NABM to Boycott Sing OUt
porc...@aol.com
It is with a sad and heavy heart that I inform you that the members of
the National Association of Blind Musicians at its annual meeting this
past Saturday, June 6, voted to boycott Sing Out! magazine and its
advertisers and to also ask the general membership of both the
National Federation of the Blind and the American Council of the Blind
to join forces in the boycott. This is the first such boycott in the
history of NABM.
The boycott is in protest of the Mark Moss, Executive Director of Sing
Out!, refusal to agree to provide the content of Sing Out! magazine in
a format that blind and visually impaired readers can access with
their own computers, and egregious hostility to the needs and civil
rights of visually impaired Sing Out! members as expressed by Mr. Moss
in email correspondence.
This boycott is scheduled to begin on Sunday, June 21, 2009, with a 1
PM ET press conference and official notification to Sing Out
advertisers. This timing is to support a seperate legal action to be
taken by visually-impaired Sing Out! members. A civil rights
complaint has already been filed with the US Department of Justice.
The members of NABM cordually request the Support of Sing out Members
and urge them to ask Executive Dircotor Mark Moss to reconsider his
position and formally agree to make Sing out! available in a
accessible format.
Sincerely,
Greg Austin
National Executive Secretary
National Association of Blind Musicians
The National Association of Blind Musicians is non-profit organization
dedicated to making music education and educational materials
available to blind and visually impaired students.
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Twibil
>
> The National Association of Blind Musicians is non-profit organization
> to NABM's agenda. (And pretending that they own the moral
> high-ground, which apparently makes extortion okay.)
I fixed this for you.
And I'll be re-subscribing to "Sing Out!" later today.
Pope Pie (Sy Lehrman)
> and urge them to ask Executive Dircotor Mark Moss to reconsider his
> position and formally agree to make Sing out! available in a
> accessible format.
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Greg Austin
> National Executive Secretary
> National Association of Blind Musicians
>
years. Is it still run by communists the way it was when Silber ran it?
If not, why not?
What exactly do you want this shoe string operation to do?
Twibil
wrote:
>
> You mean Sing Out! is still being published?
It's online these days, like everything else.
> Is it still run by communists the way it was when Silber ran it?
> If not, why not?
You mean there still a few American Communists living free? I thought
as an endangered species they'd all been confined to a spacious
preserve in Montana, where they could recover until their numbers
reached a stable breeding population, whereupon they would be equipped
with ear tags, radio tracking collars, and would be released back into
the wild to prey upon unsuspecting inner-city welfare recipiants.
There's history link up here (^), so mayhap they'll tell you.
> What exactly do you want this shoe string operation to do?
There seems to be something about the words "not-for-profit" and "shoe-
string operation" that Ser Austin fails to understand.
He thinks the folks who run "Sing Out" should have to invest their
time and money in setting up the magazine so that it's easily
accessible to the blind, which might well be an admirable objective,
but is probably wildly impractical with a publication that just barely
scrapes by every month the way it is.
Where is that time and money going to come from? NABM? Not likely!
"Sing Out" has *always* been a skin-of-the-teeth operation, run by
people who believe in what they're doing, and the idea that someone
from the outside thinks he should have the right to come in and
dictate editorial and financial policy -and threaten them if they
don't snap to attention and obey orders- reeks of political
correctness taken to the logical extreme: "Here's what I want, but I
don't want to pay for it, and if you don't obey us we'll try to hurt
your income and punish *everyone* involved with "Sing Out": Staff and
readers both."
Re-volting.
Pope Pie (Sy Lehrman)
accommodations and it is usually good to apply what pressure you can. I
have been around this issue a time or two, not with the blind, but with
others, and you get in the habit of pushing for what you need just
because everyone always starts off telling you they can't do this or
that. They can't put a lift on the bus, they can't give you accessible
seating, they can't put in a curb cut and on and on. One runs the risk
of pushing too hard and at the wrong time.
I have no experience with sight issues so I haven no clear idea what
such a publisher could do. I would assume that there is little an on
line operation could do with browser based services, but I don't know.
I will have to look at the new Sing Out! and see what it has become. I
wonder is Silber is involved. The last I heard he was in Oakland and
not well but I don't have any information beyond that.