What reparations really are about

by Don Surber

$100,000. Do I hear $250,000?

$250,000. Do I hear $500,000?

$500,000. Do I hear $1,000,000?

$5 MILLION!

Fox reported, “San Francisco reparations task force member touts tax on billionaires to get $5 million per black city resident.

“Reparations advocates argue that San Francisco’s government had ‘played a role in undermining black wealth and actively displacing the city’s black population.’”

The story said, “Reparations task force member Reverend Amos Brown told the New York Times, ‘Of all these billionaires in San Francisco, you could establish a reparations fund’ to pay millions to black residents.”

Does that list of tax-for-reparations billionaires list include Robert F. Smith, who founded private equity firm Vista Equity Partners in 2000? Jay-Z? Rihanna? Tyler Perry?

The Fox story continued, “California is one of multiple states negotiating over economic reparations for black Americans whose ancestors were victimized by the Atlantic slave trade and its legacy, despite the fact California was designated as a free state when it joined the Union in 1850.

“The New York Times observed that the premise of San Francisco’s call for reparations in particular focuses on ‘redevelopment in the 1960s and 1970s when the authorities declared entire blocks to be blighted and used eminent domain to purchase businesses and homes.’ A building designated as blighted usually means it unsafe, unsanitary or somehow endangers the welfare of the surrounding community.”

Left out of the story is that liberals pushed to destroy black neighborhoods in the name of urban renewal. That was the original reparations. The federal government would fix up black areas by demolishing all those old buildings and turning the land over to local governments to develop. Along the way, the government destroyed many a black-owned small business. Many a Democrat developer profited.

Scott Beyer wrote on July 6, 2020, “Many of America’s black urban neighborhoods are trouble spots, marked by crime, poverty and blight. Can this be blamed on failure within these communities to properly maintain their own spaces? Perhaps somewhat. But most of the blame lies elsewhere: many of these neighborhoods once thrived before city and state governments, using federal money, destroyed them.”

It took 55 years for liberals to admit that urban renewal helped destroy a budding black middle class. This summer, Biden will condemn the Tulsa riots which destroyed black businesses, but a race riot does not hold a candle to the federal government’s power of destruction.

Beyer said, “Unsurprisingly, the condemned neighborhoods were overwhelmingly African American, and to a lesser degree Hispanic and Asian. In city after city, highways that were built to appease white suburban commuters, and enabled through eminent domain and funds from the 1949 Housing Act and 1956 Interstate Highway Act, were shoved through these areas, causing surrounding blight and pollution. Among the black neighborhoods divided by highways were Treme in New Orleans, the Brooklyn area of Charlotte, and Overtown in Miami.”

Decades later, the federal government is destroying those highways in a lame attempt to restore the long abandoned neighborhoods.

(The government’s purpose in destroying those roads, however, is to control free movement. This is why Biden is mandating electric vehicles that you cannot re-charge during the rolling blackouts. Shutting down of power plants while forcing demand to increase results in turning Teslas into lawn ornaments, which is just as well because DOT is destroying highways leaving people no place to go.)

Democrat Congresswoman Cori Bush wants to extort $14 trillion for reparations. She was a nurse and pastor before she entered politics. In her third term in Congress, she now has a net worth of $5 million. I should have been a nurse.

That the congresswoman, Amos Brown and the New York Times use past liberalism to rationalize their new liberal idea is classic chutzpah. Their solution created a problem that they want to solve again.

Of course, liberals do not wish to solve any problem. Their goal is to destroy things and increase their power.

In the 1970s, liberals promoted affirmative action as a reparations. Colleges and employers would waive the 14th Amendment rights of equal opportunity to whites (and later to Asian-Americans) as a means of repairing the damage from past discrimination against black people. Never mind that college students in the 1970s were not even born in the 1930s, the white ones would pay the penalty.

40 years later, liberals have declared affirmative action a failure.

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