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In South Carolina, the governor has called for the Confederate flag to stop flying over the capitol. The governors of Virginia and North Carolina quickly declared that they would remove the flag from state license plates. Meanwhile, several of the country's top retailers -- including eBay and Amazon -- announced in quick succession that they would stop selling Confederate flag merchandise. Now MJ Lee reports at CNN that the debate over the Confederate flag is the most recent and vivid illustration of how changes in the business community can influence and pressure politics. "What you are seeing is a broad, acknowledgment across both the consumer, the political and the business community that that particular emblem is no longer part of something that should be a state-issued emblem," says GOP strategist Scott Jennings.
Walmart, Amazon, eBay and Sears announced within the span of one day that they would ban the sale of Confederate flag merchandise from their stores, saying they had no intention of offending customers. As Walmart CEO Doug McMillon put it, the decision was straightforward: "We want everybody to feel comfortable shopping at Walmart." Corporate and business leaders say that the abandoning the flag is a step towards inclusiveness for a region that has long struggled to shed negative images. "The business community -- they have a lot of say and power all over the country, whether it's on religion or ethnicity or LGBT issues," says Ralph Northam. "When you're running a business, you have to have the doors open and welcome diversity."
takyon: Alabama Governor Orders Removal Of Confederate Flags From Capitol
'Dukes of Hazzard' toy car General Lee loses its Confederate flag
Note: These moves are in response to the events in Charleston.
Original Submission
(Score: 2, Insightful) by jmorris on Thursday June 25 2015, @01:27AM
And you're just ignoring the fact that the Confederate States existed for political and economic reasons that had nothing to do with your precious little obsession with slavery.
As other have already pointed out, slavery WAS part of the problem. But not the important part, which is where they too fail.
The problem in a nutshell was that everybody understood at the time of the Declaration of Independence that slavery was utterly incompatible with the Revolutionary ideas they were putting down on paper like "All men are created equal...". At the same time they were practical men who realized that going whole hog and abolishing slavery would have meant no Revolution. So they punted and did it again with the Constitution. They allowed the existence of slavery without exactly mentioning it by name. (Oh and if I see another so called educated person here totally misunderstand the 3/5ths clause again I'm going to pimp slap them. It was an -ANTI SLAVERY- poison pill/compromise. Google it.)
So yes, slavery is America's "Original Sin" which was going to have to be dealt with eventually. And it was, importation of new slaves had a sunset clause built into the Constitution that was exercised. A slow effort to end the entire practice could have been mounted, especially as the whole business was becoming uneconomical. But no, Lincoln and the prototype SJWs of the day wouldn't hear of doing things the legal way. So they gave the South a classic Vader "I am altering the bargain, pray I do not change it further." whereupon the South took that about as well as Lando did. Simply ending slavery at that time would have been suicide so they fought like people who had nothing to lose... and against overwhelming numerical and industrial production superiority they darned near won their Independence; exactly like their forefathers had won theirs from Britain.
Any wonder their deeds still command respect? Heck, everybody and their dog knows Lee was the superior general vs anything the Union put forth and his army committed no wholesale war crimes... unlike a certain Union general who made a policy of attacking civilian populations. They behaved to the end as free men should in a no-win scenario, had we such men today we wouldn't be in nearly the trouble we find ourselves in.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday June 25 2015, @01:52AM
And, your view is the one that most closely matches my own.
At any time, congress could have passed a simple law, a compromise on slavery, which specified that any black person born in the US after some specific date was a FREE CITIZEN of the United States who could not be deprived of his liberty.
As evil as slavery was (still is in some parts of the world) it could have been addressed without violating state's rights, and without a war.
But, everyone had his own narrow minded self interests to attend to. No compromise, and no way forward possible, so we fought a vicious war instead.
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2015, @02:18AM
> And, your view is the one that most closely matches my own.
You didn't even have to post for everyone to know that. You are the clarence thomas to his antonin scalia.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Thursday June 25 2015, @07:17PM
But, unfortunately, he posted anyway. Thomas to his Scalia!! Ha! Do we have a mod for "Funniest"?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 28 2015, @06:30PM
Why would you give a Funny to a cryptofascist anonymous coward making a racist comment?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by jmorris on Thursday June 25 2015, @02:57AM
Not quite that easy but probably not much more complicated either.
Just passing a law saying nobody is born a slave would have a huge unintended consequence that everybody at the time would have seen and it would have scuttled the idea. Slaves were both an asset and a responsibility, owners had obligations both legal and practical. They couldn't just kill them or otherwise obviously mistreat them; if the law didn't catch you the slaves would still know and good luck getting productivity out of the truly hopeless. The obligation of interest here is care in old age, you couldn't just shoot em when they got too old to work you know. An owner was obligated to care for them until they died, which usually wasn't a problem since at any time you would always have a few elderly, some children, etc. who weren't currently productive but it all evened out and seeing that the old were being cared for now meant a young working age slave would have reason to believe he would receive similar treatment. Cut off the supply in a single stroke and every idiot would know what would be happening a few decades out. They would all be manumitted when they grew old and left to fend for themselves with zero resources because the plantations would have no other viable option.
Btw, this is a very similar problem to trying to unwind any other pension system like the Social Security Ponzi scheme. Also note that Lincoln's Final Solution to the question of slavery likewise had the exact same problem, but this detail was of course totally ignored among the horrific pain and misery generally afflicting the conquered lands of the South. In the end, exactly like SJWs of today, they were lying; they cared not for the plight of the slaves but for the feelz of superiority they got from their political posturing. And the rush of -POWER-.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by linuxrocks123 on Thursday June 25 2015, @07:07AM
I think you're a little too generous to the Confederacy here, and a little too harsh on the North. Lincoln said the following after being elected in 1861, repeating an earlier speech: "I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so." Lincoln was no fan of slavery, but he never had any intention of actually abolishing it through federal coercion. Of course, during the Civil War, he just went for it because, well, why not?
The North's goal was containment. They wanted to make sure slavery didn't spread to new states, since the US was an expanding country at the time. The South saw this as an attempt to reduce their power in Congress, particularly the Senate. After Lincoln was elected, they decided to make their own country rather than see their influence in the US slowly decline as new free states were admitted.
The Civil War was a tragedy. It may have been avoidable, but sole blame can't be placed on any one individual, group, or region. See here for a Wikipedia-rabbit-hole starting point for the decades-long lead-up to the Civil War: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Triumvirate [wikipedia.org]
Had we had great statesmen like that active in 1861, perhaps the South could have been convinced to accept slowly waning influence in exchange for some Constitutional guarantees about slavery -- like the last-ditch compromise effort of a proposed unamendable (!) Constitutional amendment that would have made slavery in the South completely outside the domain of federal jurisdiction. Had this happened, some hundreds of thousands of people would not have died.
Of course, had that happened, slavery would have stuck around for who knows how long. That's unfortunate, unless slavery would have died out on its own within a few decades. I do think that very well may have happened had cooler heads prevailed.
The South by 1861 had become radicalized extremists on the issue of slavery. Us-versus-them fights tend to do that to groups of people, and the South and North had been going at it in Congress for decades, about slavery and unrelated economic policy (tariff) issues a well. Radicalized extremists tend not to have any capacity for introspection. If the Civil War could have been avoided, and the South could have taken the North's concessions and both sides could have been convinced to stop fighting each other, over time it's likely the South, like all other advanced societies, would have realized on its own that slavery was wrong and abolished it. This would have become easier as time went on and the economic advantages of slavery decreased.
Instead, we had a war, which the South lost after much bloodshed. Savvy political maneuvering by Southern Democrats combined with a constitutional crisis in the presidential election of 1876 caused the end of Reconstruction in 1877, ending federal intervention in the South even though the South was still radicalized. Thus, we had the Jim Crow laws, the KKK terrorists, school segregation, etc., etc., etc. Unfortunate, for sure. Unavoidable? Maybe. Whatever the case, it's what happened, so now we have to live with it.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by TheRaven on Thursday June 25 2015, @09:02AM
Of course, during the Civil War, he just went for it because, well, why not?
He went for it because the British Empire was planning on entering the war on the side of the South (who were good trading partners and who would give Britain a chance to put the rebellious colonies in their place). If slavery had been a side issue in the war, then it would have been the North against Britain and the South, which would have been enough to decide matters quite solidly in favour of the south. Once the war was publicly about slavery, it became politically impossible for Parliament to intervene in favour of slavery.
It was a brilliant bit of politics, but the fact that it took 30 years after the end of the war to actually enforce the emancipation proclamation tells you how important the issue actually was to the north.
sudo mod me up