Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Bloomberg's No Labels Party Steals Logo

I guess Bloombergian bipartisanship means you get to steal stuff from others and call it your own?

The newly formed national political organization called No Labels should have perhaps followed the advice of its own name.

The group, which proposes “a new way of looking at politics” to get past partisan gridlock and which recruited Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and other luminaries to speak at its opening today, has also unveiled its Web site. It includes a grabby graphic of a menagerie of animals — giraffes, seals, dogs, butterflies, moose, hippopotami — that are blue on top and red on bottom like the standard Democrat donkey and Republican elephant.

If the graphic looks familiar, that’s because it bears a very, very striking resemblance to one that is at least five years old — and belongs to someone else. The older graphic was created by the designer Thomas Porostocky and included in a book compiled by the graphic artist Milton Glaser titled “The Design of Dissent.” Since 2008, Mr. Porostocky has been using it as the logo of his own political organization, More Party Animals, the mission of which is also to encourage the development of alternatives to Republican and Democrat.
A screen shot of the More Party Animals homepage.

Mr. Porostocky wrote in an e-mail this evening that he had not heard from No Labels and therefore did not want to “speculate on how or why they would do this.”

He added, “To be honest with you, I’m pretty surprised that something like this was even attempted considering their relatively high profile. It’s just an extremely lazy and careless way to launch your organization. There’s no need to rip people off when there are plenty out there who are willing to work with you legitimately.”

The No Labels party claims they did not steal the logo and came up with it independently from the More Party Animals organization.

Perhaps.

Or perhaps the corporate CEO's who are running the No Labels party are modeling themselves after Bill Gates, who always operates under the premise that what is somebody else's is actually his.

2 comments:

  1. He's from Wall Street: stealing comes naturally.

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  2. I looked up "hedge fund" in my Latin dictionary - turns out it means "criminal enterprise." Who knew?

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