Earlier this week, USAction Executive Director Jeff Blum addressed the United States Student Association, which was hosting its national legislative conference in Washington, D.C. Jeff was honored with USSA’s “Ally of the Year” award. USSA is part of the Rebuild and Renew America Now campaign, which USAction has helped organize.
Jeff spoke at a rally the following morning on Capitol Hill in Washington DC.
Here is a video of Jeff’s speech.
And here’s the text:
Jeff Blum Remarks to USSA Legislative Conference Rally
March 24, 2009
Greetings, thank you all of you for being here! And you’ve got a bunch of fabulous people coming. You’ve got some Members of Congress, Senator Durbin! My old friend Congressman Chakah Fattah! And your Member from Colorado, Congressman Polis!
Welcome to Washington, DC! When was the last time that students felt so welcome to be here? You helped elect this great President and make possible the profound opportunity we have today, and you ought to feel welcome and proud to be here.
It’s a great honor for me, a former student body president—in 1967-68—to stand before you today. My life has been shaped by what I learned about politics in college. I saw that, as Frederick Douglass famously said, “Power concedes nothing without demand. It never has, and it never will.”
Can we stick with history for a minute here? In the 19th Century, the United States moved toward free grade school education for at least some of its citizens—a big advance, which put this country ahead of others in quality of life and economic progress for some time.
In the 20th Century, activists and reformers won free high school education for virtually all of our citizens.
In the 21st Century, our challenge is to win universal, high quality, public education from pre-school through four years of college for every young person living in this country, whether they are citizens or not.
Anything less means that we will lose our ability to be leaders in the economy of the 21st Century.
Now, there is much work that needs to be done. And we need your help – your talent. Your enthusiasm. Your creativity. But maybe most of all, we need your sense of hope.
I don’t need to tell you that your classmates are worried about finding employment after graduation. That some of your former classmates are fighting wars far away. That this year alone, more than 400,000 young people will defer going to college because they can’t afford it.
And yet, despite all the bad news you read online in the morning, I believe you have hope.
Last November you helped elect a president. Today you and I together have an unbelievable burden of obligation—and an unbelievable possibility of opportunity.
We begin to address this burden—and this opportunity—this week. Important committees in Congress will begin the process of marking up the budget for fiscal year 2010.
I needn’t remind you of USSA’s priorities in this budget – priorities that will make college more affordable and thus more accessible:
- Pell Grants should become a guarantee, not a vulnerable discretionary program subject to the annual whims of short-sighted Congressmen, and they should be indexed for inflation;
- The government should mandate direct loans for students at affordable rates. We don’t need inefficient and wasteful subsidies to big lenders; and
- We need more programs that increase access and outreach to help under-represented kids on the path to college, programs like Gear-Up, which my daughter worked for in Walla Walla—anyone here from Washington State?
But I want to challenge you today to think even more broadly about what it would take to build the America we dream of—the America we want to be.
The budget is a moral document. It’s complex, yes. But it expresses the values of our nation—values that for the past eight years have been not so much values but question marks.
Will we make sure millionaires pay their fair share of taxes so that families can send their young adults to college?
Will we have quality, affordable health care for all?
Will we reduce taxes for 95 percent of working people and close the multi-billion loopholes for oil companies?
Will we chart a path of smart, renewable energy that makes our world greener and reduces dependence on foreign oil?
Here’s what my organization, USAction, is doing to make sure the answers to these questions are yes, yes, yes and yes.
We build coalitions. We helped organize Rebuild and Renew America Now. Its sole purpose is to pass President Obama’s proposed budget—a budget that would transform our nation. Today our coalition includes 105 national members—and thank you, USSA for joining us—and more than 700 local and state organizations.
To my friends, the hundreds of USSA activists here today and their allies, I want to leave you with a final thought.
Last November, with energy, enthusiasm and a sense of hope that will not die, you said, “Yes We Can.”
I challenge you: Let “Yes We Can” not be merely a slogan.
Let it be a movement.
Thank you.
don’t doubt the sincerity of those who are truly worried about the deficit causing real harm to future generations. However this is a time of crisis and the only real way out of it is to dramatically increase government spending. The deficit, as it was following WWII, can be dealt with later. Right now it’s up to the government to get us back to work and to stabilize the crumbling financial and housing markets.
