Politics & Power Quote by Russ Feingold

“Hemorrhaging” is a loaded choice: not just loss, but uncontrolled bleeding that demands emergency action. Feingold’s line is built to turn trade policy - usually filed away as technocratic and boring - into something visceral and morally urgent. It frames globalization as an avoidable injury inflicted on the body politic, and it casts elected officials as the doctors who either stop the bleed or keep pretending it’s normal.

The bipartisan finger-point is the real move. By naming “both Republicans and Democrats,” Feingold positions himself against the consensus politics of the late 1990s and early 2000s, when NAFTA-style liberalization and China’s WTO entry were defended as inevitable modernization. The subtext: the political class made a deal with corporate winners and told everyone else to retrain, relocate, or cope. That “passed by” phrasing matters too. It doesn’t just blame one party; it indicts a system that can generate the same outcome regardless of who’s in charge.

Then he pivots from anger to an argument that sounds pragmatic: “find ways for American workers to compete.” That’s not isolationism; it’s a pitch for industrial strategy, labor standards, and enforcement - the idea that markets are designed, not merely endured. He’s also pre-empting the standard rebuttal (“protectionist,” “anti-trade”) by insisting the goal isn’t to quit the global economy, but to stop rigging it against wage earners.

Contextually, this is early warning rhetoric for the populist trade backlash that would later dominate both parties. Feingold is trying to translate diffuse economic pain into a target: policy choices, not fate.