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From: Addicting Info
Date: Friday, March 16, 2012
Subject: [New post] The Tea Party Propaganda Video You Need To Be Aware Of (VIDEO TRAILER)
To: majors.bruce@gmail.com
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The Tea Party Propaganda Video You Need To Be Aware Of (VIDEO TRAILER)
by Sarah Wood
<http://www.addictinginfo.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/lincolnmemorial-300x164.jpg>
There has been a propaganda video titled "AGENDA, Grinding America Down" that the Tea Party has been using all over the nation to spread falsehoods and fear about President Barack Obama, and the liberal voice of progress and change. This video is telling people that the progress made since the 1960's is a bad thing, and that we are falling further and further away from what it means to be a decent American and live by the "morals" that we are supposedly meant to follow. It seems that all the progress made regarding equality for women, people of color, LGBT individuals, people of varying faiths, etc. goes against the best intention for the United States.
The same old catch phrases are being uttered as they are when any mention of progress and equality is uttered. ("Communism," "Marxism," "Socialism," etc.) Except this time, those words are being used as though the devil himself is about to burn us all alive if we embrace a philosophy of acceptance, tolerance, and a brotherhood of man. The video speaks about the fact that "it does not take a village to raise a child," because that village is "the government." The funny part about shouting those names at our government is that they aren't true. Any dictionary, and basic civics or economics class will tell you likewise.
//
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What those who made this video, and those who watch with eager eyes and ears need to know is that we have a government set up of the people, run by the people, and it is to work for the people... for all people. Not just those deemed worthy by a deity not everyone believes in. This is why the founders wrote into the constitution the separation of church and state. "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." Meaning no laws shall be written in respect to any religion, but you are free to worship your deity on your own time if you have one, and if you so choose.
After watching, I can only be led to believe that whoever made this video needs to take a class in basic civics, and relearn the constitution. They want an inhibiting America, one that only grants certain rights to some, but not all. They want to live in a nation designed purely for the benefit of the individual and not the general welfare of the whole. The constitution purposefully added the general welfare clause to the constitution. "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America." Everything listed is for us to do as a whole, not as individuals... but as individuals working together for the greater good.
The last line of the Declaration of Independence reads (after mentioning the Divine Providence, because most of the founders were Deist), "we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor." That's sound to me as though the founders wanted to set up a government to work for the greater good of all that inhabit this land. It doesn't say, we stand alone, working for only ourselves, and keeping only what is ours, because that's what the Lord intended. Nope... it didn't say that.
I can only hope to disseminate the truth regarding this video, and hope that others will spread the word as well. These sorts of films are dangerous. They are dangerous to those that it attacks, and they are dangerous to the well-being of the nation as a whole.
Here is the trailer:
<http://img.youtube.com/vi/SH8LkIqu1c8/0.jpg>
AGENDA: Grinding America Down (Trailer) from Copybook Heading Productions LLC on Vimeo.
You can also find more information about it here.
Sarah Wood | March 16, 2012 at 6:03 pm | Tags: agenda, civics, Grinding Down America, propaganda, Tea Party | Categories: Discredited Right-Wing Myths, Historical Information, News | URL: http://wp.me/p1w9KV-aD9
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"Let's pause for a moment to contemplate the forest. Any government measure that inhibits competition -- including from self-employment and worker-owned firms -- harms consumers and workers by raising prices and reducing bargaining power. This doesn't necessarily mean they are poorer than previously, but it means they may well be poorer than they would have been in a freed market."
The Goal Is Freedom
The 99% and the 1%
The economic means versus the political means.
Sheldon Richman
Posted March 16, 2012
This is drawn from my lecture at the William and Patricia Jolicoeur Economics Seminar, cosponsored by FEE and the Western New England University economics department, Springfield, Mass., March 13, 2012.
"We are the 99 percent!" That's the battle cry of Occupy Wall Street. What are we to make of it? It's a worthwhile question, and the answer is complex.
On the one hand, it is certainly the case that by historical and world standards, the 99 percent has an amazingly high standard of living. This includes most of those we call "poor" in this society. Suffice it to say that the amount of time it takes the average worker to earn the money required to buy a whole range of consumer goods has shrunk dramatically in my lifetime. That is indisputable, but it isn't the half of it. The products are superior, and many things we take for granted weren't available just a short time ago. Before the early 1980s you couldn't buy a personal computer. Only a few years ago the most you could do with a mobile phone was make a call!
More Access
I am not saying no one is in dire straits, but the fact is -- the recession aside -- more people in the United States have greater access to more affordable and superior goods than ever before. Even if the 1 percent has a larger share of total income in the United States than at some previous time, total income is far greater. The 99 percent's absolute amount is also far greater.
But it's not enough to say the 99 percent has never had it so good. To use an admittedly provocative analogy: Would we be happy to learn that the last generation of southern slaves lived better in material terms than earlier generations of slaves (or even free people)? Maybe they did, but so what? They were slaves.
I'm not saying the non-superrich are slaves. I'm saying that if many 1 percenters made and maintain their fortunes by unjust methods -- which means coercively at the expense of others -- then that is morally significant, and it doesn't matter how well off the rest of us are by historical and contemporary world standards. If we would have been even better off had the 1 percent not unjustly diverted to itself wealth from labor's productivity gains or consumer surplus by suppressing competition with government help, that is a legitimate grievance justifying protest.
So we must inquire whether 1 percenters (and others) have acquired their fortunes by immoral means.
Oppenheimer's Insight
I approach this question by drawing on an insight emphasized by the left-libertarian sociologist Franz Oppenheimer (1864-1943), originator of the conquest theory of the State and inspiration to Albert Jay Nock. It is an insight found previously in the nineteenth-century French laissez fairests J. B. Say, Frederic Bastiat, and others. In his book The State, Oppenheimer wrote:
While it can be difficult to determine how much any individual depends on the political means, we can enumerate some of the many devices described by that term.
Barriers to Entry
Among the political means are all the historical barriers to both competitive entry and competitive vigor that governments -- national, state, and local -- maintain at the behest of well-connected interests. These include impediments to foreign trade like tariffs and quotas, occupational and business licensing, land-use restrictions such as zoning, building codes, eminent domain, subsidies, government contracting, tax differentials, monopoly franchises, minimum product standards, limits on labor activity, intellectual property laws, and regulations, which bear more heavily on small and yet-to-be-launched firms than on large incumbent firms. These things were common as far back as the colonial period and persisted after the revolution and adoption of the Articles of Confederation and Constitution.
We may single out transportation subsidies, such as those relating to the cost of building the railroads and maintaining the interstate highway system, as particularly distorting. Those subsidies favor national-market business models over regional- and local-market models by socializing transportation costs. Nor should we neglect government's various land-distributions schemes dating back to colonial times, which gave large areas of prime real estate to special interests, such as railroads, and shaped the evolution of the American economy in ways other than how a truly spontaneous consensual market order would have. The State's engrossment of land to this day limits opportunity and mobility by foreclosing alternatives to conventional wage employment. The period often seen as closest to laissez fare -- the Gilded Age -- was anything but, having followed on the heels of the Civil War, which enriched particular people through military contracts, government debt speculation, and the cartelization of banking.
Let's pause for a moment to contemplate the forest. Any government measure that inhibits competition -- including from self-employment and worker-owned firms -- harms consumers and workers by raising prices and reducing bargaining power. This doesn't necessarily mean they are poorer than previously, but it means they may well be poorer than they would have been in a freed market.
IP in the Spotlight
Intellectual property deserves special attention. Property rules evolved to avert conflict and facilitate flourishing in society because physical objects, unlike ideal "objects," are scarce and finite. Two people cannot wear the same pair of socks at the same time, but they can use "the same" idea at the same time. Ownership in ideas equates to control of people and their use of their own physical property.
I just wish to underscore the obvious monopolistic and anticompetitive effects of IP law, which by the way the U.S. government imposes on foreign countries as the price of access to our market. (Curiously, we call these "free trade" agreements.) Patent law has been romanticized as a protection for the independent inventor from big business, but in practice it accomplishes quite the opposite. Entrenched holders of patents can use the courts to bludgeon upstarts who act in ways the holders construe as patent infringements. The pooling of patents by big companies can create de facto cartels. This has a chilling effect on competition and innovation. (For more, see David Levine and Michele Boldrin's free-market analysis, Against Intellectual Monopoly.)
One last word on IP: We live in an extraordinary time when in many industries the relative cost of physical capital is plummeting -- think of what's happened with computing power -- and the relative value of know-how -- human capital -- is exploding. The value of many firms is now more in the minds of personnel than in the machinery. The departure of a couple of employees can represent a potential competitive challenge to an incumbent firm -- unless it can control those employees through IP law.
Anger at Bankers
Occupy Wall Street has the banking establishment in mind especially when it rails against the 1 percent. Steve Jobs was a 1 percenter, and so are many sports and entertainment figures, but they are not the objects of anger. Rather it is Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and JPMorgan Chase that get the brickbats. There is a sense that Wall Street is up to no good.
In light of the last several years, this is an entirely justifiable attitude. Big, well-connected players in banking and finance were at the heart of the housing and financial debacle, in partnership with the government, of course. Free-market advocates should hold no brief for any of them. It is important to understand that throughout American history, banking and finance is the industry that has been in the coziest relationship with politicians -- national, state, and local.
The 1 percent as we know it is not purely the result of the market but rather of its opposite: corporatist collusion between government and big business and finance. In a freed market, there certainly would not be income equality people are too different to expect that. But the distance between the top and bottom would likely be much less dramatic and mobility greater. Abolishing all privileges and finding reasonable ways to rectify past injustices would put America on the road to freedom.
http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/tgif/the-99-and-the-1/
The Goal Is Freedom
The 99% and the 1%
The economic means versus the political means.
Sheldon Richman
Posted March 16, 2012
This is drawn from my lecture at the William and Patricia Jolicoeur Economics Seminar, cosponsored by FEE and the Western New England University economics department, Springfield, Mass., March 13, 2012.
"We are the 99 percent!" That's the battle cry of Occupy Wall Street. What are we to make of it? It's a worthwhile question, and the answer is complex.
On the one hand, it is certainly the case that by historical and world standards, the 99 percent has an amazingly high standard of living. This includes most of those we call "poor" in this society. Suffice it to say that the amount of time it takes the average worker to earn the money required to buy a whole range of consumer goods has shrunk dramatically in my lifetime. That is indisputable, but it isn't the half of it. The products are superior, and many things we take for granted weren't available just a short time ago. Before the early 1980s you couldn't buy a personal computer. Only a few years ago the most you could do with a mobile phone was make a call!
More Access
I am not saying no one is in dire straits, but the fact is -- the recession aside -- more people in the United States have greater access to more affordable and superior goods than ever before. Even if the 1 percent has a larger share of total income in the United States than at some previous time, total income is far greater. The 99 percent's absolute amount is also far greater.
But it's not enough to say the 99 percent has never had it so good. To use an admittedly provocative analogy: Would we be happy to learn that the last generation of southern slaves lived better in material terms than earlier generations of slaves (or even free people)? Maybe they did, but so what? They were slaves.
I'm not saying the non-superrich are slaves. I'm saying that if many 1 percenters made and maintain their fortunes by unjust methods -- which means coercively at the expense of others -- then that is morally significant, and it doesn't matter how well off the rest of us are by historical and contemporary world standards. If we would have been even better off had the 1 percent not unjustly diverted to itself wealth from labor's productivity gains or consumer surplus by suppressing competition with government help, that is a legitimate grievance justifying protest.
So we must inquire whether 1 percenters (and others) have acquired their fortunes by immoral means.
Oppenheimer's Insight
I approach this question by drawing on an insight emphasized by the left-libertarian sociologist Franz Oppenheimer (1864-1943), originator of the conquest theory of the State and inspiration to Albert Jay Nock. It is an insight found previously in the nineteenth-century French laissez fairests J. B. Say, Frederic Bastiat, and others. In his book The State, Oppenheimer wrote:
- There are two fundamentally opposed means whereby man, requiring sustenance, is impelled to obtain the necessary means for satisfying his desires. These are work and robbery, one's own labor and the forcible appropriation of the labor of others.… I propose … to call one's own labor and the equivalent exchange of one's own labor for the labor of others, the "economic means" for the satisfaction of needs, while the unrequited appropriation of the labor of others will be called the "political means."
While it can be difficult to determine how much any individual depends on the political means, we can enumerate some of the many devices described by that term.
Barriers to Entry
Among the political means are all the historical barriers to both competitive entry and competitive vigor that governments -- national, state, and local -- maintain at the behest of well-connected interests. These include impediments to foreign trade like tariffs and quotas, occupational and business licensing, land-use restrictions such as zoning, building codes, eminent domain, subsidies, government contracting, tax differentials, monopoly franchises, minimum product standards, limits on labor activity, intellectual property laws, and regulations, which bear more heavily on small and yet-to-be-launched firms than on large incumbent firms. These things were common as far back as the colonial period and persisted after the revolution and adoption of the Articles of Confederation and Constitution.
We may single out transportation subsidies, such as those relating to the cost of building the railroads and maintaining the interstate highway system, as particularly distorting. Those subsidies favor national-market business models over regional- and local-market models by socializing transportation costs. Nor should we neglect government's various land-distributions schemes dating back to colonial times, which gave large areas of prime real estate to special interests, such as railroads, and shaped the evolution of the American economy in ways other than how a truly spontaneous consensual market order would have. The State's engrossment of land to this day limits opportunity and mobility by foreclosing alternatives to conventional wage employment. The period often seen as closest to laissez fare -- the Gilded Age -- was anything but, having followed on the heels of the Civil War, which enriched particular people through military contracts, government debt speculation, and the cartelization of banking.
Let's pause for a moment to contemplate the forest. Any government measure that inhibits competition -- including from self-employment and worker-owned firms -- harms consumers and workers by raising prices and reducing bargaining power. This doesn't necessarily mean they are poorer than previously, but it means they may well be poorer than they would have been in a freed market.
IP in the Spotlight
Intellectual property deserves special attention. Property rules evolved to avert conflict and facilitate flourishing in society because physical objects, unlike ideal "objects," are scarce and finite. Two people cannot wear the same pair of socks at the same time, but they can use "the same" idea at the same time. Ownership in ideas equates to control of people and their use of their own physical property.
I just wish to underscore the obvious monopolistic and anticompetitive effects of IP law, which by the way the U.S. government imposes on foreign countries as the price of access to our market. (Curiously, we call these "free trade" agreements.) Patent law has been romanticized as a protection for the independent inventor from big business, but in practice it accomplishes quite the opposite. Entrenched holders of patents can use the courts to bludgeon upstarts who act in ways the holders construe as patent infringements. The pooling of patents by big companies can create de facto cartels. This has a chilling effect on competition and innovation. (For more, see David Levine and Michele Boldrin's free-market analysis, Against Intellectual Monopoly.)
One last word on IP: We live in an extraordinary time when in many industries the relative cost of physical capital is plummeting -- think of what's happened with computing power -- and the relative value of know-how -- human capital -- is exploding. The value of many firms is now more in the minds of personnel than in the machinery. The departure of a couple of employees can represent a potential competitive challenge to an incumbent firm -- unless it can control those employees through IP law.
Anger at Bankers
Occupy Wall Street has the banking establishment in mind especially when it rails against the 1 percent. Steve Jobs was a 1 percenter, and so are many sports and entertainment figures, but they are not the objects of anger. Rather it is Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and JPMorgan Chase that get the brickbats. There is a sense that Wall Street is up to no good.
In light of the last several years, this is an entirely justifiable attitude. Big, well-connected players in banking and finance were at the heart of the housing and financial debacle, in partnership with the government, of course. Free-market advocates should hold no brief for any of them. It is important to understand that throughout American history, banking and finance is the industry that has been in the coziest relationship with politicians -- national, state, and local.
The 1 percent as we know it is not purely the result of the market but rather of its opposite: corporatist collusion between government and big business and finance. In a freed market, there certainly would not be income equality people are too different to expect that. But the distance between the top and bottom would likely be much less dramatic and mobility greater. Abolishing all privileges and finding reasonable ways to rectify past injustices would put America on the road to freedom.
http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/tgif/the-99-and-the-1/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlZrU1Z2IZE&feature=related
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How Ayn Rand's Bizarre Philosophy Made the New Right so Toxic
Rand's psychopathic ideas made billionaires feel like
victims and turned millions of followers into their doormats.
The Guardian
ByGeorge Monbiot
Rand's psychopathic ideas made billionaires feel like
victims and turned millions of followers into their doormats.
The Guardian
ByGeorge Monbiot
It has a fair claim to be the ugliest philosophy the
postwar world has produced. Selfishness, it contends, is good, altruism
evil, empathy and compassion are irrational and destructive. The poor
deserve to die; the rich deserve unmediated power. It has already been
tested, and has failed spectacularly and catastrophically. Yet the
belief system constructed by Ayn Rand, who died 30 years ago this
month, has never been more popular or influential.
Rand was a Russian from a prosperous family who emigrated to the
United States. Through her novels (such as Atlas Shrugged) and her
nonfiction (such as The Virtue of Selfishness) she explained a
philosophy she called Objectivism. This holds that the only moral course
is pure self-interest. We owe nothing, she insists, to anyone, even to
members of our own families. She described the poor and weak as "refuse"
and "parasites", and excoriated anyone seeking to assist them. Apart
from the police, the courts and the armed forces, there should be no
role for government: no social security, no public health or education,
no public infrastructure or transport, no fire service, no regulations,
no income tax.
Atlas Shrugged, published in 1957, depicts a United States crippled
by government intervention in which heroic millionaires struggle against
a nation of spongers. The millionaires, whom she portrays as Atlas
holding the world aloft, withdraw their labour, with the result that the
nation collapses. It is rescued, through unregulated greed and
selfishness, by one of the heroic plutocrats, John Galt.
The poor die like flies as a result of government programmes and
their own sloth and fecklessness. Those who try to help them are gassed.
In a notorious passage, she argues that all the passengers in a train
filled with poisoned fumes deserved their fate. One, for instance, was a
teacher who taught children to be team players; one was a mother
married to a civil servant, who cared for her children; one was a
housewife "who believed that she had the right to elect politicians, of
whom she knew nothing".
Rand's is the philosophy of the psychopath, a misanthropic fantasy of
cruelty, revenge and greed. Yet, as Gary Weiss shows
in his new book, Ayn Rand Nation, she has become to the new right what
Karl Marx once was to the left: a demigod at the head of a chiliastic cult.
Almost one third of Americans, according to a recent poll, have read
Atlas Shrugged, and it now sells hundreds of thousands of copies every
year.
Ignoring Rand's evangelical atheism, the Tea Party movement has
taken her to its heart. No rally of theirs is complete without placards
reading "Who is John Galt?" and "Rand was right". Rand, Weiss argues,
provides the unifying ideology which has "distilled vague anger and
unhappiness into a sense of purpose". She is energetically promoted by
the broadcasters Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Rick Santelli. She is the
guiding spirit of the Republicans in Congress.
Like all philosophies, Objectivism is absorbed, secondhand, by people
who have never read it. I believe it is making itself felt on this side
of the Atlantic: in the clamorous new demands to remove the 50p tax
band for the very rich, for instance; or among the sneering, jeering
bloggers who write for the Telegraph and the Spectator, mocking
compassion and empathy, attacking efforts to make the word a kinder
place.
It is not hard to see why Rand appeals to billionaires. She offers
them something that is crucial to every successful political movement: a
sense of victimhood. She tells them that they are parasitised by the
ungrateful poor and oppressed by intrusive, controlling governments.
It is harder to see what it gives the ordinary teabaggers, who would
suffer grievously from a withdrawal of government. But such is the
degree of misinformation which saturates this movement and so prevalent
in the US is Willy Loman syndrome (the gulf between reality and
expectations) that millions blithely volunteer themselves as
billionaires' doormats. I wonder how many would continue to worship at
the shrine of Ayn Rand if they knew that towards the end of her life she
signed on for both Medicare and social security. She had railed
furiously against both programmes, as they represented everything she
despised about the intrusive state. Her belief system was no match for
the realities of age and ill health.
But they have a still more powerful reason to reject her philosophy:
as Adam Curtis's BBC documentary showed last year, the most devoted
member of her inner circle was Alan Greenspan,
former head of the US Federal Reserve. Among the essays he wrote for
Rand were those published in a book he co-edited with her called
Capitalism: the Unknown Ideal.
Here, starkly explained, you'll find the philosophy he brought into
government. There is no need for the regulation of business – even
builders or Big Pharma – he argued, as "the 'greed' of the businessman
or, more appropriately, his profit-seeking … is the unexcelled protector
of the consumer". As for bankers, their need to win the trust of their
clients guarantees that they will act with honour and integrity.
Unregulated capitalism, he maintains, is a "superlatively moral system".
Once in government, Greenspan applied his guru's philosophy to the
letter, cutting taxes for the rich, repealing the laws constraining
banks, refusing to regulate the predatory lending and the derivatives
trading which eventually brought the system down. Much of this is
already documented, but Weiss shows that in the US, Greenspan has
successfully airbrushed history.
Despite the many years he spent at her side, despite his previous
admission that it was Rand who persuaded him that "capitalism is not
only efficient and practical but also moral", he mentioned her in his
memoirs only to suggest that it was a youthful indiscretion – and this,
it seems, is now the official version. Weiss presents powerful evidence
that even today Greenspan remains her loyal disciple, having renounced
his partial admission of failure to Congress.
Saturated in her philosophy, the new right on both sides of the
Atlantic continues to demand the rollback of the state, even as the
wreckage of that policy lies all around. The poor go down, the
ultra-rich survive and prosper. Ayn Rand would have approved.George
Monbiot is the author Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning. Read
more of his writings at Monbiot.com. This article originally appeared
in the Guardian.
--
Together, we can change the world, one mind at a time.
Have a great day,
Tommy
--
Together, we can change the world, one mind at a time.
Have a great day,
Tommy
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Posted this morning at Electric Politics, a podcast interview with Winslow Wheeler, who had worked on U.S. military budgets for over thirty years within government and who for the past ten years has been a critical voice of conscience outside government. Very few people know these numbers as well as Winslow does. And as he says, the first step in deciding what we want is to be informed.
The Pentagon recently released its proposed 2013 budget. The problem is, as usual, that the Pentagon doesn't count large categories of spending which, conceptually, should be counted within the military budget. Things like the cost of building nuclear bombs. Or some military health care. Reputable foreign organizations that track world military spending -- like IISS or SIPRI -- aren't fooled. Their estimates run about 50% higher than what the U.S. officially declares. But, to be realistic, the level of U.S. military spending is actually much higher still: about twice what the Pentagon and the White House say it is, or about one trillion dollars. That's about 7% of GDP, or four to five times what other industrial nations spend. What's even worse is that the Pentagon budget is deliberately intended to fool Americans into assuming our spending is unobjectionable.
If you like the podcast please forward the link.
Thanks for listening!
http://www.electricpolitics.com/podcast/2012/03/washingtons_warlords.html
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The Pentagon recently released its proposed 2013 budget. The problem is, as usual, that the Pentagon doesn't count large categories of spending which, conceptually, should be counted within the military budget. Things like the cost of building nuclear bombs. Or some military health care. Reputable foreign organizations that track world military spending -- like IISS or SIPRI -- aren't fooled. Their estimates run about 50% higher than what the U.S. officially declares. But, to be realistic, the level of U.S. military spending is actually much higher still: about twice what the Pentagon and the White House say it is, or about one trillion dollars. That's about 7% of GDP, or four to five times what other industrial nations spend. What's even worse is that the Pentagon budget is deliberately intended to fool Americans into assuming our spending is unobjectionable.
If you like the podcast please forward the link.
Thanks for listening!
http://www.electricpolitics.com/podcast/2012/03/washingtons_warlords.html
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---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Travis <twmccoy@gmail.com>
Date: Fri, Mar 16, 2012 at 8:21 AM
Subject: Mascot Battle Angers Raiders, Hebrews, Spics
To: Travis McCoy <baconlard@gmail.com>
NEW YORK (CAP) - A call by the National Interscholastic Athletic Association for high school teams to abandon mascots based on a racial or ethnic group has met with resistance from teams as far removed from each other as the Dracester, Mass. Chieftans, the Craigsville, N.D. Red Raiders and the Muntsfield, Ala. Fighting Hebrews.
"I don't think there is anything about our nickname that is derogatory or insulting to African Americans," said Alan Manderville, superintendent of schools for Redmond, Md., whose sports teams are called the Savage Africans. "Having said that, I'm not an African American and I can't speak for how they feel. In fact, I can't recall even ever having met one."
Often the teams point to their mascots as a tribute to the ethnic group in question. For instance, many towns say that Native American mascots, like Sachems or Chiefs, are meant to honor a town's history and the early cooperation between Native Americans and settlers prior to all the genocide.
And the aforementioned Fighting Hebrews of Muntsfield say they are paying respects to the Jews who loaned the early settlers the money to found the town, before their shops were burned and they were driven from the area, according to Fred Davis, president of the Fighting Hebrew Boosters Association. Davis also noted that the potentially more controversial name of the Fighting Christ Killers was rejected by the school board by a vote of 4-3.
But that argument doesn't fly with everyone. Peter Schaffer, director of the National Anti-Mascot Coalition, pointed to a declaration made by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in 2001 that the elimination of such nicknames and images as sports mascots would benefit all Americans by getting rid of racial stereotypes.
"I'm fairly confident that eliminating these team names would completely eradicate racial insensitivity in this country," said Schaffer. "Except, you know, for Mel Gibson."
Schaffer has quite a fight ahead of him, though, based on the resistance of teams who in some cases have held these names for close to a century without a complaint. Dick Reynolds and Martin Cronk, coaches of neighboring football teams in Iowa called the Dangerous Spics and the Drunken Sambos, respectively, say they didn't even know their mascot names had racial overtones.
"We just thought they were catchy," said Cronk, whose Sambos went 9-1 last season, losing their final game to the Merchant, Iowa Chinamen. "The running joke is that when the Chinamen beat you, they want to play again in an hour," said Cronk with a laugh.
"Wait - was that insensitive?" he added.
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From: Travis <twmccoy@gmail.com>
Date: Fri, Mar 16, 2012 at 8:21 AM
Subject: Mascot Battle Angers Raiders, Hebrews, Spics
To: Travis McCoy <baconlard@gmail.com>
Mascot Battle Angers Raiders, Hebrews, Spics
If the NIAA gets its way, mascots like the Jobe Township Towelheads could become a thing of the past.
NEW YORK (CAP) - A call by the National Interscholastic Athletic Association for high school teams to abandon mascots based on a racial or ethnic group has met with resistance from teams as far removed from each other as the Dracester, Mass. Chieftans, the Craigsville, N.D. Red Raiders and the Muntsfield, Ala. Fighting Hebrews.
"I don't think there is anything about our nickname that is derogatory or insulting to African Americans," said Alan Manderville, superintendent of schools for Redmond, Md., whose sports teams are called the Savage Africans. "Having said that, I'm not an African American and I can't speak for how they feel. In fact, I can't recall even ever having met one."
Often the teams point to their mascots as a tribute to the ethnic group in question. For instance, many towns say that Native American mascots, like Sachems or Chiefs, are meant to honor a town's history and the early cooperation between Native Americans and settlers prior to all the genocide.
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And the aforementioned Fighting Hebrews of Muntsfield say they are paying respects to the Jews who loaned the early settlers the money to found the town, before their shops were burned and they were driven from the area, according to Fred Davis, president of the Fighting Hebrew Boosters Association. Davis also noted that the potentially more controversial name of the Fighting Christ Killers was rejected by the school board by a vote of 4-3.
But that argument doesn't fly with everyone. Peter Schaffer, director of the National Anti-Mascot Coalition, pointed to a declaration made by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in 2001 that the elimination of such nicknames and images as sports mascots would benefit all Americans by getting rid of racial stereotypes.
"I'm fairly confident that eliminating these team names would completely eradicate racial insensitivity in this country," said Schaffer. "Except, you know, for Mel Gibson."
Schaffer has quite a fight ahead of him, though, based on the resistance of teams who in some cases have held these names for close to a century without a complaint. Dick Reynolds and Martin Cronk, coaches of neighboring football teams in Iowa called the Dangerous Spics and the Drunken Sambos, respectively, say they didn't even know their mascot names had racial overtones.
"We just thought they were catchy," said Cronk, whose Sambos went 9-1 last season, losing their final game to the Merchant, Iowa Chinamen. "The running joke is that when the Chinamen beat you, they want to play again in an hour," said Cronk with a laugh.
"Wait - was that insensitive?" he added.
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Seems that the President is taking all the credit and not even mentioning Seal Team #6 in his new movie about himself and how great he is and has been. Really pathetic!
http://weaselzippers.us/2012/03/12/dear-leader-propaganda-movie-glorifies-obama-over-bin-laden-killing-no-mention-of-navy-seals/
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