RSS
From The Independent, reporting on the first Barack Obama-Bruce Springsteen podcast:
“If you ask me theoretically, ‘Are reparations justified?,’ the answer is yes,” Obama replies. “There’s not much question. Right? That the wealth of this country, the power of this country, was built in significant part, not exclusively, maybe not the even majority of it, but a large portion of it was built on the backs of slaves.”
How much? More likely, almost none.
I’ve been asking for some time for examples of Southern dynastic wealth that survived the Civil War and Reconstruction, and have gotten very, very few responses.
Where did all the money go? Well, two famous quotes sum it up. From Abraham Lincoln:
If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”
And from Margaret Mitchell:
Gone with the Wind
I thought America’s wealth was built on electric power generation due to electromagnetic induction. Maybe we should pay reparations to the Tesla, Maxwell, and Edison descendants.
No it wasn’t. Next.
They literally teach White race-treason and “abolition” to school children.
So reparations is small stuff.
This poison pie chart assumes all whites desire to be around "people of color". No sane white person does.
every book rewritten,
every picture has been repainted,
every statue and street building has been renamed,
every date has been altered.
"And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped.
"Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right."
- You know who.
Yes. The typical statement of a midwit like Obama. . The “wealth” of a nation is mostly based on what living humans right now produce. Some of that wealth is produced using buildings and instruments built by people now dead. Very, very little of those existing instruments were built by slaves, or even by ancestors of slaves three times removed. To those who say what wealth I possess (what little of it) was derived from slavery, I say — prove it. I’m waiting…..
Rich blacks should pay reparations to the millions of white victims of black violence and criminality, and to the families of the myriads of whites who have been and will be murdered by black criminals.
I wonder if joebama will propose that folks like barak, whose one black parent was flown over to the US for grad school in Hawaii (and the 17 year old undergrads there) and then offered a spot at harvard deserve these reparations too?
I have met a few black Americans who have no American slave ancestors, but I didn’t ask them for their opinions on reparations.
Barry…How are things in your mansions in Martha’s Vineyard & Hawaii?
The War was absolutely horrible. Tremendous arrogance and incompetence on both sides to bring it on.
But Lincoln would nonetheless have been a great President … if he had found a way to return the slaves to Africa. That achieved the War would have been worth it.
In the timeline we live in we got the War and still struggle with race. Lose, lose.
The wealth of this nation was built on the backs of slaves. That’s why all of the factories are (were) in the North, why Silicon Valley is in the West, and why we need Mexican braceros to pick our crops and Indian H-1B’s to write our software.
Blacks are a net tax suck. They have been for most of our history, at least the last 155 years of it. Of course with the deficits the government has been running since 2008, technically virtually every citizen’s tax payments are less than what the government spends per capita. But with blacks that has always been the case. Add up all the extra money we spend on blacks on welfare payments and justice system costs and subtract it from the reparations they are supposedly entitled to and they would end up owing us.
Plus other social pathologies and general non-performance in civic functions adds to the deficit. This call for reparations is just another frank admission that they are a grifter class with mild interest in participating in civil society, a society that includes suffering the slings and arrows of past and present misfortunes while still keeping enough good will to maintain a civil polity.
Recently I’ve been reading a novel called the Store, which takes place in the 1880s and concerns a scion of a formerly wealthy slaveholding family, ruined by war and Reconstruction. Through crime the main character regains a fortune and uses the profit to try and recapture a funhouse mirror version of his old grandeur.
As you may be able to gather from the title, economic standing was achieved and maintained in this changed South through owning and operating a store. Profit from which led to speculation in land and tenant farming. A completely different sort of living than that made by the old planter class. Even if it also involved exploiting blacks and poor whites.
The world of the Plantation ain’t the world of the Store. Anyone without the brain of an Obama can see that.
Keep it American and just give it to the estate of Ben Franklin.
If blacks are such great wealth creators, then Africa is about to become the global economic powerhouse. And it’s never really abolished slavery, so it has an advantage over the US.
Obama in his cheap demagogue mode here. During our slavery era everyone was worked to the bone on farms and in what were called Satanic mills and factories. These mills were very dusty with poor to non-existent ventilation. The only exceptions were the wealthy and a small middle class. My guess is most slaves were eating better, more wholesomely, than the poor in our cities and mill workers. Eating lots of collards and inferior pig parts, corn bread, is a decent diet. The pig parts were fatty but your worked this off on the plantations.
The instructor just smiled, and said “ so it didn’t occur to any of you that this incident, as described, is ludicrous and that Douglass made it up for propaganda purposes?” I liked that guy a lot.Oh, and Ken Burns, who in every one of his documentaries gets to a point where the message is “Woe, the poor Negroes,” lives in the whitest town in the whitest county in the whitest state in the whitest region of the country.Replies: @MBlanc46
Not that I would care to have been a chattel in the American South; I don't think any of the commenters here would have found it agreeable. Count me out of the "wasn't really so bad" apologias.
I'd be partial to "reparations," except for the small matter that there's no possible common ground between what I'd offer and what the dominant elites and their PoC auxiliaries would accept. E.g. payments only to Descendants of American Slaves who can prove their ancestry. And e.g. once payment is made, debt is discharged. Obviously, these terms would fracture the Coalition of the Fringes, thus entirely unacceptable. Obviously. So forget it.Replies: @JMcG, @anon
To reparations:
For once could we have the Republicans–heck, i’m not even asking for ten, i’m willing to settle for *one* good man in Sodom–stand up for Americans, stand up for their people.
The key point: reparations only with repatriation.
You renounce citizenship and return to Africa (only Africa) … here’s $100,000 for you ancestors labor.
The plain fact is the big beneficiaries of American slavery now … are current black Americans.
You want to bitch about your ancestors enslavement–fine. We’ll pay you for it. But … you give back the huge benny you got in exchange. Living in a rich, (previously) well run, white nation.
However, outright buying their vote may be an option once actual pro-Whites emerge in the political arena.Replies: @anonymousperson
That´s three times what they themselves are demanding.
Let´s see ... when the transAtlantic slave trade was outlawed, ~500k Africans had been
imported into the latter US (as a result slaves became so expensive the dangerous and debilitating work was left to Irish and Germans).
The average plantation slave, like the much-overrated honey bee, worked 4hrs/day
(granted, that´s a bit more than they do now; the indignity of it).
But let´s be generous, 500k times $100k = $50B; so far, so reasonable.
Even a payout of their full demand of $14T would - provided they are gone -
mean the US taxpayer breaks even in about ten years.
-> There will be no takers; they can do maff when they has to.
(Also, black American standard of living surpassed the Swedish in the ´80s)Replies: @Rob McX
I say 10k and a carton of Newports.
Blacks are a net tax suck. They have been for most of our history, at least the last 155 years of it. Of course with the deficits the government has been running since 2008, technically virtually every citizen’s tax payments are less than what the government spends per capita. But with blacks that has always been the case. Add up all the extra money we spend on blacks on welfare payments and justice system costs and subtract it from the reparations they are supposedly entitled to and they would end up owing us.Replies: @J, @bomag, @Jon, @Skylark Thibedeau, @Dissident799, @ic1000, @Currahee, @Reg Cæsar
Try to collect.
For once could we have the Republicans--heck, i'm not even asking for ten, i'm willing to settle for *one* good man in Sodom--stand up for Americans, stand up for their people.
The key point: reparations only with repatriation.
You renounce citizenship and return to Africa (only Africa) ... here's $100,000 for you ancestors labor.
The plain fact is the big beneficiaries of American slavery now ... are current black Americans.
You want to bitch about your ancestors enslavement--fine. We'll pay you for it. But ... you give back the huge benny you got in exchange. Living in a rich, (previously) well run, white nation.Replies: @RichardTaylor, @nokangaroos, @Mike Tre, @Moses
Only a few Blacks would take that deal. The best thing for any Black person is to live in a White country, especially America, and they know it.
However, outright buying their vote may be an option once actual pro-Whites emerge in the political arena.
Reparations are not “small stuff.” You are already rationalizing your total humiliation. And you are not even curious about the definitions of critical words, such as “white.” Typical American. What a loser. Get your kneepads ready.
In political terms, asking for reparations (which we already pay through welfare and other social programs) is nowhere near as radial as a call for outright genocide.
Theft is not as serious as murder, nor as evil as teaching little children to embrace their own racial genocide.
Damn, i’m about to burst into flame!
I don’t think you understand what was meant and you launched into a personal attack.
In political terms, asking for reparations (which we already pay through welfare and other social programs) is nowhere near as radial as a call for outright genocide.
Theft is not as serious as murder, nor as evil as teaching little children to embrace their own racial genocide.
I’m all for putting everything back the way it should have been, and that means sending all negroes to Dahomey where they would have been part of “the king’s wealth” during the “yearly head business” had they not been rescued and brought overseas.
If you have never listened to Larry Elder you must hear his reaction to the Springsteen-Obama hash bash; he is in rare form and hilarious.
But he sure knows a great segment of the public because they buy his schtick as 'thoughtful'... Inasmuch as it is just words mouthing bullshit.
Barry Soetoro never worked all that hard; his experience is that things are given to you. He now wants the Giving Tree to shake down on his people.
Yes…see also: https://www.unz.com/isteve/chicagos-mayor-groot-wants-to-tear-down-five-lincoln-statues/#comment-4480144
Fun to watch Barack quick-thinking on the fly.
Mars trip ‘can only be understood through black Americans,’ NASA tweets, celebrating renaming of Headquarters
https://www.rt.com/usa/516729-nasa-black-engineer-building-woke/
Turns out that Mars was colonized by some Righteous Black Brothers and Sisters way back in 1619, but the evil MSM has been keeping the facts from us! NASA to the Rescue! We’re not yo dad’s NASA anymore! Plz dont cut fundingz!
——————————————————————–
Hmm, NASA had black female engineers in the 1950s? Back when blacks and females were kept down by the Man? Which is it?
Your inquiry is based on false premises. So called U.S. “slaves” were compensated for their particular labor inputs in excess of the wealth they could have generated on their own accord, and also in excess of the world market labor rate. They are not “owed” anything to begin with, and neither are their descendants.
That is true even without taking into account the benefits their descendants have received from White society down through the years and the harm some of their descendants have caused to White people.
However, were we to take your ill-premised inquiry to completion, we would have to broaden it to include all US wealth, not just that arising in the antebellum South. If Southerners benefited from “slavery,” so has everyone else in the Union.
If, as some claim, slave labor built America–and by implication building America is a credit-worthy accomplishment that should be recognized—shouldn’t antebellum Whites get the lion’s share of thanks for conceiving the slave system and making it happen?
Pictured below: NSFW illustration of the stark, tragic outcomes for DOAS (descendants of American slaves) if transatlantic slavery had never happened.
I’ve been asking for some time for examples of Southern dynastic wealth that survived the Civil War and Reconstruction
The actual argument would be — I’m not making it, simply pointing it out — that low-priced cotton effectively funded the industrial revolution in the North, not that individual Southern wealth-holders contributed directly to the economic transformation of the country.
Whatever argument they trot out, the simple truth is that "Reparations" is gussied-up "Gibsmedat", and if we pay the Niggeld this will be only the beginning.
This is just 4D chess so Obama’s real family can get reparations from the Dutch
Blacks are a net tax suck. They have been for most of our history, at least the last 155 years of it. Of course with the deficits the government has been running since 2008, technically virtually every citizen’s tax payments are less than what the government spends per capita. But with blacks that has always been the case. Add up all the extra money we spend on blacks on welfare payments and justice system costs and subtract it from the reparations they are supposedly entitled to and they would end up owing us.Replies: @J, @bomag, @Jon, @Skylark Thibedeau, @Dissident799, @ic1000, @Currahee, @Reg Cæsar
This.
Plus other social pathologies and general non-performance in civic functions adds to the deficit. This call for reparations is just another frank admission that they are a grifter class with mild interest in participating in civil society, a society that includes suffering the slings and arrows of past and present misfortunes while still keeping enough good will to maintain a civil polity.
My “White Identity “ would be:
Guy Who Thinks White People Are Pretty Great But I’m Not Gonna Brag About It; Other Races Are Good At Their Own Stuff, and They Don’t Have to Genuflect or Anything But They Could Show Us Respect
Or is that too wordy?
America’s wealth cane from black slaves. That’s why black African countries where black Africans even have black African slaves now are so wealthy.
This seems fairly simple. Just need a good source for all of the major plantation owning families at the time of the war. Then it’s just a matter of doing a forward ancestry search. Might be a lot of work, but it’s more of a brute force exercise. So what’s a good place to get the original list? Surely, some historian has put that together.
If you were to look at the Civil War from a purely economic point of view, then what the North did was destroy the wealth of the South, which made Southern raw materials cheaper for Northern industrialists to purchase so they could make more money.
Southern Planters, already heavily indebted to Northern bankers, were either forced to sell their plantations or go even deeper in debt to Northern Bankers to accumulate the capital to keep on running.
I think it was T. Harry Williams who commented that the Civil War was basically a jobs program for poor Northern males.
Blacks are a net tax suck. They have been for most of our history, at least the last 155 years of it. Of course with the deficits the government has been running since 2008, technically virtually every citizen’s tax payments are less than what the government spends per capita. But with blacks that has always been the case. Add up all the extra money we spend on blacks on welfare payments and justice system costs and subtract it from the reparations they are supposedly entitled to and they would end up owing us.Replies: @J, @bomag, @Jon, @Skylark Thibedeau, @Dissident799, @ic1000, @Currahee, @Reg Cæsar
This is another one of those ‘current narrative’ things that are so obviously wrong that you can’t hardly believe it is accepted by most people. It’s like the bit about how racism thrives on ignorance, and if we could just have more diversity, people would all get along. Completely counter to what we actually see in real life.
Someone needs to remind the former president that it’s 2021, not 1859.
“examples of Southern dynastic wealth that survived the Civil War and Reconstruction”
How about examples of Northern dynastic wealth that survived the Civil War and Reconstruction? The slave trade was operated out of New England.
How about examples of Northern dynastic wealth that were the result of the Civil War and Reconstruction? Yankee war profiteering. Speculation on war bonds. Veterans’ benefits.
The Butler family, first of Georgia then of Philadelphia, and itEngland.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierce_Butler
Frankly, I can't think of a single great American fortune that emerged out of the Atlantic Slave Trade. The Astors ( John Jacob Astor was the first American multi-millionaire) , for example, became rich through the fur trade, New York real estate, and the Old China Trade.No one really springs to mind. The Rockefellers certainly didn't get rich that way.
All the wealth built on the backs of slaves was burned by Billy Sherman and Sam Grant. Jackson, Atlanta, Columbia, Richmond just to name a few of the cities turned into Chimneyvilles. Of course you could claim that the High Tariffs on goods bought by the Planters from Europe in exchange for cotton funded the U.S.Government but then you’d have to accept that the South indeed seceded not to protect slavery but to escape economic domination by the Northern Industrialists.
In the thoughts of a Leftist like Barry W.Bush it’s always 1848 and the Red Flags are flying over the barricades.
After WWI, this conversation was hear:
France: “You will need pay us reparations”
Germany: “Nun gut. But how much are we talking about?”
France: “Well, just start sending stuff!”
Various events unfolded later.
I gather you have never read Ray Bradbury’s “Black Martian Chronicles”?
How about examples of Northern dynastic wealth that survived the Civil War and Reconstruction? The slave trade was operated out of New England.
How about examples of Northern dynastic wealth that were the result of the Civil War and Reconstruction? Yankee war profiteering. Speculation on war bonds. Veterans' benefits.
The Butler family, first of Georgia then of Philadelphia, and itEngland.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierce_ButlerReplies: @Steve Sailer, @syonredux
When I checked about ten years ago, there were still four Hearsts on the Forbes 400. The Hearst fortune traces to the Nevada silver strike just before the Civil War. There aren’t any DuPonts left on the Forbes 400, but the estimated family wealth is in 11 figures.
I’m not sure how much old Vanderbilt wealth is left: Anderson Cooper’s mom Gloria Vanderbilt made her own fortune off designer jeans in the 1970s.
Let us try a simple thought experiment:
Visualize an America that had never imported a single Black Slave. (We will ignore, for now, the de facto slavery of White indentured servitude.) hat America would have no Slavery, no Civil War, no Racial Strife erupting every few years.
Would that America be richer or poorer than the current USA?
Every Minority person on this planet would still be living like an animal without the efforts, the exclusive efforts, of White Men.
They should be paying us reparations.
The problem with it ... i don't get to live in that timeline.
Blacks are a net tax suck. They have been for most of our history, at least the last 155 years of it. Of course with the deficits the government has been running since 2008, technically virtually every citizen’s tax payments are less than what the government spends per capita. But with blacks that has always been the case. Add up all the extra money we spend on blacks on welfare payments and justice system costs and subtract it from the reparations they are supposedly entitled to and they would end up owing us.Replies: @J, @bomag, @Jon, @Skylark Thibedeau, @Dissident799, @ic1000, @Currahee, @Reg Cæsar
Never worked for a modern help desk? The H1b’s call you and want you to write their code for them. They got the job cause Ajay or Ravi the boss is their cousin.
Man. Oh man, would our country be gigantically better off without them.Replies: @Ganderson
Also, inconvenient truth be told, slavery was the best thing that ever happened to the descendants of slaves, as it got them out of Africa.
Another data point:
what % of U.S. whites actually owned slaves in 1860? I believe this is around 3%.
what % of U.S. blacks in 2021 murder, rob, rape or enslave with drugs other blacks? Call this % A.
Does anyone believe A<3%?
Stop buying their frame.
Well, if you want to get technical about it, the South bought things from northern factories and it bought slaves off northern ships. The profits from all that enriched the north, and that wealth did survive the Civil War.
And the ships that transported the slaves were mostly British (Bristol and Liverpool).
As for the role of cotton in the Anglo-American economy:-Slavery and Anglo-American Capitalism Revisited, Gavin Wrighthttps://bradleyahansen.blogspot.com/2016/12/capitalism-and-slavery-debate-is-not.html
The US would have been better-off without slavery.Replies: @Corvinus
Very little. You learn that if you tour the Vanderbilt mansion in Ashville, NC.
Conditions in factories in England in the late 18th and early/mid 19th Centuries were worse, the life expectancy lower and equally difficult to escape from.
So what? Its past!
For once could we have the Republicans--heck, i'm not even asking for ten, i'm willing to settle for *one* good man in Sodom--stand up for Americans, stand up for their people.
The key point: reparations only with repatriation.
You renounce citizenship and return to Africa (only Africa) ... here's $100,000 for you ancestors labor.
The plain fact is the big beneficiaries of American slavery now ... are current black Americans.
You want to bitch about your ancestors enslavement--fine. We'll pay you for it. But ... you give back the huge benny you got in exchange. Living in a rich, (previously) well run, white nation.Replies: @RichardTaylor, @nokangaroos, @Mike Tre, @Moses
A bit generous with other people´s money aren´t we, Dad 😀
That´s three times what they themselves are demanding.
Let´s see … when the transAtlantic slave trade was outlawed, ~500k Africans had been
imported into the latter US (as a result slaves became so expensive the dangerous and debilitating work was left to Irish and Germans).
The average plantation slave, like the much-overrated honey bee, worked 4hrs/day
(granted, that´s a bit more than they do now; the indignity of it).
But let´s be generous, 500k times $100k = $50B; so far, so reasonable.
Even a payout of their full demand of $14T would – provided they are gone –
mean the US taxpayer breaks even in about ten years.
-> There will be no takers; they can do maff when they has to.
(Also, black American standard of living surpassed the Swedish in the ´80s)
I don't see blacks ever leaving the US of their own volition unless the country descends to sub-Zimbabwean levels of poverty and dysfunction. They're not into exploring new places or trying new ways of living. Given how dissatisfied they claim to be with America, you'd imagine many of them would go abroad to seek now opportunities. But hardly any expatriate Americans I've met were black.Replies: @S. Anonyia
We’ve given them most of our large cities. Isn’t that enough?
I’ve started watching old shows from the 60s and 70s as an antidote to today’s wokeness.
Last night I watched the movie “Bye, Bye, Birdie.” A piping hot Ann Margret and a 100% white cast. It was beautiful.
Well, it’s not dripping with self-hatred, so it won’t fly.
I can hardly wait for reparations.
Tip line on dining check: “Please apportion this to your reparations.”
Blacks are a net tax suck. They have been for most of our history, at least the last 155 years of it. Of course with the deficits the government has been running since 2008, technically virtually every citizen’s tax payments are less than what the government spends per capita. But with blacks that has always been the case. Add up all the extra money we spend on blacks on welfare payments and justice system costs and subtract it from the reparations they are supposedly entitled to and they would end up owing us.Replies: @J, @bomag, @Jon, @Skylark Thibedeau, @Dissident799, @ic1000, @Currahee, @Reg Cæsar
There’s a video by a guy who goes by Alternative Hypothesis. He breaks down tax payments vs. government benefits by race. His conclusion is that blacks take in around $750k more in benefits than they pay while whites pay about $225k more than they receive. Even at our current spending rates and military size, removing the blacks from the equation would mean the US would have a small budget surplus every year.
Will the Black descendants of immigrants who arrived after 1900 qualify to receive reparations? Will people like Colin Powell, Kamala Harris and Barrack Obama qualify for reparations ? Their Black parents were immigrants and did not help create the wealth of America.
Another technical consideration is that Southerners weren’t compensated when the Lincoln regime, in violation of the Constitution, exercised eminent domain on the black servants, or abrogated the contractual and property rights in the servants. Furthermore, the South is owed war reparations for the North’s murder of its sons and the destruction of its farms and cities during the North’s war of conquest.
I doubt Obama has uttered a sincere word in a public forum in his life. It’s a reasonable wager he’s like Tom Perez, a man attracted to law school because he was bad at math. It’s also a reasonable wager he hasn’t been in a serious argument over norms or policy for 30 years. This is the empty suit a majority of the voting public has put in office.
Obama, a communist, has restated Marx’s labor theory of value. Let’s give him the Nobel prize in Economics.
How much? More likely, almost none.
I saw an estimate some years ago that the net worth of the sum of Rockefeller scions was around $11 bn. When John D. Rockefeller died in 1937, he had a net worth of $1.4 bn. Had the family wealth increased pari passu with gross domestic product, his 3-digit population of descendants would now be worth $315 bn in sum. They haven’t governed anything of institutional importance since 1981, when his youngest grandchild retired from his post as President of the Chase Manhattan Bank.
Remember James Baldwin’s line about ‘If I hadn’t built the railroads for nothing’? Of all the miles of rail track to be found in the United States in 1920, about 2% consisted of lines in place in the South in 1860 (and not all of them were laid down by slaves).
Telling people who have on average accounted for 13% of the population and perhaps 7% of the human capital to be found in this country that the world hasn’t actually been revolving around their asses is rude. Fools like Obama and the other purveyors of historical fiction are making rude remarks a regrettable necessity.
Supposedly, Gloria Vanderbilt (who had her own business which I believe was profitable) left an estate of $1.5 million when she died in 2019. She had three surviving sons. I suppose it’s possible that the bulk was distributed to her heirs prior to her death in irrevocable trusts and the like, though comments made by Anderson Cooper some years ago suggest that was not the case.
In Gloria's case, in the 1980s, she accused her former partners and her lawyer of fraud. After a lengthy trial (during which time the lawyer died), Vanderbilt won and was awarded nearly $1.7 million, but the money was never recovered. Vanderbilt also owed millions of dollars in back taxes, since the lawyer had never paid the IRS, and she was forced to sell her Southampton, New York and Upper East Side homes.Replies: @Art Deco
The actual argument would be -- I'm not making it, simply pointing it out -- that low-priced cotton effectively funded the industrial revolution in the North, not that individual Southern wealth-holders contributed directly to the economic transformation of the country.Replies: @David, @Neuday
During the US Civil War, some Pasha in Egypt commandeered tens of thousands of acres in the Nile valley and worked it with forced labor to grow cotton for the satanic mills of England. Egyptian cotton production quadrupled between 1862 and 1865.
(Virginian?) tobacco-smoking was specified by the medical experts as a 'preventative' for all concerned.No shortage of foundlings, though, so no need to import slaves. Just sling the corpses out and draft in a new lot. They'd not be missed. It's fortunate that very few probably bred, or Obama would be hounding their descendants for Reparations.Replies: @Expletive Deleted
Steve, Joshua Ward was America’s largest slaveholder in 1850 and his estate was in 1860. He was a Georgetown, South Carolina rice planter and his family story is here:
https://www.angelfire.com/sc2/tokenofthemonth/token016/
It was interesting that after the war it appears that grandson Samuel Mortimer Ward b. 1858 continued the rice plantation with former slaves paid in scrip redeemable for goods at the company store, a form of wage slavery common in mining and other “company town” situations. Eventually foreign competition ruined the American rice plantation business.
Great-grandson Samuel Mortimer Ward Jr b. 1880 ended up in New York City with cooks and house servants up there and at his second home on Long Island. Who knows whether this wealth survived the war (perhaps as gold) or was re-created using land and the “company town” model after the war.
This family’s story might be a testimonial to the value of tangible assets without liens.
Providing people with land and goods is “exploiting” them?
I saw an estimate some years ago that the net worth of the sum of Rockefeller scions was around $11 bn. When John D. Rockefeller died in 1937, he had a net worth of $1.4 bn. Had the family wealth increased pari passu with gross domestic product, his 3-digit population of descendants would now be worth $315 bn in sum. They haven't governed anything of institutional importance since 1981, when his youngest grandchild retired from his post as President of the Chase Manhattan Bank.
Remember James Baldwin's line about 'If I hadn't built the railroads for nothing'? Of all the miles of rail track to be found in the United States in 1920, about 2% consisted of lines in place in the South in 1860 (and not all of them were laid down by slaves).
Telling people who have on average accounted for 13% of the population and perhaps 7% of the human capital to be found in this country that the world hasn't actually been revolving around their asses is rude. Fools like Obama and the other purveyors of historical fiction are making rude remarks a regrettable necessity.Replies: @Anon, @Wilkey, @Jim Bob Lassiter
How did you derive the 7% stat?
“There’s not much question. Right?”
Uh…wrong?
Oh well, here we go again. Reparations–the latest Flavor of The Month.
Since Obama is half-white, does that mean his white half owes reparations to his black half so he is excluded from paying or receiving reparations?
Does Obama’s children receive 75% of a reparations share because they’re 25% white?
Shouldn’t set-offs be calculated in so that the disproportionate costs of black crime, education, and welfare be deducted from reparations? Heck, blacks might end up owing the rest of the country money if we are to settle scores.
But Lincoln would nonetheless have been a great President ... if he had found a way to return the slaves to Africa. That achieved the War would have been worth it.
In the timeline we live in we got the War and still struggle with race. Lose, lose.Replies: @Prester John, @Hapalong Cassidy, @Wilkey, @MBlanc46
Yeah. In April it’ll be 156 years since Appomattox. And here we are.
How much wealth of this nation has been stolen by the government and politicians?
Complexion counts. Meet the next president, Kamalalalabobama Harris.
I saw an estimate some years ago that the net worth of the sum of Rockefeller scions was around $11 bn. When John D. Rockefeller died in 1937, he had a net worth of $1.4 bn. Had the family wealth increased pari passu with gross domestic product, his 3-digit population of descendants would now be worth $315 bn in sum. They haven't governed anything of institutional importance since 1981, when his youngest grandchild retired from his post as President of the Chase Manhattan Bank.
Remember James Baldwin's line about 'If I hadn't built the railroads for nothing'? Of all the miles of rail track to be found in the United States in 1920, about 2% consisted of lines in place in the South in 1860 (and not all of them were laid down by slaves).
Telling people who have on average accounted for 13% of the population and perhaps 7% of the human capital to be found in this country that the world hasn't actually been revolving around their asses is rude. Fools like Obama and the other purveyors of historical fiction are making rude remarks a regrettable necessity.Replies: @Anon, @Wilkey, @Jim Bob Lassiter
Putting their share of our human capital at 7% is being extremely generous. We have copious examples of wealthy countries that don’t have many blacks. The only examples we have of prosperous black countries are tiny tax and tourist havens, like Barbados, and tiny oil rich countries, like Equatorial Guinea, where a huge portion of the population still lives in poverty.
Germany (pop. 83 million), the UK (68 million) and France (67 million) all have GDPs higher than the GDP of all of Africa (pop 1.3 billion), despite having far fewer natural resources at their disposal. Likewise, Japan (pop. 125 million) has twice the GDP of all of Africa.
Incidentally Steve, it is only 2021, but Africa’s population has already increased by about half a billion people since 2000 – an over 60% increase in its population in just 20 years. Hundreds of thousands of Africans are jumping on boats each year to try to float to Europe, but by the end of the decade Africa will have added more people (~750 million) in just 30 years than actually live in all of Europe.
I saw an estimate some years ago that the net worth of the sum of Rockefeller scions was around $11 bn. When John D. Rockefeller died in 1937, he had a net worth of $1.4 bn. Had the family wealth increased pari passu with gross domestic product, his 3-digit population of descendants would now be worth $315 bn in sum. They haven't governed anything of institutional importance since 1981, when his youngest grandchild retired from his post as President of the Chase Manhattan Bank.
Remember James Baldwin's line about 'If I hadn't built the railroads for nothing'? Of all the miles of rail track to be found in the United States in 1920, about 2% consisted of lines in place in the South in 1860 (and not all of them were laid down by slaves).
Telling people who have on average accounted for 13% of the population and perhaps 7% of the human capital to be found in this country that the world hasn't actually been revolving around their asses is rude. Fools like Obama and the other purveyors of historical fiction are making rude remarks a regrettable necessity.Replies: @Anon, @Wilkey, @Jim Bob Lassiter
Seven percent?? Me thinks ye needs to recalibrate your generosity dials.
Geez, when does Barry say “OK, that’s enough. I’ve squeezed this system for all I can get”.
“Currently, the Obamas are believed to have a net worth of $40 million. However, there are estimates that they will be able to make as much as $242 million over the course of their entire lifetime following the presidency. Due to this, while their net worth is $40 million for the time being, it seems safe to say that won’t remain true for a particularly long period of time.”
That was published 2 years ago.
Maybe it’s a case of “Reparate me all the way to the Billionaire’s list, where my homies hang”.
I recall reading back issues of Time magazine in my college library from the late 50s and early 60s in which economic analysts said that Africa, newly liberated from colonialism, would compete with the US for economic dominance any day now. The Wakanda fantasists have been with us for quite some time.
That happened in the American South as well. I used to think that “social history”, which became all the rage starting in the late 70s was all BS, but social historians did some good and interesting work. There were a couple of guys who tried to get at the question of what the slaves’ diets were like: their conclusion was “ about the same as northern factory workers.” Differences in diet had more to do with southernness rather than slave-ness. In addition, motivating a non-paid workforce is tricky- corporal punishment, which existed in all strata of 19th century society, has its limitations- the system that worked the best was a piecework type system: you have to do x amount today; the rest of the day you can devote to tending your own plots, animals, etc.
The Ken Burns “slaves worked from sunup to sundown without rest, all while being savagely beaten every minute, and sometimes at night when there was a full moon” is a remnant of the slave narratives that became popular in the 1850’s. One needn’t be an apologist for slavery to believe that the conventional abolitionist view of slavery is largely nonsense.
There’s a section in Frederick Douglass’ autobiography in which he described an incident, and for the sake of brevity, I’ll just say he got in a fight with everybody in two counties, ran 45 miles and then asserted his freedom, all of which was done in the 100 degree MD heat. I had read this passage in a black history class I was taking and the instructor, a young black guy, asked us all what we thought about this vignette. Everybody in the class was White, the answers came back “ it shows the cruelty of slavery”, or “it shows the determination of Douglass”, I’m sure you all could imagine what group of potential high school history teachers would answer.
The instructor just smiled, and said “ so it didn’t occur to any of you that this incident, as described, is ludicrous and that Douglass made it up for propaganda purposes?” I liked that guy a lot.
Oh, and Ken Burns, who in every one of his documentaries gets to a point where the message is “Woe, the poor Negroes,” lives in the whitest town in the whitest county in the whitest state in the whitest region of the country.
Except for the century before the American Revolution slavery was always a negative economic influence and many American voices made this observation decades before the war.
I use the same quote from Lincoln when discussing reparations. The Civil war was an immense struggle. People simply don’t realize the scale of destruction of the American Civil War, large swarths of the South were plundered and destroyed.
The social problems that naturally occurred in the South after a war freed their slaves helped perpetuate poverty and retarded economic development.
The actual argument would be -- I'm not making it, simply pointing it out -- that low-priced cotton effectively funded the industrial revolution in the North, not that individual Southern wealth-holders contributed directly to the economic transformation of the country.Replies: @David, @Neuday
How did cheap cotton in Georgia fund industry in the North? The Planter class was able to buy manufactured goods from the North? But isn’t that saying that “individual Southern wealth-holders contributed directly to the economic transformation of the country.”?
Whatever argument they trot out, the simple truth is that “Reparations” is gussied-up “Gibsmedat”, and if we pay the Niggeld this will be only the beginning.
Heck it should be the American Indians paid the reparations’ for losing to the European, who by the way were just reclaiming old property. Seems there is an increasing amount of DNA and relic evidence that the white man was here long before the Asian red man. However science here is wrong think, and not to be trusted. Weird how that works. So in the spirit of fair, albeit false, history let’s just raze the whole country down, and let nature restore it. Whoever rebuilds first, gets the whole shebang. My money is on the Chinese for the win, as long as the white man logs for them in the spirit of capitalism and rugged individualism. Any reparations’ for the black man genuinely means a boat trip back to Africa, and repaid whatever their worth was upon their ancestors sale, with inflation of course
Speaking old money from slavery, aren’t the NYT’s royal family of Ochs – Sulzberger such an example?
https://nypost.com/2020/07/18/the-family-that-owns-the-new-york-times-were-slaveholders-goodwin/
Does that wealth include Obama’s luxurious home in Martha’s Vineyard?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IiSwR6fT3lsReplies: @Dan Hayes, @Forbes, @Mr. Anon, @European-American
I convinced myself that Elder was A-OK when he recently disparaged a fellow Black for using the “race card”!
One of the stupid concepts behind reparations is that the recipients will leverage this influx of cash into long term gains in wealth and mobility, when in reality it will be more like what happens with lottery winners: a couple of years of vastly increased spending on material goods followed by a fall right back to where they were economically prior to their big payday.
Even if they were structured as more modest annual payments or benefits, the reality is 90% of the people that get them will not be able to leverage them into being noticeably better off. What then?
It's like Affirmative Action - Justice O'Connor said that we'd need it for 25 years. Well that expiration date is fast approaching and the need for Affirmative Action is greater than ever. The chances that it will sunset are zero.
Once the reparations regime begins it's going to be never ending, because the "goal" is never going to be achieved. If it is achieved, it will only be like in Cuba where everyone [who is not named Castro] is equal now because they are all equally poor. Could the government stop paying Social Security now or ever? Not until it all collapses.
Note that “white separatist” is missing.
This poison pie chart assumes all whites desire to be around “people of color”. No sane white person does.
Southern Planters, already heavily indebted to Northern bankers, were either forced to sell their plantations or go even deeper in debt to Northern Bankers to accumulate the capital to keep on running.
I think it was T. Harry Williams who commented that the Civil War was basically a jobs program for poor Northern males.Replies: @Reg Cæsar
“Wealth” built on a Ponzi scheme. Each “owner” desired to pass off his unproductive drones to the next fool who came along. And there was no shortage of those.
George Washington knew how worthless they were, and said as much, but was helpless because he didn’t hold title to the staff at Mount Vernon. Couldn’t unload them and replace them with “hard-working Mohammedans”.
Slavery in the New World was a form of pollution. Slave pollution. The enslaved– the enslavable– have no place in a free country. We drink from a poisoned well today.
But Lincoln would nonetheless have been a great President ... if he had found a way to return the slaves to Africa. That achieved the War would have been worth it.
In the timeline we live in we got the War and still struggle with race. Lose, lose.Replies: @Prester John, @Hapalong Cassidy, @Wilkey, @MBlanc46
I always wonder what would have happened to the slaves if the Confederacy had been successful. Eventually the South would have realized that slavery was no longer viable, probably before the 19th century was over. What would they have done with the large surplus black population? Perhaps they would have reserved Florida for them, being the least populated state in the South, and having the climate closest to sub-Saharan Africa. Moving them all there would have been a challenge, but it could have been done.
A slave costs 250 in west Africa which is 250 dollar modern while they are 800 (800 dollar current) Sudan while slaves were 800 dollars antebellum time (40 000 dollar current). Do you think they were treated like 800 dollar antebellum or a 800 dollar slave in modern Sudan?
Gorilla glue smells as good as white kids hair.
Blacks are a net tax suck. They have been for most of our history, at least the last 155 years of it. Of course with the deficits the government has been running since 2008, technically virtually every citizen’s tax payments are less than what the government spends per capita. But with blacks that has always been the case. Add up all the extra money we spend on blacks on welfare payments and justice system costs and subtract it from the reparations they are supposedly entitled to and they would end up owing us.Replies: @J, @bomag, @Jon, @Skylark Thibedeau, @Dissident799, @ic1000, @Currahee, @Reg Cæsar
Wilkey, you and I must not watch the same teevee stations.
Indeed, how much net wealth was destroyed by that war?
Much has been made of the net value of slaves (based on auction prices and total in captivity) but seemingly little thought to
1) a price bubble driven by market scarcity,
2) the value of free workers being unmeasured by the selected measurement approach,
3) to whom all that supposed wealth was transferred upon emancipation.
I recently saw a professor (during a BHM lecture) claim that hemp was legally discriminated against to protect cotton. A simple web search showed that occurred in 1937! There are a number of hemp fetishists who claim hemp was better than cotton, but the work to extract the fiber is pretty substantial compared to combing a ball of cotton. Moreover, the war shifted cotton production overseas as Brittan sought out alternate sources, e.g. Egypt.
BTW, if our wealth is based on slavery,
1) why isn’t Brazil the worlds dominant power?
2) how did Austrailia and Canada achieve comparable living standards?
3) Do they mean to say that Africa impoverishment results from the selling many of it’s inhabitants into slavery across the ocean?
Out of agrees, but as an IT Tech, +1000. The three common characteristics of these Indian H1B’s: nepotistic, incompetent, virulently xenophobic Racists.
Man. Oh man, would our country be gigantically better off without them.
Well… one of the many spare bedrooms has a pair of Renoirs hanging from its walls… just sayin’…
In the 1700s and 1800s, slavery in the Caribbean was in general nightmarish compared to slavery in the mainland Colonies and the United States. Steve has quoted mortality figures in prior posts. The account in the early chapter of Chernow’s biography of Alexander Hamilton — he was born on Nevis — is consistent with that. Free males were required to be part of the militia, with white society haunted by the realistic fear of what a slave revolt would mean (see Haiti).
Not that I would care to have been a chattel in the American South; I don’t think any of the commenters here would have found it agreeable. Count me out of the “wasn’t really so bad” apologias.
I’d be partial to “reparations,” except for the small matter that there’s no possible common ground between what I’d offer and what the dominant elites and their PoC auxiliaries would accept. E.g. payments only to Descendants of American Slaves who can prove their ancestry. And e.g. once payment is made, debt is discharged. Obviously, these terms would fracture the Coalition of the Fringes, thus entirely unacceptable. Obviously. So forget it.
Does anyone believe that Affirmative Action will stop 25 years after Justice O’Connor opined that it would no longer be necessary subsequent to that date.
Look up shill in the dictionary and you’ll find a picture of Bruce Springsteen. And he’s a shill for the powers that be, something that journalists and “artists” used to go to great lengths to be the opposite of.
Reparations for slavery in the US is a morally shallow position to take. Twenty years ago, 100,000 black children were sold in to slavery every year in central Africa, and it had been that way for a very long time. May still be happening today, even though slavery was finally made illegal in most of those countries by 2005. How many black or white progressives in the US have made this modern day peculiar institution their cause? Not many, if any. Why not? First, it portrays black slave owners (who are black before they are slave owners) in a negative light. Secondly, it diverts attention away from the Cult of Abolition in America, which worships at the shrine of American slavery to its great political advantage.
Implicit in all of this is the idea that slavery itself isn’t so bad. More important to progressives is who the perpetrator is.
For once could we have the Republicans--heck, i'm not even asking for ten, i'm willing to settle for *one* good man in Sodom--stand up for Americans, stand up for their people.
The key point: reparations only with repatriation.
You renounce citizenship and return to Africa (only Africa) ... here's $100,000 for you ancestors labor.
The plain fact is the big beneficiaries of American slavery now ... are current black Americans.
You want to bitch about your ancestors enslavement--fine. We'll pay you for it. But ... you give back the huge benny you got in exchange. Living in a rich, (previously) well run, white nation.Replies: @RichardTaylor, @nokangaroos, @Mike Tre, @Moses
“You renounce citizenship and return to Africa (only Africa) … here’s $100,000 for you ancestors labor.”
I say 10k and a carton of Newports.
So Obama is now calling for reparations? When is anyone going to notice that that douchebag Obama was actually president for 8 years and he never did anything about it?
He’s just trolling Joe.
Also, let’s look at the Caribbean islands, where their entire economy (in the pre-tourist era) was based on plantation slavery with hardly any white people (except for overseers) or industry other than slave based agriculture. In a place like the US, the wealth is all jumbled up – we can’t tell how much is from slaves and how much is from other people, but on those islands, virtually all of the wealth must have been created by the slaves (OK, maybe a little by the white people who had the knowledge and capital to build cane mills). We can see that these islands (e.g. Haiti) are all fabulously wealthy from all of that slave created wealth. Whereas in places in the US that never had slavery (e.g. Beverly Hills) everyone lives in tar paper shacks because there were no Negroes around to create wealth for them.
My general take on this question is that this is one of these rare historical "what if"s where we have a control group.
Anglo Saxons also settled three other places--Canada, Australia, New Zealand--where the inhabitants were still mostly doing hunter-gatherer activity, ergo were at low density and pushed aside for settlement. But those places did not have slavery.
America is richer than those places but it also has:
-- way, way better farmland (and way way better climate than Canada)
-- allowing much higher density settlement and economies of scale
-- way better natural water transport
-- better access (or for Canada just as good) access to foreign markets
So America should be richer than those places. And was/is from the get go.
My take is slavery--once cotton gin--speeded up development in the South, based on propagating the plantation model West, and industrial development up North. But then slavery vanished after 1865--massive Southern wealth wiped out, along with huge war debts for the whole nation incurred. And yet, that ushered in period of rapid industrial expansion in the US, so that by the close of the 19th century the US was the leading economy in the world, with the highest standard of living in the world ... while the South with all the blacks was the most backward lagging part of it.
Not to be rude about it, but the evidence suggests that while some small set of white people benefited from slavery back in the day--fortunes were made, people lived well, etc.--overall blacks have net negative value in America (and other white civilizations), imposing high tax and social costs, degrading the quality of life particularly in our cities. destroying the value of quite a bit of nice urban real estate, lowering our standard of living ... generally a boat anchor whites have had to drag along.Replies: @anon, @Jack D, @Reg Cæsar, @sb, @res
As someone who likes travelling in Africa partly because the vast majority of the locals aren't exactly work obsessed, I was so confused that I was even too slow to fake a laugh.
It'd be like a Norwegian telling me that this year's Brazilian Carnival was a bust because there were no Norwegians there to get the party started.
You'd wonder what planet they were from.
Even if they were structured as more modest annual payments or benefits, the reality is 90% of the people that get them will not be able to leverage them into being noticeably better off. What then?Replies: @Jack D, @Pericles, @Jim Bob Lassiter
What then? Whitey pays and pays. So long as “equity” has not been achieved (blacks are not as wealthy as whites) this in itself is proof that the reparations are not complete – if they were, then such gaps would completely disappear.
It’s like Affirmative Action – Justice O’Connor said that we’d need it for 25 years. Well that expiration date is fast approaching and the need for Affirmative Action is greater than ever. The chances that it will sunset are zero.
Once the reparations regime begins it’s going to be never ending, because the “goal” is never going to be achieved. If it is achieved, it will only be like in Cuba where everyone [who is not named Castro] is equal now because they are all equally poor. Could the government stop paying Social Security now or ever? Not until it all collapses.
Not that I would care to have been a chattel in the American South; I don't think any of the commenters here would have found it agreeable. Count me out of the "wasn't really so bad" apologias.
I'd be partial to "reparations," except for the small matter that there's no possible common ground between what I'd offer and what the dominant elites and their PoC auxiliaries would accept. E.g. payments only to Descendants of American Slaves who can prove their ancestry. And e.g. once payment is made, debt is discharged. Obviously, these terms would fracture the Coalition of the Fringes, thus entirely unacceptable. Obviously. So forget it.Replies: @JMcG, @anon
Exactly. If reparations are paid, they’ll make no long term difference to the state of American blacks. Then, there will be a call for another round. Repeat ad infinitum.
Does anyone believe that Affirmative Action will stop 25 years after Justice O’Connor opined that it would no longer be necessary subsequent to that date.
Hey, give Obama some credit. Bold of him to say “not exclusively, maybe not even the majority of it.” I imagine some leftists would be genuinely shocked and offended to hear him say “maybe not even the majority.” Their go-to line for quite a while now has been “America’s wealth was built on the backs of slaves,” with no further qualification or attempt to quantify the portion attributable to slavery, leaving the implication that it’s *all* attributable to slavery. “Well like, I don’t think you can really separate it, the whole system relied on it” is the response you’d get from most leftists today if you pressed them on it. So I’ll count this as progress!
A Vanderbilt descendent has written a book about the family’s financial fall. Hardly anything left and this has been the case for quite a long time
“Within thirty years after the death of the Commodore Vanderbilt in 1877, no member of his family was among the richest people in the United States…. When 120 of the Commodore’s descendants gathered at Vanderbilt University in 1973 for the first family reunion, there was not a millionaire among them.”
https://dividendrealestate.com/vanderbilt/
Big AGREE to all of that one, Jack.
In reply to Arclight, I’d like to add that the Peak Stupidity Reparations Plan does indeed include the provision for having structured payments with payment coupons on paper and apps. From Section II, subpart 2(b), paragraph 16-stroke-E, clause 3, and I quote:
“What then?”
“Being born and raised in New York,
there ain’t nothin’ that you won’t see.
The streets are filled with bad goings-on,
and you know that’s no place to be.”
My car broke down in the evening.
It just stopped stone cold
stopped, stone cold in the street,
and a dirty mean man with shot gun in his hand
said ‘gimme your money, please’.
He said ‘gimme your money please’.”
Wasn’t that strange,
it wasn’t that strange, indeed.
New name: MASSA.
That´s three times what they themselves are demanding.
Let´s see ... when the transAtlantic slave trade was outlawed, ~500k Africans had been
imported into the latter US (as a result slaves became so expensive the dangerous and debilitating work was left to Irish and Germans).
The average plantation slave, like the much-overrated honey bee, worked 4hrs/day
(granted, that´s a bit more than they do now; the indignity of it).
But let´s be generous, 500k times $100k = $50B; so far, so reasonable.
Even a payout of their full demand of $14T would - provided they are gone -
mean the US taxpayer breaks even in about ten years.
-> There will be no takers; they can do maff when they has to.
(Also, black American standard of living surpassed the Swedish in the ´80s)Replies: @Rob McX
Let’s face it, white Americans are more likely to flee to Africa than blacks. If the US descends into anarchy or intolerable anti-white oppression, many whites might take refuge in some Third World countries and form their own ethnic enclaves. That can work out to some degree if the country in question is too poor to harass them and benefits from the presence of productive people.
I don’t see blacks ever leaving the US of their own volition unless the country descends to sub-Zimbabwean levels of poverty and dysfunction. They’re not into exploring new places or trying new ways of living. Given how dissatisfied they claim to be with America, you’d imagine many of them would go abroad to seek now opportunities. But hardly any expatriate Americans I’ve met were black.
Even if they were structured as more modest annual payments or benefits, the reality is 90% of the people that get them will not be able to leverage them into being noticeably better off. What then?Replies: @Jack D, @Pericles, @Jim Bob Lassiter
Reparations Part 2.
Visualize an America that had never imported a single Black Slave. (We will ignore, for now, the de facto slavery of White indentured servitude.) hat America would have no Slavery, no Civil War, no Racial Strife erupting every few years.
Would that America be richer or poorer than the current USA?
Every Minority person on this planet would still be living like an animal without the efforts, the exclusive efforts, of White Men.
They should be paying us reparations.Replies: @AnotherDad, @Wilkey
Damn that sounds nice.
The problem with it … i don’t get to live in that timeline.
Even if they were structured as more modest annual payments or benefits, the reality is 90% of the people that get them will not be able to leverage them into being noticeably better off. What then?Replies: @Jack D, @Pericles, @Jim Bob Lassiter
And to that end, the Happy Merchants will by happy to take all that money in their bling shops.
BOOM, million bucks appear, and black man runs off happy with his cash.White man says "I want a million dollars in stocks and bonds in a well-balanced portfolio"
BOOM, an account summary appears in his hand totaling a million dollars, and white man runs off happy.So what do you want? Says the genie to the Jew.
Jew says " I'd like some cheap jewelry and that colored boy's address".
Not that I would care to have been a chattel in the American South; I don't think any of the commenters here would have found it agreeable. Count me out of the "wasn't really so bad" apologias.
I'd be partial to "reparations," except for the small matter that there's no possible common ground between what I'd offer and what the dominant elites and their PoC auxiliaries would accept. E.g. payments only to Descendants of American Slaves who can prove their ancestry. And e.g. once payment is made, debt is discharged. Obviously, these terms would fracture the Coalition of the Fringes, thus entirely unacceptable. Obviously. So forget it.Replies: @JMcG, @anon
You probably wouldn’t have found life anywhere in the world, for thousands of years up until the 20th Century, to be much to your modern tastes. As it stood though, the lives of blacks in the antebellum United States were better than those of most people elsewhere in the world. Blacks enjoyed a standard of living higher than the White populations of Europe. They certainly had it better than their co-ethnics who remained in Africa. It is even possible that Europeans saved them from being killed by rival African tribes.
Our attention should instead be on the hundreds of thousands of Southerners who were murdered by Lincoln and his henchmen.
There is no moral, legal, or practical ground for so-called “reparations.” (In contrast, Southerners are owed war reparations for the North’s armed invasion and occupation.) If you wish to provide more welfare to blacks or redistribute wealth in their direction, that is fine. Moral and practical cases can be made for that: equality of outcomes, unequal distribution of wealth, education, and aptitudes, etc.. But make those arguments then and call things by their proper name.
Citations required here on your part, or retract your claim.
Perhaps you need be reminded that black Africans enjoyed their personal freedom and a standard of living quite comfortable in the Songhai Empire (during which the European slave trade begun). Of course, it became tenuous along the coastline--but not in the interior, that would occur in the mid to late 1800's :(---thereafter when Europeans sought to extract mammon from the "Dark Continent".
Should not southern whites picked their own damn cotton?
Since slavery in the Americas was based on black Africans selling each other as slaves maybe Obama should be calling on blacks in Africa to pay reparations?
And then we can look at the wealth per capita of Canada, who had the whites but not the black slaves…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IiSwR6fT3lsReplies: @Dan Hayes, @Forbes, @Mr. Anon, @European-American
Obama sure loves to hear his voice. He goes on and on and on and on…blah, blah, blah…
But he sure knows a great segment of the public because they buy his schtick as ‘thoughtful’… Inasmuch as it is just words mouthing bullshit.
Obama always believed this. he always believed all of this stuff. he hates America, and always has.
of course he thinks you should pay reparations. he thinks you don’t deserve your money and should be stripped of all your hard earned cash. he thinks foreign alien invaders are 1000 times better people than core Americans who built a nation out of wilderness. he thinks homos should take over society. he thinks your kids should chop off their dicks. you name it, he believes it. Obama is a full blown Hate America Red Communist. anybody with a brain knew this from day 1.
Obama is the Jackie Robinson for leftists. by being polite and pretending he’s a moderate, he gets them in the door. then they destroy your country by bringing in the next 1000 Obamas after you agreed to take in the first. how could you not see this from a mile away?
Hey there Rufus -when you and ol’Ben are done pickin’ cotton today run downtown to the square and build a Greek Classic Revival courthouse for the town.
did africans build any part of the railroad infrastructure at all?
serious economics question: if there had been no war, and industrialization of the north and west continued at it’s historical pace, but continued to mostly not happen in the south, at what point would the south have been economically uncompetitive with the north, even for agriculture, to the point where they would be forced to largely abandon unskilled, less productive blue collar slave labor and join the industrial revolution?
around 1900? when does the tractor show up? around 1900 i think. tractor depends on auto development.
then again, in 2021, market forces are not forcing US agriculture to give up mexicans completely and go full robots, as they have in the Netherlands, where they can’t get an endless supply of mexicans for 5 dollars an hour. mexicans ARE better workers than africans though. have to factor that into the efficiency factor of the equations.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IiSwR6fT3lsReplies: @Dan Hayes, @Forbes, @Mr. Anon, @European-American
I’ve always liked Larry Elder. FOX has him on as a contributor from time to time, but only on “black issues”, which is rather patronizing. Why not talk to him about economics? Or foreign policy issues? He’s a smart guy, and I’d rather hear his opinion on any number of subjects than that of most of the lameos and muttonheads that FOX has on their regular roster.
The lion’s share of the Reparations lump sum (or annuity) will have to be based on compensation for the racism the recipient has been subjected to in the US since slavery was abolished (including during Obama’s two terms). What happened to ancestors will account for only a token part of the total. So Obama would get most of what US blacks descended from slaves will.
The wealthiest slaveholder in the South was Steven Duncan who had moved there from Carlisle, Pennsylvania, built a fortune and returned to the North. The value of the plantations Duncan was forced to leave was not the greater part of his net worth . Most of what I have read about the Antebellum South suggests the period of vast profits from cotton was just before Civil War, but the South was relatively poor nonetheless. If slavery had really been a goldmine then the South would have been so rich they’d have been easily able to buy ironclads ECT from other countries and fight the North to a standstill .
On the other hand, maybe it was just the Southern man was drinking, gambling, dueling and whoring so prodigiously that the the profits of slavery melted away; meanwhile, Northerners lived frugal lives of dutiful hard work and early nights. For instance, although young Lincoln was a lawyer, he did not have the luxury of a bed to himself and spent years sleeping with his landlord.
But Lincoln would nonetheless have been a great President ... if he had found a way to return the slaves to Africa. That achieved the War would have been worth it.
In the timeline we live in we got the War and still struggle with race. Lose, lose.Replies: @Prester John, @Hapalong Cassidy, @Wilkey, @MBlanc46
Supposedly President Grant (iirc) threatened to help return the former slaves to Africa, but mostly that was to frighten the South into treating them better, since they still needed the labor of emancipated blacks. What no one really foresaw was the massive welfare state we now have, not to mention laws making it incredibly difficult to fire incompetent employees, if they happen to be black. And of course there were naive people who didn’t understand back then (and even today, SMH) that the difference in human capital between blacks and whites wasn’t simply due to the fact that slaves had not been educated.
Visualize an America that had never imported a single Black Slave. (We will ignore, for now, the de facto slavery of White indentured servitude.) hat America would have no Slavery, no Civil War, no Racial Strife erupting every few years.
Would that America be richer or poorer than the current USA?
Every Minority person on this planet would still be living like an animal without the efforts, the exclusive efforts, of White Men.
They should be paying us reparations.Replies: @AnotherDad, @Wilkey
So basically a former British colony without blacks. So something like Australia, Canada, or New Zealand?
What a bunch of shitholes. (/sarc)
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified,
every book rewritten,
every picture has been repainted,
every statue and street building has been renamed,
every date has been altered.
“And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped.
“Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
– You know who.
Regardless of the morality of the issue, slavery was once legal. Whatever wealth was created by slave labor is today irrelevant as slaves had no agency, no ability to choose or deny. They were property and any wealth created by their labor belonged to their owners.
When the law made slavery illegal, the slave owners were deprived of their property without compensation. What about their heirs?
I don't see blacks ever leaving the US of their own volition unless the country descends to sub-Zimbabwean levels of poverty and dysfunction. They're not into exploring new places or trying new ways of living. Given how dissatisfied they claim to be with America, you'd imagine many of them would go abroad to seek now opportunities. But hardly any expatriate Americans I've met were black.Replies: @S. Anonyia
I don’t know about Africa, but you could easily form a colony in Belize if shit hits the fan here. I know family who moved there and enjoy a nice lifestyle.
Blacks are a net tax suck. They have been for most of our history, at least the last 155 years of it. Of course with the deficits the government has been running since 2008, technically virtually every citizen’s tax payments are less than what the government spends per capita. But with blacks that has always been the case. Add up all the extra money we spend on blacks on welfare payments and justice system costs and subtract it from the reparations they are supposedly entitled to and they would end up owing us.Replies: @J, @bomag, @Jon, @Skylark Thibedeau, @Dissident799, @ic1000, @Currahee, @Reg Cæsar
Furthermore, whatever wealth slavery produced was almost exclusively in the business of Southern agriculture. This wealth was entirely squandered and destroyed by the War.
Good point on the Caribbean comparables, Jack.
My general take on this question is that this is one of these rare historical “what if”s where we have a control group.
Anglo Saxons also settled three other places–Canada, Australia, New Zealand–where the inhabitants were still mostly doing hunter-gatherer activity, ergo were at low density and pushed aside for settlement. But those places did not have slavery.
America is richer than those places but it also has:
— way, way better farmland (and way way better climate than Canada)
— allowing much higher density settlement and economies of scale
— way better natural water transport
— better access (or for Canada just as good) access to foreign markets
So America should be richer than those places. And was/is from the get go.
My take is slavery–once cotton gin–speeded up development in the South, based on propagating the plantation model West, and industrial development up North. But then slavery vanished after 1865–massive Southern wealth wiped out, along with huge war debts for the whole nation incurred. And yet, that ushered in period of rapid industrial expansion in the US, so that by the close of the 19th century the US was the leading economy in the world, with the highest standard of living in the world … while the South with all the blacks was the most backward lagging part of it.
Not to be rude about it, but the evidence suggests that while some small set of white people benefited from slavery back in the day–fortunes were made, people lived well, etc.–overall blacks have net negative value in America (and other white civilizations), imposing high tax and social costs, degrading the quality of life particularly in our cities. destroying the value of quite a bit of nice urban real estate, lowering our standard of living … generally a boat anchor whites have had to drag along.
White people don't go around saying stuff like "white people built America" because there's no need to - it's quite obviously true. White people are in the position of Christopher Wren. In the middle of St. Paul's Cathedral there is is a plaque. It says "Si monumentum requiris circumspice" - If you are looking for my monument, look around you. Meaning this whole damn place is my monument.
If another measure of wealth is used ,say median wealth per adult , the order is quite different .
The US does much better -very much better -on mean average statistics than median average statistics ( where it is rather ordinary ) It is a country of one percenters after all
However, outright buying their vote may be an option once actual pro-Whites emerge in the political arena.Replies: @anonymousperson
No black would ever voluntarily leave a white country no matter how loud they cry “racism”.
My general take on this question is that this is one of these rare historical "what if"s where we have a control group.
Anglo Saxons also settled three other places--Canada, Australia, New Zealand--where the inhabitants were still mostly doing hunter-gatherer activity, ergo were at low density and pushed aside for settlement. But those places did not have slavery.
America is richer than those places but it also has:
-- way, way better farmland (and way way better climate than Canada)
-- allowing much higher density settlement and economies of scale
-- way better natural water transport
-- better access (or for Canada just as good) access to foreign markets
So America should be richer than those places. And was/is from the get go.
My take is slavery--once cotton gin--speeded up development in the South, based on propagating the plantation model West, and industrial development up North. But then slavery vanished after 1865--massive Southern wealth wiped out, along with huge war debts for the whole nation incurred. And yet, that ushered in period of rapid industrial expansion in the US, so that by the close of the 19th century the US was the leading economy in the world, with the highest standard of living in the world ... while the South with all the blacks was the most backward lagging part of it.
Not to be rude about it, but the evidence suggests that while some small set of white people benefited from slavery back in the day--fortunes were made, people lived well, etc.--overall blacks have net negative value in America (and other white civilizations), imposing high tax and social costs, degrading the quality of life particularly in our cities. destroying the value of quite a bit of nice urban real estate, lowering our standard of living ... generally a boat anchor whites have had to drag along.Replies: @anon, @Jack D, @Reg Cæsar, @sb, @res
Blacks benefited from the arrangement, too. Higher standard of living than the French. Compensated better than their working class counterparts in the brutal industrial cities of the North and Europe. Gainful employment. All needs provided for.
The harshest slave masters are found in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. The need for food, shelter, clothing, healthcare, support on old age, sex. Unrelenting.
My general take on this question is that this is one of these rare historical "what if"s where we have a control group.
Anglo Saxons also settled three other places--Canada, Australia, New Zealand--where the inhabitants were still mostly doing hunter-gatherer activity, ergo were at low density and pushed aside for settlement. But those places did not have slavery.
America is richer than those places but it also has:
-- way, way better farmland (and way way better climate than Canada)
-- allowing much higher density settlement and economies of scale
-- way better natural water transport
-- better access (or for Canada just as good) access to foreign markets
So America should be richer than those places. And was/is from the get go.
My take is slavery--once cotton gin--speeded up development in the South, based on propagating the plantation model West, and industrial development up North. But then slavery vanished after 1865--massive Southern wealth wiped out, along with huge war debts for the whole nation incurred. And yet, that ushered in period of rapid industrial expansion in the US, so that by the close of the 19th century the US was the leading economy in the world, with the highest standard of living in the world ... while the South with all the blacks was the most backward lagging part of it.
Not to be rude about it, but the evidence suggests that while some small set of white people benefited from slavery back in the day--fortunes were made, people lived well, etc.--overall blacks have net negative value in America (and other white civilizations), imposing high tax and social costs, degrading the quality of life particularly in our cities. destroying the value of quite a bit of nice urban real estate, lowering our standard of living ... generally a boat anchor whites have had to drag along.Replies: @anon, @Jack D, @Reg Cæsar, @sb, @res
I think that even for the (smarter) people saying this (like Obama) “black people built America” is not meant to be taken literally but as a sort of metaphorical expression of black awesomeness like a “black man invented the light bulb” or “there would be no NASA without black people”. These are also (beside being false) an expression of deep insecurity .
White people don’t go around saying stuff like “white people built America” because there’s no need to – it’s quite obviously true. White people are in the position of Christopher Wren. In the middle of St. Paul’s Cathedral there is is a plaque. It says “Si monumentum requiris circumspice” – If you are looking for my monument, look around you. Meaning this whole damn place is my monument.
You fail to take into account the growth industries that are very largely a creation of the black population. The private prison industry, for example, would not exist without them, surely that’s worth something?
BTW, any financial gurus on here that could give me advice regarding my large position in the floor sticker sector? I noticed that people aren't obeying those stickers very much anymore. I even had a cab driver tell me "now's the time to sell" ... but I'm not sure that's what he said, because he was wearing a thick face diaper. After the small tip I gave him, he may have been saying "you can go straight to hell". Hard to tell.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJDH76zY2IE
Obama and Springsteen call their podcast “Renegades: Born in the USA.”
At least they have a sense of humor. Both Obama and Springsteen grew up in privileged upper-middle class homes. But Springsteen has been LARPing as Joe Six Pack for over 50 years, and who knows for sure where Obama was born?
They remain a couple of graying trust fund babies, who have bright futures as spokespersons for AARP and as role models for their fellow trust fund babies of Anti-fa.
The U.S. is the richest country on earth and in all of history because a few million black slaves picked cotton in the Deep South from 1619 to 1865. White billionaires and multi-billionaires, millionaires and multi-millionaires, CEOs, lawyers, doctors, professors, politicians, actors, singers, musicians, professional athletes, etc., etc., owe their wealth and affluence to blacks who died as slaves 200-400 years ago or were freed over half a century ago.
Rich blacks should pay reparations to the millions of white victims of black violence and criminality, and to the families of the myriads of whites who have been and will be murdered by black criminals.
The best way to make a small fortune is to start with a big one. There is many a slip between cup and lip. In other words, money has a way of getting pissed away, one way or another – extravagant lifestyle, bad investments, etc.
In Gloria’s case, in the 1980s, she accused her former partners and her lawyer of fraud. After a lengthy trial (during which time the lawyer died), Vanderbilt won and was awarded nearly $1.7 million, but the money was never recovered. Vanderbilt also owed millions of dollars in back taxes, since the lawyer had never paid the IRS, and she was forced to sell her Southampton, New York and Upper East Side homes.
Blacks are a net tax suck. They have been for most of our history, at least the last 155 years of it. Of course with the deficits the government has been running since 2008, technically virtually every citizen’s tax payments are less than what the government spends per capita. But with blacks that has always been the case. Add up all the extra money we spend on blacks on welfare payments and justice system costs and subtract it from the reparations they are supposedly entitled to and they would end up owing us.Replies: @J, @bomag, @Jon, @Skylark Thibedeau, @Dissident799, @ic1000, @Currahee, @Reg Cæsar
Try 375 of it.
My general take on this question is that this is one of these rare historical "what if"s where we have a control group.
Anglo Saxons also settled three other places--Canada, Australia, New Zealand--where the inhabitants were still mostly doing hunter-gatherer activity, ergo were at low density and pushed aside for settlement. But those places did not have slavery.
America is richer than those places but it also has:
-- way, way better farmland (and way way better climate than Canada)
-- allowing much higher density settlement and economies of scale
-- way better natural water transport
-- better access (or for Canada just as good) access to foreign markets
So America should be richer than those places. And was/is from the get go.
My take is slavery--once cotton gin--speeded up development in the South, based on propagating the plantation model West, and industrial development up North. But then slavery vanished after 1865--massive Southern wealth wiped out, along with huge war debts for the whole nation incurred. And yet, that ushered in period of rapid industrial expansion in the US, so that by the close of the 19th century the US was the leading economy in the world, with the highest standard of living in the world ... while the South with all the blacks was the most backward lagging part of it.
Not to be rude about it, but the evidence suggests that while some small set of white people benefited from slavery back in the day--fortunes were made, people lived well, etc.--overall blacks have net negative value in America (and other white civilizations), imposing high tax and social costs, degrading the quality of life particularly in our cities. destroying the value of quite a bit of nice urban real estate, lowering our standard of living ... generally a boat anchor whites have had to drag along.Replies: @anon, @Jack D, @Reg Cæsar, @sb, @res
The Shirley Plantation in Charles City County [sic], Virginia is the oldest business in America.
Some small set of white people benefited from Madoff Investment Securities.
Some small set of white people benefited from Lou Pearlman’s Trans Continental International.
Some small set of white people benefited from Charles Ponzi’s Securities Exchange Company.
Some small set of white people benefited from Joseph Smith’s Kirtland Safety Society Anti-Banking Company.
How any of that concerns the rest of us is a mystery.
Back of the envelope, profit loss statement, blacks shouldn’t end up owing more than a few grand apiece. I’d be willing to waive it as a gesture of good faith.
How about examples of Northern dynastic wealth that survived the Civil War and Reconstruction? The slave trade was operated out of New England.
How about examples of Northern dynastic wealth that were the result of the Civil War and Reconstruction? Yankee war profiteering. Speculation on war bonds. Veterans' benefits.
The Butler family, first of Georgia then of Philadelphia, and itEngland.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierce_ButlerReplies: @Steve Sailer, @syonredux
The Atlantic Slave Trade operated out of Britain (Bristol and Liverpool). New England (Mostly Rhode Island) was very much a junior partner.
Frankly, I can’t think of a single great American fortune that emerged out of the Atlantic Slave Trade. The Astors ( John Jacob Astor was the first American multi-millionaire) , for example, became rich through the fur trade, New York real estate, and the Old China Trade.
No one really springs to mind. The Rockefellers certainly didn’t get rich that way.
Mules contributed a thousand times more agricultural wealth in America than negroes.
In defense of Obama, this is, by Woke standards, a fairly reasonable comment. Talk to your average PBS viewer, and they’ll tell you that America was built on cotton and redlining…..
Atherton, California is the wealthiest city in the entire United States. The Wakanda demographic will claim that Atherton’s wealth was built on the blood, sweat, and tears of Black body labor even thou
In Gloria's case, in the 1980s, she accused her former partners and her lawyer of fraud. After a lengthy trial (during which time the lawyer died), Vanderbilt won and was awarded nearly $1.7 million, but the money was never recovered. Vanderbilt also owed millions of dollars in back taxes, since the lawyer had never paid the IRS, and she was forced to sell her Southampton, New York and Upper East Side homes.Replies: @Art Deco
She supposedly inherited $4.5 million in 1945. Real interest and dividends on a pile like that might have amounted to $100,000 a year. At the time, the ratio of direct tax collections to personal income was 0.106. If 1/3 of her income was devoted to direct taxes, she’d have had a household income of about $67,000 a year. Mean household income after direct taxes were levied was in 1945 around $4,000 per year. She’d have been in the top 0.5% just living off the rents.
The South preferred to get their goods from Britain, not the Northern US (Hence, Southern anger over the tariff).
And the ships that transported the slaves were mostly British (Bristol and Liverpool).
As for the role of cotton in the Anglo-American economy:
–Slavery and Anglo-American Capitalism Revisited, Gavin Wright
https://bradleyahansen.blogspot.com/2016/12/capitalism-and-slavery-debate-is-not.html
The US would have been better-off without slavery.
http://mshistorynow.mdah.state.ms.us/articles/161/cotton-in-a-global-economy-mississippi-1800-1860Furthermore...
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/african-americans-many-rivers-to-cross/history/why-was-cotton-king'
Man. Oh man, would our country be gigantically better off without them.Replies: @Ganderson
I’ve said it a million times: hockey players and their hot WAGS are the only people I’d allow in. Maybe their kids, but they’d all have to go home once their careers were over.
OK, the following just popped up into my mind after reading Steve’s post:
1) Today, the Book Review in Huntington(just north of Mr. and Mrs Derbyshire):table that contains the new hardcovers going on the NYT Bestsellar list…..right when you walk in……MEDICORE…THE DANGEROUS LEGACY OF WHITE MALES…….written by a young women who looks like she has a Nigerian Father and White Mother….Nigerian name……
2)Of course the Black Racist Obama wants affirmative action to extend to AFRICAN LEGAL IMMIGRANTS and their US born African geneline…
3)The HISTORIC NATIVE BORN WHITE AMERICAN MAJORITY gets reparations for the 16 years of rule by Bill Clinton and Barack Obama…16 years of nonwhite of SCAB LABOR LEGAL IMMIGRANTS and their US Born nonwhite geneline…
4)Barack Obama serves the interests of the Revolting White Liberal Greedy Cheating Billionaire Class..
5)The Civil War was most definitely not worth it
6)The 1964 Civil Rights Act should never have been passed…
7)Barack Obama is an indictable WAR CRIMINAL
Have I forgotten anything?
Steve…don’t forget:MEDICORE:THE DANGEROUS LEGACY OF WHITE MALES….Steve…do you think she has a Nigerian LEGAL IMMIGRANT Father….?
No. It’s more than that. One landlord systematically cheats his tenants out of their rightful share of crop sales. Just as he shorts customers in his store whenever he can.
Of course, there will always be people trying to cheat their fellow-man., no matter economic system they live under. But the tenant system offers its own inducements to unfair dealing. If you get thrown off your land it’s not like you can visit the next landlord down the road like I can switch grocery stores today.
Then again, it was an improvement over slavery. For instance, you couldn’t be sold away at whim.
My point was that both ways involved exploitation. Absence of slavery didn’t magically turn everyone into a fair dealer.
Peel’s Mill was deprecated by the townsfolk, not just for rumours and actual examples of the unchecked cruelty of the overseers, but that the considerable expense of interring cohort after cohort of workhouse children (not always orphans) fell entirely on the ratepayers and “heritors”. There were repeated outbreaks of various virulent infectious diseases among these half-starved wretches, as one might imagine.
(Virginian?) tobacco-smoking was specified by the medical experts as a ‘preventative’ for all concerned.
No shortage of foundlings, though, so no need to import slaves. Just sling the corpses out and draft in a new lot. They’d not be missed. It’s fortunate that very few probably bred, or Obama would be hounding their descendants for Reparations.
My own great-great-grandfather had a considerable bleaching-and-dyeing works right across the way from Peel's Entry on Stand Lane, about 500 yards, might have had about 20 men and 60 boys at the peak. And his cousin of the same name on the next block, at the same trade. Other cousins by marriage had textile-related (paper, dyeing, finishing and so on) factories cheek-by-jowl about the place, wherever they could get a discharge for their foul wastes into the River Irwell.
What might cause you to hold and dispute is that my old man Joe and his kin were initially in economic conflict with Bobby Peel from up Tottington (I think), on account of them starting out as handloom weavers before the new Factory system got going.
Highly skilled hand-weavers of linen (like Robbie Burns) and woollens, with all the outwork that that entailed (money for wives and daughters, as could stop at home and mind bairns, the fire, pigs, cabbages and the cow, literal spinsters). So along with their natural (eventually Primitive Methodist) human kindness, they had every reason to slander the monstrous machine economy thrust upon them. Put them right out of the game, until they caught on to the modern practices and "diversified".
But I don't think they were wrong. They knew what they were looking at in that damned Mill. White Slavery, worse than feudalism.
Suppose Amazon just opened up a distribution center next to your mom'n'pop general store. With Red China Rules. Suicide nets, the whole nine yards.
They knew that was what was next, for them and their children.
A random black guy in South Africa once told me an unsolicited joke. He asked “why did Lord of the Rings take so long to happen?” To which he answered “because there were no black people in it to do all of the work.”
As someone who likes travelling in Africa partly because the vast majority of the locals aren’t exactly work obsessed, I was so confused that I was even too slow to fake a laugh.
It’d be like a Norwegian telling me that this year’s Brazilian Carnival was a bust because there were no Norwegians there to get the party started.
You’d wonder what planet they were from.
Stevie Wonder moving to Ghana to protect grandchildren from racism
Good point, Bill. In addition, the hair care products sector of our economy would be a shell of its former shelf were black people not around. Before you guys do anything rash, let me know so I can sell my holdings.
BTW, any financial gurus on here that could give me advice regarding my large position in the floor sticker sector? I noticed that people aren’t obeying those stickers very much anymore. I even had a cab driver tell me “now’s the time to sell” … but I’m not sure that’s what he said, because he was wearing a thick face diaper. After the small tip I gave him, he may have been saying “you can go straight to hell”. Hard to tell.
Oh, come on, Kolya, I thought we’d put that old IT wives tale to bed. The birth certificate says “Hawaii” right on it, up in the top right of the very first layer of the Photoshop file.
You fancy a pair of impecunious college students traveled halfway around the world to avail themselves of Kenyan obstetric care? Or was the object to introduce Ann Dunham to BO, Sr's legal wife?Replies: @Achmed E. Newman
But Lincoln would nonetheless have been a great President ... if he had found a way to return the slaves to Africa. That achieved the War would have been worth it.
In the timeline we live in we got the War and still struggle with race. Lose, lose.Replies: @Prester John, @Hapalong Cassidy, @Wilkey, @MBlanc46
Indeed, AD, but being dead put a definite crimp in his ability to do that.
The instructor just smiled, and said “ so it didn’t occur to any of you that this incident, as described, is ludicrous and that Douglass made it up for propaganda purposes?” I liked that guy a lot.Oh, and Ken Burns, who in every one of his documentaries gets to a point where the message is “Woe, the poor Negroes,” lives in the whitest town in the whitest county in the whitest state in the whitest region of the country.Replies: @MBlanc46
Are the “couple of guys” you’re referring to Fogel and Engerman? Time on the Cross and Fogel’s later book are required reading for anyone who wants to talk about the conditions of the black slaves in the US
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IiSwR6fT3lsReplies: @Dan Hayes, @Forbes, @Mr. Anon, @European-American
Thanks. I couldn’t stand the idea of listening to the podcast. But with skeptical background commentary, it’s listenable-to. For a few minutes anyway.
So if my Obama-bio-reading-and-admiring friends ask me, did you listen to the Barack-Bruce podcast, I can say, yeah bits, can’t say I remember much though…
1 Obama very lawyerishly almost-agreeing with Bruce Springsteen that white people should have to give blacks money, bemoaning that the country was not ready for it during his administration (being far too racist at the time it had just elected a black man president),
2 Obama claiming that in a Hawaii high school locker room he was called a "coon" and reacted by punching the speaker in the face. The speaker, bewildered (and notably nonviolent) asked why. Larry points out it is truly remarkable that, after all the pages Obama has written and speeches he has given, and considering that the only thing he ever talks about is himself and his literally remarkable life, this story has somehow never come up before. It is also hard to believe that Barack Obama has ever punched anyone (although I'm not looking for a fight from Michelle if you understand what I am saying). Springsteen thanks him profusely for having attacked a white person.
3 Springsteen describes a, uh, not a story but a stream of consciousness dream image, um, where this guy is standing on a car but it's not Michael Jackson in the Black Or White extended video but actually maybe it is. And it's about how racism is bad but is also cured with money.
For once could we have the Republicans--heck, i'm not even asking for ten, i'm willing to settle for *one* good man in Sodom--stand up for Americans, stand up for their people.
The key point: reparations only with repatriation.
You renounce citizenship and return to Africa (only Africa) ... here's $100,000 for you ancestors labor.
The plain fact is the big beneficiaries of American slavery now ... are current black Americans.
You want to bitch about your ancestors enslavement--fine. We'll pay you for it. But ... you give back the huge benny you got in exchange. Living in a rich, (previously) well run, white nation.Replies: @RichardTaylor, @nokangaroos, @Mike Tre, @Moses
The only thing worse for a Black than living in a racist America founded by bigoted Whites would be leaving a racist America founded by bigoted Whites.
Another data point:
what % of U.S. whites actually owned slaves in 1860? I believe this is around 3%.
what % of U.S. blacks in 2021 murder, rob, rape or enslave with drugs other blacks? Call this % A.
Does anyone believe A<3%?Replies: @Moses
Some of my ancestors owned slaves. Does that make me a Bad White(TM)?
Stop buying their frame.
It’s simply ridiculous. You’re talking about the most useless people on the planet who happened to have a better natural protection against malaria than european indentured slaves.
If blacks had never been brought to the Americas, these African diseases would never have arrived and white indentured workers would have done fine.
But the Africans arrived very early, brought by the Spanish, before the English were even involved.
Nobody understood the huge price Europeans (not to mention the American natives) paid in exchange for the African slaves.
If blacks had never been brought to the Americas, these African diseases would never have arrived and white indentured workers would have done fine.
But the Africans arrived very early, brought by the Spanish, before the English were even involved.
Nobody understood the huge price Europeans (not to mention the American natives) paid in exchange for the African slaves.
(Virginian?) tobacco-smoking was specified by the medical experts as a 'preventative' for all concerned.No shortage of foundlings, though, so no need to import slaves. Just sling the corpses out and draft in a new lot. They'd not be missed. It's fortunate that very few probably bred, or Obama would be hounding their descendants for Reparations.Replies: @Expletive Deleted
I ought to be clear, and do a Sailerian Disclaimer about this, it’s not a Thing I ever learned from books. Just family talk.
My own great-great-grandfather had a considerable bleaching-and-dyeing works right across the way from Peel’s Entry on Stand Lane, about 500 yards, might have had about 20 men and 60 boys at the peak. And his cousin of the same name on the next block, at the same trade. Other cousins by marriage had textile-related (paper, dyeing, finishing and so on) factories cheek-by-jowl about the place, wherever they could get a discharge for their foul wastes into the River Irwell.
What might cause you to hold and dispute is that my old man Joe and his kin were initially in economic conflict with Bobby Peel from up Tottington (I think), on account of them starting out as handloom weavers before the new Factory system got going.
Highly skilled hand-weavers of linen (like Robbie Burns) and woollens, with all the outwork that that entailed (money for wives and daughters, as could stop at home and mind bairns, the fire, pigs, cabbages and the cow, literal spinsters). So along with their natural (eventually Primitive Methodist) human kindness, they had every reason to slander the monstrous machine economy thrust upon them. Put them right out of the game, until they caught on to the modern practices and “diversified”.
But I don’t think they were wrong. They knew what they were looking at in that damned Mill. White Slavery, worse than feudalism.
Suppose Amazon just opened up a distribution center next to your mom’n’pop general store. With Red China Rules. Suicide nets, the whole nine yards.
They knew that was what was next, for them and their children.
Just how wealthy was America during the time of the Civil War, with no electricity, no central heating, no oil powered machinery?
My general take on this question is that this is one of these rare historical "what if"s where we have a control group.
Anglo Saxons also settled three other places--Canada, Australia, New Zealand--where the inhabitants were still mostly doing hunter-gatherer activity, ergo were at low density and pushed aside for settlement. But those places did not have slavery.
America is richer than those places but it also has:
-- way, way better farmland (and way way better climate than Canada)
-- allowing much higher density settlement and economies of scale
-- way better natural water transport
-- better access (or for Canada just as good) access to foreign markets
So America should be richer than those places. And was/is from the get go.
My take is slavery--once cotton gin--speeded up development in the South, based on propagating the plantation model West, and industrial development up North. But then slavery vanished after 1865--massive Southern wealth wiped out, along with huge war debts for the whole nation incurred. And yet, that ushered in period of rapid industrial expansion in the US, so that by the close of the 19th century the US was the leading economy in the world, with the highest standard of living in the world ... while the South with all the blacks was the most backward lagging part of it.
Not to be rude about it, but the evidence suggests that while some small set of white people benefited from slavery back in the day--fortunes were made, people lived well, etc.--overall blacks have net negative value in America (and other white civilizations), imposing high tax and social costs, degrading the quality of life particularly in our cities. destroying the value of quite a bit of nice urban real estate, lowering our standard of living ... generally a boat anchor whites have had to drag along.Replies: @anon, @Jack D, @Reg Cæsar, @sb, @res
America is richer than the countries you name because it has a much larger population and inhabitable area , a longer history of settlement and prefers GDP ( nominal ) as the measure of wealth
If another measure of wealth is used ,say median wealth per adult , the order is quite different .
The US does much better -very much better -on mean average statistics than median average statistics ( where it is rather ordinary ) It is a country of one percenters after all
The highlights are
1 Obama very lawyerishly almost-agreeing with Bruce Springsteen that white people should have to give blacks money, bemoaning that the country was not ready for it during his administration (being far too racist at the time it had just elected a black man president),
2 Obama claiming that in a Hawaii high school locker room he was called a “coon” and reacted by punching the speaker in the face. The speaker, bewildered (and notably nonviolent) asked why. Larry points out it is truly remarkable that, after all the pages Obama has written and speeches he has given, and considering that the only thing he ever talks about is himself and his literally remarkable life, this story has somehow never come up before. It is also hard to believe that Barack Obama has ever punched anyone (although I’m not looking for a fight from Michelle if you understand what I am saying). Springsteen thanks him profusely for having attacked a white person.
3 Springsteen describes a, uh, not a story but a stream of consciousness dream image, um, where this guy is standing on a car but it’s not Michael Jackson in the Black Or White extended video but actually maybe it is. And it’s about how racism is bad but is also cured with money.
Might be.
The birth certificate says “Hawaii” right on it, up in the top right of the very first layer of the Photoshop file.
You fancy a pair of impecunious college students traveled halfway around the world to avail themselves of Kenyan obstetric care? Or was the object to introduce Ann Dunham to BO, Sr’s legal wife?
You fancy a pair of impecunious college students traveled halfway around the world to avail themselves of Kenyan obstetric care? Or was the object to introduce Ann Dunham to BO, Sr's legal wife?Replies: @Achmed E. Newman
Got no idea, Art. It was a joke.
You've got 'no idea'? SavvyReplies: @Achmed E. Newman
And don’t forget special education, school security guards teachers assistants counselors coordinators assistant principals for this and that and the endless proliferation of non teachers to wrangle the blacks through the school system.
For instance, wiki informs that Carranza (NYC school chancellor) is given a staff consisting of:
• 1 COO (chief)
• 1 senior deputy chancellor
• 5 deputy chancellors
“As it stood though, the lives of blacks in the antebellum United States were better than those of most people elsewhere in the world. Blacks enjoyed a standard of living higher than the White populations of Europe.”
Citations required here on your part, or retract your claim.
Perhaps you need be reminded that black Africans enjoyed their personal freedom and a standard of living quite comfortable in the Songhai Empire (during which the European slave trade begun). Of course, it became tenuous along the coastline–but not in the interior, that would occur in the mid to late 1800’s :(—thereafter when Europeans sought to extract mammon from the “Dark Continent”.
Should not southern whites picked their own damn cotton?
Obama’s descended from slave owners on his communist maternal side. Let him pay reparations.
And the ships that transported the slaves were mostly British (Bristol and Liverpool).
As for the role of cotton in the Anglo-American economy:-Slavery and Anglo-American Capitalism Revisited, Gavin Wrighthttps://bradleyahansen.blogspot.com/2016/12/capitalism-and-slavery-debate-is-not.html
The US would have been better-off without slavery.Replies: @Corvinus
Yet…
http://mshistorynow.mdah.state.ms.us/articles/161/cotton-in-a-global-economy-mississippi-1800-1860
Furthermore…
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/african-americans-many-rivers-to-cross/history/why-was-cotton-king’
Old jokes department: (I understand Barry Goldwater told this one back in the day)
A black man, a white man, and a Jew are walking along the beach together when one of them kicks open a buried lamp. Out of the lamp comes a genie. Genie says “Well, normally I give out 3 wishes to whoever frees me, but since there are three of you, I will grant each of you one wish.”
Black man says “I want a million dollars in cash”.
BOOM, million bucks appear, and black man runs off happy with his cash.
White man says “I want a million dollars in stocks and bonds in a well-balanced portfolio”
BOOM, an account summary appears in his hand totaling a million dollars, and white man runs off happy.
So what do you want? Says the genie to the Jew.
Jew says ” I’d like some cheap jewelry and that colored boy’s address”.
Be funnier.
You’ve got ‘no idea’? Savvy
I've got no idea whether the young Miss Dunham and Senior O had much money or not. I had assumed that both of them were well off enough, seeing as they ended up traveling all across the world. Airplane tickets were 2 or 3 times higher in price than they are today in real dollars. So, no, I've got no idea.Replies: @Art Deco
I agree with Obama. Since both most slaves and the socialists of the time supported slavery, and have since been attempting to enslave everyone, the far-left should pay up! …starting with sending checks to descendants of Union War veterans and those killed by Blacks.
You've got 'no idea'? SavvyReplies: @Achmed E. Newman
I don’t use the word “sperge” often (don’t even like the term), but, c’mon, man! It’s not all my fault that you can’t get the joke. Do you want it explained to you?
I’ve got no idea whether the young Miss Dunham and Senior O had much money or not. I had assumed that both of them were well off enough, seeing as they ended up traveling all across the world. Airplane tickets were 2 or 3 times higher in price than they are today in real dollars. So, no, I’ve got no idea.
No, it's your fault that you're not funny.
I’ve got no idea whether the young Miss Dunham and Senior O had much money or not.
Her father sold furniture for a living. Her mother in later years had a good job at the Bank of Hawaii, but that hadn't happened yet. She was attending the local state school. She didn't have much money.
The last I heard, Mr. Springsteen had $300M (face value) tied up in municipal (i.e. tax-free) bonds; he once paid a lot of taxes.
I think ex-President Obama’s pension is $400K a year. The total pension bill for all, USG retirees probably runs more than $100 billion annually.
Reparations (redistributed tax revenues) are very good for them.
My general take on this question is that this is one of these rare historical "what if"s where we have a control group.
Anglo Saxons also settled three other places--Canada, Australia, New Zealand--where the inhabitants were still mostly doing hunter-gatherer activity, ergo were at low density and pushed aside for settlement. But those places did not have slavery.
America is richer than those places but it also has:
-- way, way better farmland (and way way better climate than Canada)
-- allowing much higher density settlement and economies of scale
-- way better natural water transport
-- better access (or for Canada just as good) access to foreign markets
So America should be richer than those places. And was/is from the get go.
My take is slavery--once cotton gin--speeded up development in the South, based on propagating the plantation model West, and industrial development up North. But then slavery vanished after 1865--massive Southern wealth wiped out, along with huge war debts for the whole nation incurred. And yet, that ushered in period of rapid industrial expansion in the US, so that by the close of the 19th century the US was the leading economy in the world, with the highest standard of living in the world ... while the South with all the blacks was the most backward lagging part of it.
Not to be rude about it, but the evidence suggests that while some small set of white people benefited from slavery back in the day--fortunes were made, people lived well, etc.--overall blacks have net negative value in America (and other white civilizations), imposing high tax and social costs, degrading the quality of life particularly in our cities. destroying the value of quite a bit of nice urban real estate, lowering our standard of living ... generally a boat anchor whites have had to drag along.Replies: @anon, @Jack D, @Reg Cæsar, @sb, @res
An early example of privatizing the profits while socializing the costs? (on reflection, that behavior has probably been around since the beginnings of humanity, just easier and better documented today)
I’m sorry
For something that I didn’t do
Lynched somebody
But I don’t know who
You blame me for slavery
A hundred years before I was born
Minor Threat’s “Guilty of Being White” written by Ian MacKaye
I wasn’t there, I didn’t do it, You don’t get any dough from me. That’s what I think about reparations.
Racial considerations aside, don’t overlook the cost of administrators back at HQ.
For instance, wiki informs that Carranza (NYC school chancellor) is given a staff consisting of:
• 1 COO (chief)
• 1 senior deputy chancellor
• 5 deputy chancellors
I've got no idea whether the young Miss Dunham and Senior O had much money or not. I had assumed that both of them were well off enough, seeing as they ended up traveling all across the world. Airplane tickets were 2 or 3 times higher in price than they are today in real dollars. So, no, I've got no idea.Replies: @Art Deco
It’s not all my fault that you can’t get the joke.
No, it’s your fault that you’re not funny.
I’ve got no idea whether the young Miss Dunham and Senior O had much money or not.
Her father sold furniture for a living. Her mother in later years had a good job at the Bank of Hawaii, but that hadn’t happened yet. She was attending the local state school. She didn’t have much money.
Agreed. Also, ask Obama how much money the parents of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom should pay Davidson, Boyd, Cobbins, Thomas, and Coleman?
I also read that there is a minor movement of blacks going back to Africa. I read an article, in which one black guy felt relieved to no longer have to deal with America’s “racial history”.
In other words, the Democrats (Obama, Reverend Wright, etc) have brainwashed many blacks to really believe they’re victims of racism, when in reality they are the most privileged race in the country.
So like a judo throw, we can use the energy of the race-grifters against their own interests and in defense of our interests.
With that in mind, we should talk more about “separation reparations” or “repatriation reparations”. If the country’s so racist, then why won’t you take 100k to leave it? Some will take the money, and the ones who won’t, will thus be revealing to the world they are just whiny parasites.
Not just malaria. Also yellow fever and the hookworm described in the book, “The Germ of Laziness.”
If blacks had never been brought to the Americas, these African diseases would never have arrived and white indentured workers would have done fine.
But the Africans arrived very early, brought by the Spanish, before the English were even involved.
Nobody understood the huge price Europeans (not to mention the American natives) paid in exchange for the African slaves.
Not just malaria. Also yellow fever and the hookworm described in the book, “The Germ of Laziness.”
If blacks had never been brought to the Americas, these African diseases would never have arrived and white indentured workers would have done fine.
But the Africans arrived very early, brought by the Spanish, before the English were even involved.
Nobody understood the huge price Europeans (not to mention the American natives) paid in exchange for the African slaves.
The wealth of America was built by slavery.
Also, the wealth of America was built by immigrants.
Pick one.