Posted on 12/30/2001 3:12:53 PM PST by mrustow
Article reports on the NAACP's newest race hoax/boycott/ extortion campaign against the hospitality industry. The target du jour: the Adam's Mark Hotel chain. Black guests from Black College Reunion weekends 1999 and 2000 conspired with the state and national NAACP, with the abettance of Florida AG Bob Butterworth and the federal Department of Justice, to launch extortionary lawsuits which Adam's Mark settled at a momentary cost of $5 million.
This should be interesting because the ones that I know running hotels locally are extremely prejudiced against blacks...and they do not hide it.
"A New Kind Of Slavery" by David Morgan of the Asheville, N. C. Tribune.
Just as for centuries slavery was an acceptable form of property in our nation, a new definition of ‘property’ is eating away at our country’s moral underpinnings. This new definition has thrown us into a war that is silently stripping away the very fabric of our nation’s soul.
It is a war much like the Great War between the States, and yet it crawls among us now in a new form while festering itself in a guise that beguiles discussion. Once again its precept hides itself under the Constitution and under the declaration of our Supreme Court to give it national validity. It, too, has been made a law of the land.
It is important that we remember that 150 years ago and before, under the protection of our Constitution and its Supreme Court, our entire nation was one gigantic prison from which fugitive slaves could not escape. This explains why the so-called ‘underground’ railroad ended up in Canada. Lincoln said in his first inaugural address that he would enforce the fugitive slave laws. The War Between the States never had its origins in slavery. Just as the Gulf War was justified for economic reasons, so was the War Between the States.
In early March of 1861, just before Lincoln took office, Congress passed the Morrill Tariff, the highest tariff in American history. The average tariff rate was about 47%. It was not a revenue tariff but was realistically a prohibitive tariff. On March 11 the Confederate Constitution was adopted, and a low tariff in Charleston was put into effect immediately, essentially creating a free trade zone in the South. Northern newspapers soon grasped the significance of these two tariffs. On March 18, 1861, the Philadelphia Press called for war saying: "Blockade Southern Ports. If not, a series of customs houses will be required on the vast inland border from the Atlantic to West Texas. Worse still, with no protective tariff, European goods will under-price northern goods in Southern markets. Cotton for Northern mills will be charged an export tax. This will cripple the clothing industries and make British mills prosper." Previously the Press had argued for a peaceful resolve to the secession crisis.
The economic editor of the New York Times reversed his conciliatory mood and declared on March 22, 1861, with a vengeance: "At once shut down every Southern port, destroy its commerce and bring utter ruin to the Confederate States." The Chicago Daily Times, on December 10, 1860, saw the pending disaster the free ports in the South would bring to northern commerce: "In one single blow our foreign commerce must be reduced to less than one-half what it now is. Our coastwise trade would pass into other hands. One-half of our shipping would lie idle at our wharves. We should lose our trade with the South, with all of its immense profits. Our manufactories would be in utter ruins. Let the South adopt the free-trade system, or that of a tariff for revenue, and these results would likely follow."
Then quite a startling development occurred in New York and Boston in late March, 1861 when over a hundred leading commercial importers informed the collector of customs that they would not pay duties on imported goods unless the same duties were also collected at ports in the South. This threat forced Lincoln and his administration to abandon his initial plan of turning over Fort Sumter to the Confederates. Only a month before these merchants had favored giving up the forts.
However, Lincoln had to protect northern commerce. Lincoln’s concern over secession was most obvious when he declared, "What then will become of my tariff?" A low Southern tariff and a free port were a highly dangerous serious threat to all northern commerce. Yet they were essential for Southern survival. And the North was facing an economic horror story that it would not accept. A free and independent South was an economic dagger ready to plunge into the heart of the North.
The issue plainly was taxes and tariffs, taxes and tariffs. To add some perspective, it should be noted that in the mid to late 1850’s, the South was funding probably 75 to 80% of all taxes. Because the South was an agricultural area, which grew and exported cotton and crops and then had to purchase finished goods, high tariffs were a real hardship on its economy. In 1860 total exports from the Southern states totaled $213 million and from the North approximately $47 million. The percentage of taxes paid by the South were approximately 87% of the total, and a majority of that was spent on northern economic interests. In addition the North held a monopoly on shipping from Southern ports, with the South paying the Northern shipping companies some $36 million in 1860. In effect the South was paying tribute to the North. Southern anger was growing.
Lincoln and the north were more than willing to let the South maintain its way of life as well as its institution of slavery as long as the South would continue to pay the tariffs and taxes. Lincoln had even gone so far as to support and sign the ‘original’ 13th Amendment that would have protected slavery forever, and which was unanimously approved as a resolution by Congress on July 23, 1861. This is the only proposed Constitutional amendment that was signed by a sitting President. To be exact, it said: "No amendment shall be made to the Constitution which will authorize or give Congress the power to abolish or interfere within any state with the domestic institutions thereof, including that a person’s held to labor or service by laws of said state."
Abraham Lincoln was saying to the people of the South that if they would accept this proposed 13th Amendment, and pay the tariffs and taxes, they could keep their slaves forever. The South had absolutely no reason to secede over the issue of slavery. Slavery for the South was secure as long as the South stayed with the North. The real problem was that the South wanted to control its own destiny and economic future, and not be forced to hand over millions in revenues to the North.
Slavery simply was not the cause of the War’s inception. It is only the sanitation brigade of the politically correct and the historical revisionists of the victors that have tried to make it appear that way. Moral justification for the deaths of some 600,000 men took precedence over the truth. It still does.
Besides, slavery was on its way out. Slavery had been around for thousands of years, going back to the Romans, the Greeks, and the Persians and before. No one color or race had a monopoly on slavery. But by the 1860’s, in a majority of the western world, slavery had been abolished. Had the South been able to go its own way, there is little doubt that slavery there would not have lasted very much longer there as well. It was no longer acceptable anywhere.
Slavery had always had its roots in property rights. The idea that another person could own another person was not one that shocked or offended people as it has come to do today. The concept did not have to do with race or color; it was a right of ownership and property, generally held by those in power. Even among the some 175,000 free blacks in America in 1830, approximately 4,000 of them owned some 12,600 other blacks. Over time and as democratic and republican forms of government expanded, the idea of slavery slowly became abhorrent to most nations, and they took steps to outlaw it. Basically, nations and people took steps to declare that no person could be considered to be "property," as each one had an equal "right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." In brief, "property" was redefined to meet rising political pressures that conformed to a new sharing of God’s moral principals.
In the past few decades, however, a new form of ‘property’ definition has once again begun to eat its way into the moral fiber of our country. The United States Supreme Court handed down a major decision known as Roe vs. Wade in January 1973, under the law of the US Constitution. That decision declared that a baby that was alive in its mother’s womb but was as of yet unborn, and which was referred to as a ‘fetus,’ was simply a piece of property. It was a piece of property just as the Supreme Court had once declared the slave to be a piece of property. In effect this as yet to be born person was in status equal to or less than the status that a slave had held. Generally speaking, owners of slaves felt some sort of moral obligation for them, and certainly did not treat them as human rubbish or as things that could be killed at will.
The Supreme Court ruled that the mother of the unborn baby had the ‘free-choice’ to either bring the baby to birth or to kill it, because this unborn baby was simply a piece of property that belonged to the mother.
Those who feel this is a correct position call themselves ‘pro-choice.’ They basically hold the same views as those who were ‘pro-slavery’ in the way that they define human existence. Human life is a "piece of property." It can be bought and sold. That definition, and particularly that definition confirmed by the Supreme Court, made everything proper.
But make no mistake. Pro-slavery or pro-choice – both take the same view of human life. It is a view that has once more set the stage for decades of anguish and human degradation. It too has its roots in economics. And, once again another barbarian prison has been judiciously erected, the escape from which will require massive leaps of moral fortitude.
Comment:
The last analogy is somewhat of a stretch for me. However, these activists of the Negro race continue on their merry way, collecting money from the uninitiated, rather like some preachers, and the NAACP's newest race hoax/boycott/ extortion campaign. Try as they might, the people don't want to stay on the plantations any longer. But "Play it Again Sam", you might get a few takers..............
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.