“The March on Washington”—that is how the event is remembered in our children’s history books, but the name is shortened from the event’s original title, “The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.”
As we come together to dedicate this monument, let us also rededicate ourselves to Dr. King’s life and legacy. Let us also build a living monument to jobs and freedom. A job is the root of our freedoms as Americans. Dr. King understood this, asking, “What good is the right to sit at a lunch counter if one can’t afford the price of a meal?”
To create jobs, a modern economy requires modern investments. Indeed, no government program is as empowering for a family as a job. There is no amount of tax cuts that any government can pass that can substitute for a job. There is no better way to expand opportunity, to grow our economy, and to strengthen and grow the ranks of an increasingly diverse and upwardly mobile middle class than by creating jobs. And the most important one we create is the next one.
We live in a time of rapid economic change, and we need to find the will to balance and move forward at the same time. In our State last month, Maryland businesses created 10,400 new private sector jobs—the sixth best job growth of any of the fifty states. But during that same period, our public sector eliminated, 2,300 jobs. That’s 2,300 moms and dads in Maryland, jobs that we could not afford to lose, because every job’s important. Public sector job losses can hurt this fragile jobs recovery just as surely as private sector job losses can hurt this jobs recovery.
Over the past couple of years, we've made the tough, but fiscally responsible decisions needed to protect our priorities while maintaining our state's AAA bond rating. We need Congress to do the same. As a nation, we need to stop cutting our children's future. We need to start rebuilding America and we need to return to the urgent work of building up our children's future.
Someone once said, “The struggle of men against power is the struggle of memory over forgetting.” There is a sense in our country, that as a nation, we’ve lost our direction forward, that we’ve lost our balance, and that we’ve become disconnected from one another, from nature herself, and from the future we aspire to give to our children. We must find that direction. We must rebalance. We must, as Dr. King said, “be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope.” We must become reconnected.
When Dr. King shared his dream on the National Mall forty-eight years ago, he spoke of standing in the symbolic shadow of President Lincoln. Today, with this monument, it is we who stand in his shadow, and today, it is we who must make his dream for equality and opportunity, jobs and freedom, a reality.
Thank you,
Governor Martin O'Malley
5 comments:
Who wrote this crap? ...Oh, O'Malley, now I get it.
Did Mr. O'Malley support NAFTA and other traitorous trade agreements that sent MILLIONS of good manufacturing jobs overseas? This sabotaged millions of American workers of ALL races. Now American labor can work part time at fast food or at Wal*Mart with few or no benefits. Ross Perot was right about these trade agreements sucking all the good jobs out of OUR country. If Mr. O'Malley supported these traitorous agreements, he should shut the F%&*k up, resign and go to China or Mexico to be with the people the backers of these disastrous trade agreements truly represent!
I understand that this project was out-sourced to China. Thomas Blackshear, an African- American sculptor, would have chiseled Dr. King's image from black marble.
All NAFTA did was provide cheap goods and speed up the process of taking away dumb Joe Smoe's ability to make $40 an hour for a job any idiot could do.
It is true still today: a job is freedom and freedom is a job. And in all the many difficult decisions that we have to make as a people, job creation has to be our number one priority, always.
huh?
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