxiety of deindustrialization, offering a framework to understand their precarity not as inevitable market forces but as the result of specific, reversible policy choices. Dorgan’s legacy here is that of a prairie populist, issuing a stark warning about the fragility of an economy that has traded its foundation for financialization and cheap imports.

Community Verdict

The consensus positions the book as an essential, galvanizing primer on the perils of globalization, valued for its clarity and moral urgency. Readers across the political spectrum praise its ability to articulate a deep-seated economic anxiety, finding its indictment of corporate-political collusion both persuasive and enraging. The core argument—that current trade policy constitutes a deliberate betrayal of the American middle class—resonates powerfully, with many describing the work as a vital wake-up call. Criticism focuses primarily on the book’s rhetorical tone and methodological rigor. Detractors find the prose occasionally strident and polemical, arguing that its populist fervor can undermine the substantive economic case. A significant point of contention is the lack of formal citations, which leaves some readers questioning the precision of its statistical claims. While the overarching thesis commands respect, the execution is sometimes judged as more of a forceful political broadside than a dispassionate, scholarly analysis.

Hot Topics

1The national security implications of outsourcing critical manufacturing and defense industries abroad.
2The validity and presentation of statistical data on trade deficits and job losses, criticized for selective use.
3The ethical and economic contradiction of U.S. drug companies manufacturing overseas while opposing reimportation.
4Bipartisan political failure, with blame assigned to both major parties for enabling corporate-driven trade policy.
5The proposal of Warren Buffett's import-credit system as a pragmatic alternative to current trade frameworks.
6The debate over protectionism versus free trade as the correct path for preserving American jobs and industry.