Tag: reparations

San Francisco reparations panel pitches $5M — each — to black residents

A San Francisco panel studying reparations has proposed a one-time payment of $5 million to each black resident of the city deemed eligible as recompense for the “decades of harm they have experienced,” according to a report on Monday.

“A lump sum payment would compensate the affected population … and will redress the economic and opportunity losses that​ ​Black San Franciscans have endured, collectively, as the result of both intentional decisions and​ ​unintended harms perpetuated by City policy​,” the San Francisco African American Reparations Advisory Committee said in a draft report issued last month, Fox News Digital reported. ​

The proposal could cost the city, which has a 2022-2023 budget of $14 billion, roughly $50 billion, the Daily Mail reported.

The committee also proposed wiping out all debts associated with educational, personal, credit card and payday loans for black households.

The 15-member pan​el was established by San Francisco supervisors in May 2021. A separate task force created by California’s legislature is also studying reparations.

The city group’s report says: “Reparation​ ​must be adequate, effective, prompt, and should be proportional to the gravity of the violations and the harm suffered.​”​

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St. Louis mayor plans reparations committee for black residents

St. Louis Mayor Tishaura O. Jones signed an executive order to establish a volunteer panel that will determine the degree to which black residents of St. Louis have suffered from racism. The stated goal of the committee is to explore the history of “race-based harms” in St. Louis and reveal the “present-day manifestations” created by said history.

As the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports, Jones came to the conclusion that the panel was needed after a “growing tapestry of equity-based analyses” shed light on the city’s history of violence, segregation, and exploitation that she says has left it as one of the most divided cities in the country.

“I look forward to reviewing this commission’s work to chart a course that restores the vitality of Black communities in our city after decades of disinvestment,” the mayor remarked in a statement. “We cannot succeed as a city if one half is allowed to fail,” she declared.

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California Reparations Committee Recommends $223K Each for State’s ‘Black’ or ‘African American’ Residents

A California committee formed to determine how much in reparations black people should receive due to slavery and past discrimination has determined that each of the 2.5 million California residents who identify as “Black” or “African American” should be paid $223,000 each for “housing discrimination.”

The total cost of reparations just for housing — there are four other causes for reparations the committee will consider — would be more than $569 billion. That’s $40 billion more than the entire state budget.

The committee has also recognized mass incarceration, unjust property seizures, devaluation of Black businesses, and healthcare as other causes for reparations.

The committee was created in 2020 after the Democratic legislature authorized its formation. It has until June 2023 to submit its recommendations.

“We are looking at reparations on a scale that is the largest since Reconstruction,” Jovan Scott Lewis, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and a member of the task force, told the New York Times.

Californians eligible for reparations, the task force decided in March, would be descendants of enslaved African Americans or of a “free Black person living in the United States prior to the end of the 19th century.” Nearly 6.5 percent of California residents, roughly 2.5 million, identify as Black or African American. The panel is now considering how reparations should be distributed — some favor tuition and housing grants while others want direct cash payments.

That’s the stickiest issue of all. Who is eligible and how do you prove it?  How much “black blood” will you need to claim any of the cash? These issues are impossible to adjudicate fairly, but no one on the commission is concerned about “fairness” It’s a punitive form of “justice” and needs to be stopped in its tracks before it gets started.

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‘We’re not going to move on’: Hakeem Jeffries cosponsors slavery reparations bill

Democratic Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, the potential House Democratic leader who has been endorsed by outgoing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, is a cosponsor of the slavery reparations study legislation currently pending in the House.

Formally titled the Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act, H.R. 40 passed out of the House Judiciary Committee in April 2021, but it has not been put up for a full House vote.

The bill would establish a 13-member commission to “examine slavery and discrimination in the colonies and the United States from 1619 to the present and recommend appropriate remedies.” The United States declared its independence from Great Britain in 1776.

“Year after year, decade after decade, century after century, we’ve come a long way,” Jeffries said during a Brookings Institution discussion addressing “structural racism” in U.S. public policy institutions in February 2020. “But, you know, some notion of truth and reconciliation, how do we move forward toward a more perfect union, I think has got to be part of any conversation connected to H.R. 40.”

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Biden agrees to pay climate REPARATIONS: US will pay up to $1BN to compensate developing countries for global warming – but gas-guzzling China WON’T have to pay into global fund

Joe Biden says the US will sign-up to a UN-backed fund to pay reparations to developing countries worst-affected by climate change.  

The creation of the fund was announced Saturday. It was negotiated at the United Nations‘ COP27 Summit in Egypt, was originally known as a ‘loss and damage’ fund and had been blocked by previous American administrations. 

The nations who’ll benefit from the funds are largely from Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean and the South Pacific. They say they’re set to be worst-affected by rising sea levels and other weather extremes blamed on carbon emissions created by wealthier countries. 

Last year, Biden was granted $1 billion to help developing countries tackle climate change, although it’s unclear if that cash will go into this fund. 

The president also faces having his plans stymied by the GOP-majority house, which would have to approve any funding mooted by the White House.

There will be wrangles with fellow UN members over who pays what – which could well mean nothing gets done until after the next presidential election in 2024. 

And if a Republican like GOP golden boy Ron DeSantis ends up winning the presidency, the fund could face being scrapped again. 

Donald Trump famously pulled the US out of the 2015 UN Paris Accord on climate change, saying it represented a bad deal for America – with DeSantis known to share many of the 45th president’s views. 

China – the world’s biggest polluter – wouldn’t have to contribute to any global fund, because it is still considered a developing nation, despite its vast wealth. 

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Sitting Congresswoman Claims That Reparations Could Have Slowed The Spread Of COVID

Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) claimed that if reparations for slavery had been implemented, that might have helped to contain the spread of COVID during the recent global pandemic.

Jackson Lee took to the House floor on Thursday to rally support for H.R. 40, a bill that would establish a congressional commission to study the potential cost and impact of reparations.

Noting that COVID infection rates among minority communities had initially appeared to be greater than among white Americans or the population at large, Jackson Lee cited a Harvard Medical School study that said living conditions — and work environments in the African American community were more conducive to the virus’ rapid spread.

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California panel set to release report calling for ‘comprehensive reparations’ to Black Americans

A California task force on reparations  – the first of its kind in the nation – is set to release a report on Wednesday outlining several ways to address what it believes to be wrongs committed by the state against Black Americans.

The report calls for expanded voter registration, policies to hold police more accountable in cases of alleged brutality, and recommends the creation of a special office that would, in part, help Black Americans who descended from free or enslaved Black people in the country at the end of the 19th century document their eligibility for financial restitution.

The report, which runs 500 pages, will be the first government-commissioned study on harms against the African American community since the 1968 Kerner Commission report ordered by President Lyndon Johnson, task force Chair Kamilah Moore said.

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Slave descendants question Georgetown’s $1 billion reparations fund

A year after the Jesuit university announced the reparation fund, descendants of slaves owned by Georgetown have questions

Descendants of slaves owned by the Jesuit religious order and Georgetown University have questions about where the money raised for reparations has gone.

The Catholic university first announced in April 2021 the plans to raise $1 billion to make reparations, though not individual payments, to atone for the Jesuits’ past ownership and sale of slaves. The Jesuits had a goal to raise $100 million in the short-term, according to the initial announcement.

A year later, the descendants of some of the 272 slaves want to know how the money has been spent.

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Reparations Panel in California, a Free State, Votes 5-4 to Limit Benefits to Descendants of Slaves

A state panel considering reparations for slavery in California, which entered the Union in 1850 as a free state, voted 5-4 on Tuesday to limit benefits to those who could actually show they were descended from slaves, not all who happen to be black.

As Breitbart News began reporting in 2020, Democrats in California passed legislation at the height of the Black Lives Matter riots to create a commission to consider the issue of reparations, even though the state was a free state at its birth:

Despite California’s free history, the reparations task force is assigned the mission of evaluating the history and impact of slavery on the United States as a whole.

The goal, as with many California policies, is to be a model for liberal policies elsewhere — or, as Newsom said, according to The Hill, to be “a paradigm that we hope will be resonant all across the United States.”

The nine-member panel, which did not appear to have any white or Hispanic members, launched last year, amid statements about the importance of slavery to the U.S. as a whole, and the anniversary of deadly race riots in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921.

However, the panel could not agree for months on whether the proposed reparations for slavery should only include those who descended from black slaves, or those who could be construed broadly as victims of so-called “systemic racism.”

Finally, the panel decided to focus on descendants of slaves, for pragmatic reasons, the San Francisco Chronicle reported:

While the panel has have much work left to do, it is sharply divided after an emotional fight over the eligibility rules. The task force was split between two factions that are miles apart in their interpretation of whether reparations should be distributed using a lineage or race-based test.

…

[Chair Kamilah] Moore said while it might be hard for some to document their ancestry, a race-based standard would be far more challenging because it would require the state to define Blackness when a person’s racial identify can be subjective and could enable a host of false claims based on physical attributes like skin color.

…

Moore also evoked the stance of Secretary of State Shirley Weber, a former legislator who wrote the bill to create the task force. Weber previously implored members to keep their initial focus on reparations for people descended from slavery, so the effort doesn’t become so broad that nothing gets done. She has said people whose families came later did so willingly and without the economic burden of generations of unpaid labor.

The reparations would apply to all descendants of slaves in the U.S., not merely those who made their way to California.

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