>I like these ideas, albeit they do not go far enough - I would suggest
>creating a permanent federal employment program (e.g. public works) offering
>a living wage job (with required training if needed) to any unemployed or
>underemployed person and taxing private businesses to fund that program (if
>needed) - but why, for dog's sake, calling it "reparations"? This concept
>exemplifies what is precisely wrong with the left in this country - ranting
>about the past instead of offering constructive solutions for the future.
Not going far enough is putting in mildly. What struck me about President Bush's proposal is that it acknowledged, however unwittingly, the principle of reparations or restitution. Why call it that? Call it honeycakes for all I care. Call it 40 acres and a Subaru. Better yet call it "rise above the legacy of inequality" -- that's what your president called it. I merely referred to it as reparations to tie it in with a previously existing line of argument. The issue is not what to call it but whether the amounts and methods are at all commensurate with the task that needs to be accomplished. Behind the issue of how much funding is adequate is what justifies an expenditure of that magnitude, that's a property question not an abstract rights question.
The Sandwichman
From John Conyers website/ on The Commission to Study Reparations Proposals for African American Act:/
http://www.house.gov/conyers/news_reparations.htm
"It is a fact that slavery flourished in the United States and constituted an immoral and inhumane deprivation of African slaves' lives, liberty and cultural heritage. As a result, millions of African Americans today continue to suffer great injustices.
"But reparation is a national and a global issue, which should be addressed in America and in the world. It is not limited to Black Americans in the US but is an issue for the many countries and villages in Africa, which were pilfered, and the many countries, which participated in the institution of slavery.
"Another reason that this bill has garnered so much resistance is because many people want to leave slavery in the past - they contend that slavery happened so long ago that it is hurtful and divisive to bring it up now. It's too painful. But the concept of reparations is not a foreign idea to either the U.S. government or governments throughout the world.
"Though there is historical cognition for reparations and it is a term that is fairly well known in the international body politic, the question of reparations for African Americans remains unresolved. And so, just as we've discussed the Holocaust, and Japanese interment camps, and to some extent the devastation that the colonists inflicted upon the Indians, we must talk about slavery and its continued effects."