The following is from Obama’s Inaugural Address:
Our workers are no less productive than when this crisis began. Our minds are no less inventive, our goods and services no less needed than they were last week or last month or last year. Our capacity remains undiminished.
From my column for January 1, 2009:
The United States of America is just as rich today as it was a year or, for that matter, ten years ago. It still possesses the same rich natural resources, the same enviable geography, and the same productive, innovative and energetic workforce. Our country still has enormous intrinsic value.
Thanks to several sharp-eared Friends of Rall for noticing.
12 Comments.
*the same productive, innovative and energetic workforce*
Certainly not. Ten years ago, the baby boomers weren't retiring (among other key demographic shifts).
yeah, there's no possible way anyone could come up with that on their own. He must have lifted it from you, no two ways about it!
No, really.
….. and the same old Imperialism.
Are you seriously laying claim to the idea that the United States didn't lose its potential just because of market difficulties? Is this a serious post?
I said it was cold out today, and the weatherman came on the ten o'clock news saying the same thing. Better call my lawyer.
One of the major challenges for Americans is now the reeducation of workforce. About 70 percent of GDP came from service aka consumption sectors. Usually that figure is closer to 50, the other part being production.
Even worse, only mere 13 percent of GDP comes from industrial sectors and that is even lower than yearly IMPORTS. Even UK has relatively bigger industrial sectors, 16 percent. Japan 23 and Germany 29.
Now GDP probably is contracting fast and returning to the 50-50 situation is only matter of time. That means there is about 30 million (extra) service sector workers out of total 155 million whose skills are no longer needed.
Where they are going to get the money for reeducation when they are unemployed? US Government is now wasting money to keep banks solvent, not putting money to much needed structural changes.
That is why I am really pessimistic about all of this. There exists a debt ceiling for US government and maybe even this year T-bond buyers will say "no thanks, no more". Then the only way to finance expenses is to print money and usually it won't work without collapsing the economy totally. This is kind of checkmate situation soon, few moves still left but the outcome is pretty certain by now.
I think being Obama's best critic has gotten Ted read by Obama himself, not to mention his writers.
Maybe you and Obama just think alike, Ted.
There are enough differences in the two texts that I don't think that Obama or his staff copied it from Ted.
But I do think that Bob Herbert of the NYT should have given credit to Ted for any ideas that he reads in Ted's column, and not say that the ideas were "floatin' around".
Floating around . . . floating around . . . we all float down here . . .
George H. W. Bush's speech writers lifted 'Thousand Points of Light" from Antoine de San Exupery, never credited the late author for their theft of his words.
It's not surprising that Obama's speech writers would lift Ted's words. After all, Ted has traveled Central Asia, went in harm's way and wrote about it. Who better to steal ideas and words from than someone who has actually done the hard, dirty work required in a working Democracy? Or a semi-working Democracy? If Obama wants to carry this country again and keep it out of the hands of the FOUL Republican party, he will have to do better than blindly trust his speech writers and advisors. If not, why not just hire Karl Rove back?
I couldn't prove it in court, but it's obvious to me this was lifted. If my name were Abe Lincoln, I suppose Obama would have given me a citation.
I wonder how much of the rest of the speech was "inspired" by other sources?
Sounds like a job for FOX News.
If you look at Krugman's column on the NY Times today (1/23/09) then you will see that this idea can also be traced back to John Maynard Keynes. That being said, my wife said the same thing to me months ago when we were discussing the financial crisis. Neither of us has read Keynes and it predates your post.
Perhaps this is an idea that naturally comes from a western education or perhaps this may just be a case of a thousand monkies with typewriters…
Paul Krugman's column in the January 23rd New York Times provides this interesting quote, since we are discussing plagiarism — Krugman: The first part of this passage (in Obama's Inaugural Address) was almost surely intended as a paraphrase of words that John Maynard Keynes wrote as the world was plunging into the Great Depression — and it was a great relief, after decades of knee-jerk denunciations of government, to hear a new president giving a shout-out to Keynes. "The resources of nature and men's devices," Keynes wrote, "are just as fertile and productive as they were. The rate of our progress towards solving the material problems of life is not less rapid. We are as capable as before of affording for everyone a high standard of life…But today we have involved ourselves in a colossal muddle, having blundered in the control of a delicate machine, the working of which we do not understand." Well, Ted?