House of Paine

black face lie

what lhell imp
produced
 this here 
senator from the state of lincoln
          
called by the name 
of ..
what is it ?

oh  'bama wamma ...?

fuck 
far from the tiger woods 
of the senate

 this flat foot 
is 
 to  prog  politics 

what buddy hacket
   was to one liner comedy 

---------

well at any rate ...

here's 
mistah 
post  DLC 
 trojan jack ass 
     TYPE 
      HIGH YELLah
                 " BLACK ALIBI "
                   TERMINATOR 

COMEWNCEMENTALLY 
oratationing
 

AND GANG
  its strictly

hire AND  brimstones 

AHEAD 
on 
this   flat earth OF OURS


    eeecks
  GOD SAVE 
    all them 
    thumb brained
        lowly college woodchucks 
                         OUT THERE ....


================================


"What will be your place in history?"

In other eras, across distant lands, this question
could be answered with relative ease and certainty. As
a servant in Rome, you knew you'd spend your life
forced to build somebody else’s Empire. As a peasant in
11th Century China, you knew that no matter how hard
you worked, the local warlord might come and take
everything you had - and you also knew that famine
might come knocking at the door. As a subject of King
George, you knew that your freedom of worship and your
freedom to speak and to build your own life would be
ultimately limited by the throne.

And then America happened.

A place where destiny was not a destination, but a
journey to be shared and shaped and remade by people
who had the gall, the temerity to believe that, against
all odds, they could form "a more perfect union" on
this new frontier. And as people around the world began
to hear the tale of the lowly colonists who overthrew
an empire for the sake of an idea, they started to
come. Across oceans and the ages, they settled in
Boston and Charleston, Chicago and St. Louis, Kalamazoo
and Galesburg, to try and build their own American
Dream. This collective dream moved forward imperfectly
- it was scarred by our treatment of native peoples,
betrayed by slavery, clouded by the subjugation of
women, shaken by war and depression. And yet, brick by
brick, rail by rail, calloused hand by calloused hand,
people kept dreaming, and building, and working, and
marching, and petitioning their government, until they
made America a land where the question of our place in
history is not answered for us. It’s answered by us.

Have we failed at times? Absolutely. Will you
occasionally fail when you embark on your own American
journey? You surely will. But the test is not
perfection. The true test of the American ideal is
whether we're able to recognize our failings and then
rise together to meet the challenges of our time.
Whether we allow ourselves to be shaped by events and
history, or whether we act to shape them. Whether
chance of birth or circumstance decides life’s big
winners and losers, or whether we build a community
where, at the very least, everyone has a chance to work
hard, get ahead, and reach their dreams.

We have faced this choice before.

At the end of the Civil War, when farmers and their
families began moving into the cities to work in the
big factories that were sprouting up all across
America, we had to decide:  Do we do nothing and allow
captains of industry and robber barons to run roughshod
over the economy and workers by competing to see who
can pay the lowest wages at the worst working
conditions? Or do we try to make the system work by
setting up basic rules for the market, instituting the
first  public schools, busting up monopolies, letting
workers organize into unions?

We chose to act, and we rose together.

When the irrational exuberance of the Roaring Twenties
came crashing down with the stock market, we had to
decide: do we follow the call of leaders who would do
nothing, or the call of a leader who, perhaps because
of his physical paralysis, refused to accept political
paralysis?

We chose to act - regulating the market, putting people
back to work, expanding bargaining rights to include
health care and a secure retirement–and together we
rose.

When World War II required the most massive homefront
mobilization in history and we needed every single
American to lend a hand, we had to decide: Do we listen
to skeptics who told us it wasn't possible to produce
that many tanks and planes? Or, did we build
Roosevelt’s Arsenal for Democracy and grow our economy
even further by providing our returning heroes with a
chance to go to college and own their own home?

Again, we chose to act, and again, we rose together.

Today, at the beginning of this young century, we have
to decide again. But this time, it is your turn to
choose.

Here in Galesburg, you know what this new challenge is.
You've seen it. All of you, your first year in college
saw what happened at 9/11. It’s already been noted, the
degree to which your lives will be intertwined with the
war on terrorism that currently is taking place. But
what you've also seen, perhaps not as spectacularly, is
the fact that when you drive by the old Maytag plant
around lunchtime, no one walks out anymore. I saw it
during the campaign when I met union guys who worked at
the plant for 20, 30 years and now wonder what they're
gonna do at the age of 55 without a pension or health
care; when I met the man who’s son needed a new liver
but because he'd been laid off, didn't know if he could
afford to provide his child the care that he needed.

It’s as if someone changed the rules in the middle of
the game and no one bothered to tell these folks. And,
in reality, the rules have changed. It started with
technology and automation that rendered entire
occupations obsolete - when was the last time anybody
here stood in line for the bank teller instead of going
to the ATM, or talked to a switchboard operator? Then
it continued when companies like Maytag were able to
pick up and move their factories to some under
developed country where workers were a lot cheaper than
they are in the United States.

As Tom Friedman points out in his new book, The World
Is Flat, over the last decade or so, these forces -
technology and globalization - have combined like never
before. So that while most of us have been paying
attention to how much easier technology has made our
own lives - sending e-mails back and forth on our
blackberries, surfing the Web on our cell phones,
instant messaging with friends across the world - a
quiet revolution has been breaking down barriers and
connecting the world’s economies. Now business not only
has the ability to move jobs wherever there’s a
factory, but wherever there’s an internet connection.

Countries like India and China realized this. They
understand that they no longer need to be just a source
of cheap labor or cheap exports. They can compete with
us on a global scale. The one resource they needed were
skilled, educated workers. So they started schooling
their kids earlier, longer, with a greater emphasis on
math and science and technology, until their most
talented students realized they don't have to come to
America to have a decent life - they can stay right
where they are.

The result? China is graduating four times the number
of engineers that the United States is graduating. Not
only are those Maytag employees competing with Chinese
and Indian and Indonesian and Mexican workers, you are
too. Today, accounting firms are e-mailing your tax
returns to workers in India who will figure them out
and send them back to you as fast as any worker in
Illinois or Indiana could.

When you lose your luggage in Boston at an airport,
tracking it down may involve a call to an agent in
Bangalore, who will find it by making a phone call to
Baltimore. Even the Associated Press has outsourced
some of their jobs to writers all over the world who
can send in a story at a click of a mouse.

As Prime Minister Tony Blair has said, in this new
economy, "Talent is the 21st century wealth."  If
you've got the skills, you've got the education, and
you have the opportunity to upgrade and improve both,
you'll be able to compete and win anywhere. If not, the
fall will be further and harder than it ever was
before. So what do we do about this?  How does America
find its way in this new, global economy?  What will
our place in history be?

Like so much of the American story, once again, we face
a choice. Once again, there are those who believe that
there isn't much we can do about this as a nation. That
the best idea is to give everyone one big refund on
their government - divvy it up by individual portions,
in the form of tax breaks, hand it out, and encourage
everyone to use their share to go buy their own health
care, their own retirement plan, their own child care,
their own education, and so on.

In Washington, they call this the Ownership Society.
But in our past there has been another term for it -
Social Darwinism - every man or woman for him or
herself. It’s a tempting idea, because it doesn't
require much thought or ingenuity. It allows us to say
that those whose health care or tuition may rise faster
than they can afford - tough luck. It allows us to say
to the Maytag workers who have lost their job - life
isn't fair. It let’s us say to the child who was born
into poverty - pull yourself up by your bootstraps. And
it is especially tempting because each of us believes
we will always be the winner in life’s lottery, that
we're the one who will be the next Donald Trump, or at
least we won't be the chump who Donald Trump says:
"You're fired!"

But there is a problem. It won't work. It ignores our
history. It ignores the fact that it’s been government
research and investment that made the railways possible
and the internet possible. It’s been the creation of a
massive middle class, through decent wages and benefits
and public schools that allowed us all to prosper. Our
economic dependence depended on individual initiative.
It depended on a belief in the free market; but it has
also depended on our sense of mutual regard for each
other, the idea that everybody has a stake in the
country, that we're all in it together and everybody’s
got a shot at opportunity. That’s what’s produced our
unrivaled political stability.

And so if we do nothing in the face of globalization,
more people will continue to lose their health care.
Fewer kids will be able to afford the diploma you're
about to receive.

More companies like United Airlines won't be able to
provide pensions for their employees. And those Maytag
workers will be joined in the unemployment line by any
worker whose skills can be bought and sold on the
global market.

So today I'm here to tell you what most of you already
know. This is not us - the option that I just
mentioned. Doing nothing. It’s not how our story ends -
not in this country. America is a land of big dreamers
and big hopes.

It is this hope that has sustained us through
revolution and civil war, depression and world war, a
struggle for civil and social rights and the brink of
nuclear crisis. And it is because our dreamers dreamed
that we have emerged from each challenge more united,
more prosperous, and more admired than before.

So let’s dream. Instead of doing nothing or simply
defending 20th century solutions, let’s imagine
together what we could do to give every American a
fighting chance in the 21st century.






What if we prepared every child in America with the
education and skills they need to compete in the new
economy? 

 If we made sure that college was affordable
for everyone who wanted to go? 

If we walked up to those
Maytag workers and we said 
"Your old job is not coming
back, but a new job will be there 
because we're going
to seriously retrain you
 and there’s life-long
education that’s waiting for you 
- the sorts of
opportunities that Knox has created 
with the Strong
Futures scholarship program.

What if no matter where you worked 
or how many times
you switched jobs,
 you had health care and a pension
that stayed with you always, 
so you all had the
flexibility to move to a better job 
or start a new
business? 

What if instead of cutting budgets 
for
research and development and science, 
we fueled the
genius and the innovation 
that will lead to the new
jobs and new industries 
of the future?

Right now, all across America,
 there are amazing
discoveries being made. 
If we supported these
discoveries on a national level,
 if we committed
ourselves to investing 
in these possibilities, 
just
imagine what it could do 
for a town like Galesburg. 

Ten
or twenty years down the road,
 that old Maytag plant
could re-open its doors 
as an Ethanol refinery that
turned corn into fuel. 

Down the street, a biotechnology
research lab could open up
 on the cusp of discovering
 a cure for cancer.

 And across the way, 
a new auto company
could be busy churning
 out electric cars. 
The new jobs
created would be filled
 by American workers trained
with new skills
 and a world-class education.

All of that is possible 
but none of it will come easy.
Every one of us 
is going to have to work more,
 read
more, train more,
 think more. 

We will have to slough
off some bad habits - 
like driving gas guzzlers 
that
weaken our economy 
and feed our enemies abroad.


 Our
children will have to 
turn off the TV set 
once in a while 
and put away the video games
 and start hitting
the books. 

We'll have to reform institutions,
 like our public schools
 that were designed for an earlier time


Republicans will have to recognize 
our collective
responsibilities
 even as Democrats recognize
 that we
have to do more
 than just defend old programs

It won't be easy
 but it can be done
 It can be our
future
 We have the talent 
and the resources and
brainpower 
But now we need the political will
 We need
a national commitment


And we need each of you.

Now, no one can force you to meet these challenges. If
you want, it will be pretty easy for you to leave here
today and not give another thought to towns like
Galesburg and the challenges they face. There is no
community service requirement in the real world; no one
is forcing you to care. You can take your diploma, walk
off this stage, and go chasing after the big house, and
the nice suits, and all the other things that our money
culture says that you should want, that you should
aspire to, that you can buy.

But I hope you don't walk away from the challenge.
Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a
certain poverty of ambition. It asks too little of
yourself. You need to take up the challenges that we
face as a nation and make them your own. Not because
you have a debt to those who helped you get here,
although you do have that debt. Not because you have an
obligation to those who are less fortunate than you,
although I do think you do have that obligation. It’s
primarily because you have an obligation to yourself.
Because individual salvation has always depended on
collective salvation. Because it’s only when you hitch
your wagon to something larger than yourself that you
realize your true potential.

And I know that all of you are wondering how you'll do
this, the challenges seem so big. They seem so
difficult for one person to make a difference.

But we know it can be done. Because where you're
sitting, in this very place, in this town, it’s
happened before.

Nearly two centuries ago, before civil rights, before
voting rights, before Abraham Lincoln, before the Civil
War, before all of that, America was stained by the sin
of slavery. In the sweltering heat of southern
plantations, men and women who looked like me could not
escape the life of pain and servitude in which they
were sold. And yet, year after year, as this moral
cancer ate away at the American ideals of liberty and
equality, the nation was silent.

But its people didn't stay silent for long.

One by one, abolitionists emerged to tell their fellow
Americans that this would not be our place in history -
that this was not the America that had captured the
imagination of the world.

This resistance that they met was fierce, and some paid
with their lives. But they would not be deterred, and
they soon spread out across the country to fight for
their cause. One man from New York went west, all the
way to the prairies of Illinois to start a colony.

And here in Galesburg, freedom found a home.

Here in Galesburg, the main depot for the Underground
Railroad in Illinois, escaped slaves could roam freely
on the streets and take shelter in people’s homes. And
when their masters or the police would come for them,
the people of this town would help them escape north,
some literally carrying them in their arms to freedom.

Think about the risks that involved. If they were
caught abetting a fugitive, you could've been jailed or
lynched. It would have been simple for these
townspeople to turn the other way; to go live their
lives in a private peace.

And yet, they didn't do that. Why?

Because they knew that we were all Americans; that we
were all brothers and sisters; the same reason that a
century later, young men and women your age would take
Freedom Rides down south, to work for the Civil Rights
movement. The same reason that black women would walk
instead of ride a bus after a long day of doing
somebody else’s laundry and cleaning somebody else’s
kitchen. Because they were marching for freedom.

Today, on this day of possibility, we stand in the
shadow of a lanky, raw-boned man with little formal
education who once took the stage at Old Main and told
the nation that if anyone did not believe the American
principles of freedom and equality, that those
principles were timeless and all-inclusive, they should
go rip that page out of the Declaration of
Independence.

My hope for all of you is that as you leave here today,
you decide to keep these principles alive in your own
life and in the life of this country. You will be
tested. You won't always succeed. But know that you
have it within your power to try. That generations who
have come before you faced these same fears and
uncertainties in their own time. And that through our
collective labor, and through God’s providence, and our
willingness to shoulder each other’s burdens, America
will continue on its precious journey towards that
distant horizon, and a better day.

Thank you so much class of 2005, and congratulations on
your graduation. Thank you.