Posted on 06/21/2009 8:08:26 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Ashby Jones:
The Senate unanimously passed a resolution on Thursday apologizing for slavery, making way for a joint congressional resolution. Click here for the WaPo story. “You wonder why we didn’t do it 100 years ago,” Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), lead sponsor of the resolution, said after the vote. “It is important to have a collective response to a collective injustice.”
Memo to Senator Harkin: We had a collective response. It was called the Army of the Potomac. Not to mention the Emancipation Proclamation, the 13th Amendment, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and decades of affirmative action.
Jones continues: Randall Robinson, author of “The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks,” said he sees the Senate’s apology as a “confession” that should lead to a next step of reparations. “Much is owed, and it is very quantifiable,” he said. “It is owed as one would owe for any labor that one has not paid for, and until steps are taken in that direction we haven’t accomplished anything.”
Back in 2004, I wrote a column for TCS Daily that addressed the reparations issue: Descendants of African-American slaves are suing Lloyd's of London seeking reparations on grounds that Lloyd's insured ships used in the slave trade in the Eighteenth Century. Although a federal judge recently dismissed a class action seeking reparations for slavery from a number of US corporations, lawyer Edward Fagan who successfully pursued Swiss banks on behalf of Holocaust victims seems confident that he's got a strong argument:
"Why is it too far fetched to say blacks should be entitled to compensation for damages and genocide committed against them, when every other group in the world that has been victimized in this way has been?"
A fair question, but there is a big difference between reparations from corporations for the benefit of victims of the Holocaust or Japanese internment, to cite two commonly used examples, and the descendants of slavery.
Legal liability can be justified on a number of grounds, such as deterrence, compensation, and retributive justice. Requiring a corporation to pay reparations to victims of centuries or even decades old wrongs advances neither deterrence nor retributive justice.
Who do we punish when we force the corporation to pay reparations? Since the payment comes out of the corporation's treasury, it reduces the value of the residual claim on the corporation's assets and earnings. In other words, the shareholders pay, not the directors and officers who actually committed the alleged wrongdoing (who in most of these cases are long dead anyway).
As far as deterrence goes, the problem is that shareholders don't control corporations. Corporation law assigns the responsibility for making corporate policy to the board of directors and the firm's managers. Holding the shareholders liable for something that happened decades ago is unlikely to have much deterrent effect on the corporation's current directors and managers. Human nature being what it is, current managers likely believe that they won't commit the errors of their predecessors. On top of which, the prospect that shareholders will be held liable is far less likely to deter management misconduct than would the prospect that the managers who made the decisions would be held personally liable.
Retributive justice likewise is poorly-served by corporate-level liability. Retributive justice is legitimate only where the actor to be punished has committed acts to which moral blameworthiness can be assigned. Because the corporation's legal personhood is a mere legal fiction, however, a corporation is not a moral actor.
Edward, First Baron Thurlow, put it best: "Did you ever expect a corporation to have a conscience, when it has no soul to be damned, and nobody to be kicked?" The corporation is simply a nexus of contracts between factors of production. As such, there is no moral basis for applying retributive justice to a corporation -- there is nothing there to be punished.
Even if you assume the corporation is still benefiting from alleged wrongdoing that happened decades or even centuries ago, the modern shareholders are mere holders in due course. It is therefore difficult to see a moral basis punishing them. They have done nothing for which they are blameworthy.
In sum, both deterrence and retributive justice require that punishment be directed solely at those who actually commit wrongdoing. In this context, it would be the directors, officers, or controlling shareholders who actually enslaved people. Since they're long dead, there is nobody left who properly can be punished.
This leaves compensation. When compensation is the goal of a particular punishment, it is more appropriate to treat the corporation as though it were a real entity that can be punished through fines or tort liability. After all, the corporation likely will have far deeper pockets and thus far greater ability to compensate victims than either managers or shareholders.
As a matter of compensatory justice, however, reparations for slavery differ significantly from the Holocaust or Japanese internment. In the latter cases, there were living victims whose injuries could be redressed. In the case of African-American slavery, there are no living victims or even immediate descendants.
Courts have routinely held that descendants of slaves have suffered no legally cognizable injury for which they have standing to sue. In his decision in the African-American Slave Descendants Litigation case, for example, federal district court judge Charles Norgle rejected the plaintiffs' argument that they suffered continuing harms, in form of racial profiling, racial slurs, and shorter life expectancy, as result of the enslavement of their ancestors.
Slavery was a great injustice. Yet, there is no moral case for reparations. None of the principal legitimate purposes of punishment -- deterrence, compensation, or retributive justice -- would be served by requiring corporations to pay such reparations.
This shows the true liberal mentality: “It is all about me. It is not good enough that others before me have made amends - I have to do it myself in order for it to be valid and for me to, finally, feel good.”
It is a severe, debilitating foray into unreality. And these are the people running the country!
I want to sit back and watch this debate with some double green apple martinis.
The slave owners and slaves are all gone now. This is just another dumbass, DemocRAT exercise in bovive scatology by a bunch of morons and buffoons in Washington.
All this will do is promote more racial strife and create resentment against blacks. But then again, that’s what slimeball Democrats like Harkin want.
History note: BLACKS started Slavery — most slaves were NOT hunted as shows on “Roots” but were sold to Eurpoeans by their BLACK African slaveholders.
The ignorance of our legislators is astounding. The fact they ACT on that ignorance is frightening.
Because political correctness wasn't invented yet.
The worst thing you can do for a young black man or woman is to tell them that they are owed a check for something that happened long before they were born. Like everybody else, they need character development to succeed in life. Sewing a victim mentality is hardly the way to achieve that. Randall Robinson and other race hustlers are doing great harm to those they claim to be advocates for.
Not apologizing on my behalf.
I just want to know when Great Britain is going to apologize for the way my Scottish ancestors were treated, killed, and enslaved.
It is estimated that over 600,000 Americans died in the Civil War. That is one type of reparation. While I would agree that a formal apology via Congress would have been appropriate right after the Civil War ended, I would imagine that there was an effort to avoid stoking the embers so soon after the end of that war. Slavery is horrible, but you can’t go back and undo what happened then. Most Americans do not have relatives who were involved in slavery, or who were even in the US at that time. So it makes no sense to exact reparations from people who didn’t have anything to do with what the reparations are for. Also, what percentage of blacks actually have ancestors who were slaves in the US?
I trot these facts out every once and a while. This looks like another opportune moment:
From: "The Historical Atlas of The United States" published by the National Geographic Society in 1988: Total number of African slaves brought to Colonial America (U.S.) was 399,000. (Page 40 under "African Immigration in Chains") This total figure of imported slaves grew to a maximum population of 2,000,000 and peaked in 1830
Imported to Spanish America...(Cuba, Mexico, Central and South America)...1,552,100. No estimates as to what this population topped out at.....or when
Imported to British Caribbean...(Virgin Islands, Bahamas, Jamaica and Honduras)...1,665,000. No final estimate of peak population
Imported to Danish Caribbean...(Leeward Islands)...28,000. No estimate.
Imported to French Caribbean...(Suriname and Guyana and Haiti)...1,600,000. No estimate.
Imported to Dutch Caribbean...(Aruba and Leeward Islands)...500,000. No estimate.
And finally...Brazil imported a total 3,646,800 African slaves into their country. There is no final estimate as to what the total population reached or when it occurred.
About 6% of the Africans brought to the New World as slaves ended up in what would be the United States of America. Slavery was also carried on in the Eastern Hemisphere by Africans themselves during this unfortunate period of history but when reminded of this terrible scourge we are, for some reason......only reminded of our own (U.S.) participation..Hopefully, this information will also dispel the notion that the economic success of this country was due to forced human bondage. I haven't seen the stats lately....but I don't recall Brazil ever being an economic dynamo....or Aruba... or....you get my meaning.
It seems an appropriate response to people who claimed they have been damaged by the slavery of their ancestors, is to return them to their original homeland at government expense.
Shsouldn’t Obama be the one apologizing to blacks-—it was his ancestors who sold Africans to slave traders!
I left many infringements of human rights off the list, and I apologize for those as well as apologize for leaving them off the list.
"You wonder why we didn’t do it 100 years ago," Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa)The blame squarely rests with Harkin's own party. Republicans passed America's first Civil Rights Act in 1875. Nearly a century later Democracts finally got on board with their version in 1964.
"Every man that wanted the privilege of whipping another man to make him work for nothing, and pay him with lashes on his naked back, was a Democrat. Every man that raised bloodhounds to pursue human beings was a Democrat. Every man that cursed Abraham Lincoln because he issued the Emancipation Proclamation was a Democrat." - Robert Ingersoll, 1876.Speaking of reparations, how much does America intend to pay the families of soldiers who fought and died to free slaves?
“The Senate unanimously passed a resolution on Thursday apologizing for slavery, making way for a joint congressional resolution. Click here for the WaPo story. “You wonder why we didn’t do it 100 years ago,” Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), lead sponsor of the resolution, said after the vote. “It is important to have a collective response to a collective injustice.””
Maybe Harkin wonders why “we” didn’t do it 100 years ago, but I know the answer. Democrats would never have approved an apology 100 years ago - DEMOCRATS WERE THE SLAVEHOLDERS! They would not have apologized in 1863, and not in 1963; they filibustered and opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 until the bitter end. Clowns, utter disgusting clowns, Byrd, Kennedy, Fwank, Peloser, Reid, and so on. Clowns.
Democrat??? It seems like it was unanimous.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.