The man can speak.
Here is the full text of his graduation address at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois over the weekend.
Read it and remember how we are manufacturing a middle class through government policy -- or letting Social Darwinism (now called 'the Ownership Society') make the rich and lucky richer and luckier and the rest of us worse off.
The choice is ours.
4 comments:
Just wish I could've gotten back to the 'burg to catch it live! And I love the fact that he took the time to learn a little about the college traditions before coming (the bit in his second paragraph to "a little Pumphandle" is a reference to the way the academic year always starts, with everybody lining up on South Lawn behind Old Main to shake everybody else's hand before having a picnic supper).
I thought the poor who pay no income taxes were the lucky ones, at least according to the wall street journal.
A better link to use is this one, although the official transcript appears to just be the script he was working from. I've edited it into an actual transcript, if you're interested. (The differences are subtle, but amusing and interesting.)
This was a good speech and we in Illinois should be proud of him. He's got the ownership society wrong though. Ownership and personal accounts may be the best way to give us portablitiy of Health and Retirement benefits. Those may be the best solutions for a new economy that demands lots of labor flexibility. You don't want your pension and health benefits locked up with United and a large Corporation anymore because they are going to go under. A Nationalized sysemt of uniform benefits owned by workers is where we should go, and are probably going. It's a blend of Socialism and personal ownership people can't quite grasp yet because of the politics.
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