With all due respect to Southern Americans,all Confederates were/are pardoned traitors. Reparations? - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#15105738
All Confederates were/are pardoned traitors.

If not officially pardoned, then functionally.

This means they should not be honored now.

There is no sense in which their cause was just. They said straight out that their cause was to keep slavery.
This is not a "just cause". "States Rights" is just a later excuse. Keeping slavery was their true reason for the war.

Now, in the 21st Cent. in the 3rd Millennium you-all need to grok that your ancestors were functionally pardoned. That the alternative was mass executions. That many nations have done just that after a civil war. So, be thankful you are alive because your ancestors were not executed.
. . . While being thankful, you need the grok that the fundamental FOUNDING principle of the United States *IS* "all men are created equal".

Therefore, you-all need to change your thinking. Black Americans are equal to White Americans, period.

On the issue of Reparations these are my thoughts.
1] Current White Americans are not to blame for slavery, no matter how hugely EVIL it was, period.
2] By 1865 (yes 1865) White Americans had paid a price in blood to end slavery. Their descendants should not be held to account now for slavery. The whites of the 1860s paid that debt with their blood.
3] Current White Americans are somewhat to blame for Jim Crow that did not officially end until about 1965 and for the lingering racial discrimination that still exists.
4] Therefore, current US Gov. should pay reparations to current Black Americans for Jim Crow, not for slavery.

Why? -- For example, economics Prof. Mark Blyth quotes a paper by the Boston Fed. Res. Bank that in Boston [now] the math average net worth of whites or White families in Boston is $247K, while the net worth of Black Boston families is $8 (yes $8.00). This is a huge difference [$8 X 30,875 = $247, so 31K times more]. It can be assumed to be totally (at least 90%, the other 10% the head start some whites got from wealth in 1865) the result of racism and Jim Crow for the last 155 years. [All my grandparents came over in about 1897 or so. People like me are descended from people who had nothing when they arrived. There a lot of whites like me include in the average white families above.]

White People --- do NOT be alarmed. When the US Gov. spends it doesn't spend tax dollars. Just like a bank making a loan, the US Gov. creates every dollar it spends. Therefore, there is no need to raise taxes on White people to pay the Reparations. The only things White people need to do are let it happen and deal with any small amount of inflation it causes. Inflation is the only possible negative effect on whites.
. . . [See my many posts about MMT in Credit and Debt, Economics and Capitalism, and Political Circus for how the Gov. spends, why the deficit is a good thing, and why the national "debt" is really the assets of the bond holders and this debt can never be paid off except with newly created dollars that don't come from taxpayers.]

Since I categorically reject the notion that all people should be selfish and do what is best for them and this will result in the best outcome for everyone, and believe instead in the fairness I learned from my mother, from my kindergarten teacher, and from my church; I can accept and even call for such Reparations in the name of "Fairness".
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#15105752
Steve_American wrote:4] Therefore, current US Gov. should pay reparations to current Black Americans for Jim Crow, not for slavery.

Why the US government? It was Southern state governments that implemented Jim Crow. Why should the rest of the country pay for what Democrats did in the South? Frankly, why should Republicans pay. We should be making the Democrats pay reparations.
#15105756
blackjack21 wrote:Why the US government? It was Southern state governments that implemented Jim Crow. Why should the rest of the country pay for what Democrats did in the South? Frankly, why should Republicans pay. We should be making the Democrats pay reparations.

I explained why in my post. You might need to read between the lines though.

1] None of the people alive today are to blame for slavery.
2] The people today are only partly to blame for Jim Crow. Only some of the people in the southern stares are to blame. It is not fair to make all the current people of the southern states pay when only some or most are to blame.
3] The states can't make the payment that states can't create the dollars to do it. The states can't use tax dollars because it would destroy their economies to do that.
4] Only the US Gov. can create the necessary dollars. The only way to do it is to create dollars. My back of an envelope calculation is the at $25,000 per Black American it would take about $1T to $1.3T to do it, and if it were to pay $50,000 then that would double the amount.

Creating the dollars and not gathering them with taxes makes the process far less painful in theory for White people. In practice, Taxing an additional $1.1 T from White people in 1 year would destroy the US economy making everyone suffer.

But, you need to grok MMT to understand it all.
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#15105764
The issue of reparations can no longer be swept under the counter.

The allied countries and the Soviet Union's successor states should pay reparations to Germans and Japanese, or their relatives if dead, illegally used as slave labour, or illegally imprisoned without due process after the cessation of hostilities with Germany and Japan.
#15105765
Rich wrote:The issue of reparations can no longer be swept under the counter.

The allied countries and the Soviet Union's successor states should pay reparations to Germans and Japanese, or their relatives if dead, illegally used as slave labour, or illegally imprisoned without due process after the cessation of hostilities with Germany and Japan.

If I understand you, you want someone to make Russia pay now for the sins of the USSR. Why should Russia pay for the sins of the USSR?
What "someone" do you think can do that? Making a nuclear power do something is pretty hard./snark

As for the Western Allies I'm not aware of the enslaving of Germans or Japanese after WWII by the Allies.

Nice try to derail my thread.
#15105784
Steve_American wrote:If I understand you, you want someone to make Russia pay now for the sins of the USSR. Why should Russia pay for the sins of the USSR?

Why have Germans been made to pay for the sins of Nazi Germany, the large majority of which had voted Social Democrat or Communist in 1932, were refugees form other countries that had not been citizens of Weimar Germany in 1932 or had been two young to vote in 1932?

Steve_American wrote:As for the Western Allies I'm not aware of the enslaving of Germans or Japanese after WWII by the Allies.

Well there's no excuse for your shameful ignorance of this fact.

Nice try to derail my thread.

Liberals sure hate their rank hypocrisy being exposed. More immediate still than even the illegal imprisonment and enslavement of Germans and Japanese after WWII is the torture and imprisonment of Khalid Sheik Mohammed. I'm still waiting for an explanation from American Liberals, why they are whining on about injustices over a century and a half ago, while ignoring the abominations of justice that their government is committing right now.
#15105962
I will insert in brackets some words to give you some context that the system here deletes.
Rich wrote:Why have Germans been made to pay for the sins of Nazi Germany [when the USSR & W. Allies have not been], the large majority of which had voted Social Democrat or Communist in 1932, were refugees form other countries that had not been citizens of Weimar Germany in 1932 or had been two young to vote in 1932?

I think it (the making them pay part) was because Germany lost the war and all the Allies won .

Well there's no excuse for your shameful ignorance of this fact [that Japanese were enslaved after WWII and Germans by the W. Allies].


This is not evidence of your supposed 'fact'.

Liberals sure hate their rank hypocrisy being exposed. More immediate still than even the illegal imprisonment and enslavement of Germans and Japanese after WWII is the torture and imprisonment of Khalid Sheik Mohammed. I'm still waiting for an explanation from American Liberals, why they are whining on about injustices over a century and a half ago, while ignoring the abominations of justice that their government is committing right now.

You apparently missed one of my key points. That being that I think Liberals and Black Americans should be crying more about Jim Crow than about something that ended 155 years ago. I agreed with you on that point. And I added that 19th cent. White Americans lost about 300,000 lives in the war ending slavery, not to menton lost arms and legs.
. . . That war was caused IMO by the growing attitude in the North that slavery was immoral. IMO, also, these changes in attitudes were the direct result of steam-riverboat traffic on the Ohio River, which exposed thousands of traveling Northerners to in your face direct observations of how slave women were raped behind closed doors (but the walls were very thin to save weight). Seeing and hearing just what slavery meant changed everything. Southerners could no longer
meaningfully claim that the slaves were well treated.
____________________________ ______________________________ ______

Where is everyone's outrage about the fact that women are still enslaved in America and EU nations as sex slaves? Where are the policies to free them? Why do the cops treat the victims like criminals and not the pimps aka owners? Never mind the rest of the world, we could at least end sex slavery in our own nations.
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#15106014
Steve_American wrote:This is not evidence of your supposed 'fact'.

Its not my job to educate Liberals with basic historical facts. We had our Sea Lioner in Chief in another thread demanding evidence that the Lakota were not the first occupiers of the Black Hills. Again a very basic historical fact.

You apparently missed one of my key points. That being that I think Liberals and Black Americans should be crying more about Jim Crow than about something that ended 155 years ago. .

American (United States citizens if you prefer) Liberals should be crying about the current enslavement, of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, without even the merest pretence of due process.
#15106025
Rich wrote:Its not my job to educate Liberals with basic historical facts. We had our Sea Lioner in Chief in another thread demanding evidence that the Lakota were not the first occupiers of the Black Hills. Again a very basic historical fact.

As a student of anthropology I can tell you that the Lakota were over 10,000 years to late to be the 1st people to live in the Black Hills.

Please get your facts right.

That claim is like saying that the Britons (who were Celts) were the 1st people to live in England. In this case over 100,000 to 200,000 years off.

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