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.
The first blacks brought to Jamestown were enslaved. The people of Jamestown bought their freedom and set them free. My white ancestors on my Mother’s side were indentured servants. Where’s my payback?
As an Iowan, I would like to apologize to the rest of the country for Tom Harken. (Seeing as apologies are all the rage now, might as well apologize for a current, legitimate offense.)
http://newsone.blackplanet.com/nation/senate-passes-apology-for-slavery-and-segregation/
Go to this site and read the comments. When I was there earlier it was 31 pages of foul language whining and gloating with a few voices of reason among them. Some of them think every black person should get 1.5 million dollars. Some think nothing can ever repay what they are owed. One man wanted a white woman as a slave with the right to chop off her feet without consequence and it still would not be enough.
As for the fact that they were sold by other Africans you should read the justification for that. They believe that the other tribes sold them to help them get to a better life in the New World. They said the sellers never thought the sold would be mistreated.
Harkin was my congressman and senator for years, too, as I grew up in Iowa. We called him "Tommy the Commie". The fact that he and Grassley are elected by the same people proves that most of the public can't handle the intellectual challenge of voting.
“If we’re taxed or otherwise charged one thin dime for this, I expect to see another Civil War that will make the last one look like a Junior High production of Gone With The Wind.”
Yes.
However, the time may have already come. ACORN comes to mind. So does everything else the dems and Obama have been doing by stealing our children’s and grandchildren’s future.
The embarrassing fact of history, is that the Europeans did not have to use any force to obtain these slaves. The slaves were "sold" by their black owners. There was no need for the slave raiders to risk their lives or venture into the jungles of Africa, they simply purchased the people from African chiefs and Muslim slave traders at the coast.
I think that a reparations bill should be passed by Congress. The key provision of the bill should be this: the sum of $10,000,000 will be paid to each currently living slave for the forced labor he or she did during his or her lifetime. That seems fair.
The comments on that story are downright scary.
“GIMME MINE! I’S SUFFERED” (obviously not a single person on that thread has ever been a slave or even KNEW a slave).
I think we should just finish the earlier attempt and give every black person an option for a one way trip to Liberia. That is more than we owe them, but it might make up for their self-inflicted injuries.
I believed during the campaign that, if he needed it, he would create an ugly racial incident to inflame sympathies for his candidacy. He did not need to play this card at that time, since McCain was such a feeble opponent. But Obama still holds the race card close to the vest, and will use it when and if he needs it, even though it will probably mean innocent people will die.
To extract "reparations" would be worth the deaths of innocents to him.
How many more times are we going to apologize for slavery?
I waded through 31 pages earlier this evening. What is is up to now? I don’t want to go back I already had my evening shower.
Some of them are very scary and some of them are just plain ignorant like the lady telling them how wonderful it was in Africa and how they had been misinformed about the disease and poverty.
All of my ancestors arrived well after slavery was abolished. Just sayin’.
I forgot to mention the ones who said they were oppressed and enslaved because they are still 3/5 a person since the 3/5 compromise had never been repealed.
Some of mine were Quakers and helped slaves escape.
...jes’ sayin’...
It is really bad — these people don’t even admit they crapped in their own nest but they want others to pay for the cleanup.
Still 31 pages and as you said, foul and self-serving.
I’ll buy you a cattle prod if you’ll poke obama about that.
:-)
After I learn to spell! LOL!
Well we can say pretty much for sure that Ron Paul will be one of the few votes against this. Odds are that he’ll provide the only vote.
nah...we overlook some stuff when the message is good enough.
;-)
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