I agree with BJ completely. I don’t favor reparations, I just find the hostility some feel to the idea disturbing. I think it is too late for reparations to do any good, but if they do happen it’s no skin off my ass.
When a candidate who ran as a segregationist is still in congress it is rediculous to claim that discrimination is a thing of the past, and in my experience the ones who are the quickest to claim that they’ve “done their part” are the very ones who have fought tooth and nail every step of the way.
[bad analogy]
When someone started the race 30 yards behind with weights tied around their legs, you don’t get to cop a self righteous attitude when they point out that it isn’t fair.
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Olentzero, I usually respect your opinion. But this just shows such a lack of understanding of the marketplace that I have to wonder how deeply you actually understand the way the relationship between investors and business functions.
I’ve been watching the rally on CNN, and I must say that a few of the speakers scare me as much as those who are up in arms complaining about the very idea of reparations.
My biggest reason for opposing reparations is that anything done now will be a day late and a dollar short. Nothing that can be done now would be adequate justice.
What I mean by justice is a fair chance to succeed or fail on your own measure, not because of your ancestors. This is the goal, it may never be achieved but if reparations had been made within a reasonable time from the civil war I’m sure we would be a lot further along than we are now.
As others, smarter and more eloquent than myself, have pointed out much of the racism in this country can be traced directly back to slavery. I sure as hell don’t have the answers, but at least I’m not pretending there isn’t a problem.
This is of course referring to federal reparations, as far as corporate reparations from companies that insured slaves goes I am all in favor of it. A corporate entity can’t die, the corporation today is the same as the corporation that profitted from evil.
Well, it’s good to know that it isn’t just about race. That sure makes me feel better.
So how do you feel about Mr. Barron’s remarks, Olentzero? He just wants to beat up a random white guy, just to make himself feel better. After all, he suffers so badly from the legacy of slavery that he’s on the city council of the largest city in the United States. A city of 10 million people, many of them white, and he just wants to commit assault on them.
Now that’s a cause I’d sure be proud to support, yessir.
I look around me at the entertainment industry and at professional sports and see plenty of black individuals who have suceeded on their own merits and who earn more in a year than I have in a life time—it is easy to cite athletes and entertainers because they get the headlines. On a less publicised plane, my next door neighbor is a black man with two engineering degrees and a very responsible position with a major defense contractor. Two doors down from him is a black couple, one of whom is a retired teacher while the other is principal of one of our local schools. While my town house complex is not a particularly up-scale place, it is not a lower income place, either. It would seem that those individuals were not restricted in their ability to earn good incomes. For what it is worth, I don’t believe that I have ever, personally, harmed a black person in any way and I am at a loss to understand what I have to apologize for and why I should fund any sort of reparations. It strikes me, frankly, as a case of enough people making enough noise that they might finally be paid something in order to shut them up----and that’s my opinion.
I would want to know, if I were paying out the money, would the payment of reparation satisfy all the blacks in America? If not, what would? Maybe we should shelve the idea of reparations while we make a list of everything that would be required to even the score. Once that is done, we can turn our attention to righting all the wrongs done to anyone, anywhere and at any time so that we may all live happily ever after.
Reason number 605 why reparations will never come to pass: a lot of the most fervent supporters are crackpots.
To borrow a line from George Will (not one of my favorite people but when he’s right, he’s right), politics is the art of the possible. Perfect justice isn’t achievable and the pursuit of perfect justice takes away time and energy from more practical measures that can actually improve people’s lives.
Black residents of NYC face real problems that officials like Barron should be addressing. Education, police brutality, housing discrimination, unsafe streets, etc.
Barron shouln’t have time to make speeches about slapping white people.
channeling Pogo* we has met de enemy, and he is us
I’ll have to admit that this whole issue had me rather upset. The idea that our entitlement society could breed this concept is just distrubing to me, I suppose. Then yesterday morning on “Fox Friends” an AM cable FOX talk show one of the marchers was describing how racis America is and listed breast cancer as an example. Well to be honest, if American breast cancer is a bigot, then I feel a little better about myself. I mean even if I am a racist (which I suppose I must be if I’m not black and I’m living in the U.S.) at least I don’t kill black people like breast cancer does, that racist bastard.
Seriously, I’d agree with Belowjob on the crackpot thing. If I was a pro-reparations activist I would round up every microphone in the vicinity of the rally and screen every person being interviewed for stupid remarks before letting one mic out of mr control. BTW, the sun is a real fucking racist as more white Americans are sunburnt every year than black Americans. Fuck the racist sun!
It was also legal for German companies to use Jewish slave labor and it was also legal for the government to inter Japanese Americans during WWII. Both of these groups got apologies and reparations.
As a person of african descent, I can’t for the life of me, figure out why anyone would want to damage their sking by laying in the sun for hours. I know white people that don’t even use sun block, and go happily skipping around in the sun.
If ANYONE wants reparations, let them start with suing (in international court) the fine folk that sold them into slavery… their greedy little village jackass they knew as their tribal “chief”.
Geez. At least get your history straight. There are a lot of good reasons for opposing reparations that have nothing to do with butchering history.
It would not have been the chieftan of the enslaved people’s group who would have sold them. (I’m sure an occasional rival or mouthy brother-in-law got shipped out, but that was not the norm.) The chieftan who would have sold them would have been from a totally different group who engaged in slave-taking in response to bribes and threats from the Europeans and Americans who came down the coast looking for human cargo. That hardly makes it all right, but it is a rather different scenario than claiming that the trans-Atlantic slave trade simply took advantage of an ongoing African practice. It did not and attempts to rationalize the evil away by noting that some Africans participated does not change the fact that it was initiated and enlarged by the Europeans and Arabs beyond anything Africa had ever experienced.
The Japaneese internment camps have hence been deemed illegal and therefore you have reparations. Not to mention the fact that moneys were given to actual survivors within their lifetimes and which covered veryfiable loss of property and liberty.
As for the Germans: ruled illegal by international court at Neurenburg and not protected bu U.S. constitution. Same thing with American and British POWs’ used by Japanese companies in WW II.
A question: Are the Reverend Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton in on this scam? If so, shouldn’t they have to return all the money they’ve extorted over the years (if reparations are paid)?
Also, most of these people don’t knoow who their fathers were, let alone being able to prove descent from slaves.
Well, as I understand it, there is gross profit and net profit, the latter being the amount of profit taken in after all expenses are accounted for - including dividends. So is it not possible to take reparations from the net profits? True, the amount of net profit for further investment will be smaller, thus affecting dividends next quarter or so, but when faced with the choice of making steps toward social justice and what’s good for the market (which more often than not seem to be diametrically opposed), I unhesitatingly choose the former.
phil, I think since I’ve made it pretty clear that I firmly believe the effort around reparations for slavery needs to involve whites, Blacks, and Latinos, the question of where I stand on such comments as Mr. Barron’s ought to be quite self-evident. I mean, I certainly don’t think you support David Duke’s views on race simply because you may possibly agree on economic issues.