[TheOrator]

My recent attempts at beginning debates have for the most part resulted in Spoon saying "yeah, pretty much," Civ and I going back and forth, and then stagnation and death. So here I've created an open-ended debate based on socialist propaganda newsletter Fight Back!.


http://www.fightbacknews.org

This here magazine is full of controversial positions on controversial issues. I'll get the party started with two simultaneous debates:

1) Hawaiian Sovereignty: I was really surprised to find that I support the prospect of Hawaiian sovereignty on two conditions: the majority of the population supports it, and we can still call Hawaiian Pizza Hawaiian Pizza.

2) Slavery Reparations: I was entirely unsurprised to learn that I do not support this group's (and, I'm sure, others') bid for fiscal reparations to the African-American community for centuries of slavery and the rest. When Sherman made his promise (that sadly was not fulfilled), he made it to the actual victims of slavery. These people are certainly not. Hell, considering the amount of slave-rape that occurred at the time, a good number of them are probably descendants of the slave-owners as well.

So I'd like to get these debates going for a while, and then when one or more dies off, I or another can go to the Fight Back! website and pick another issue. It'll be a gay ol' time!

[Spoon Poetic]

Even when I learned about the annexation of Hawaii in grade school, I was sad and disagreed. That was totally bogus. If the Hawaiian people want to be their own country again, I say let them! Maybe Puerto Rico can be our 50th state. They already have all the perks without any of the drawbacks. Put it to a vote!




As for the slavery reparations - I have mixed feelings on this. It definitely should have happened, and it didn't. Should it happen now? Well. On the one hand, these people were not slaves. On the other hand, a large majority of those in poverty are black (and it might even be that the majority of blacks are in poverty? I need to check that stat), and this is in large part due to slavery, and the after-effects, and never being able to come up from that. I doubt a mule would help anyone at this point, and there's certainly not enough acres to go around, but I dunno. Really I don't think there is any fair way to pull this off without traveling back in time and really giving everyone their 40acres/mule, or something equally as silly. I just don't see an "apology package" being viable at this point, though I understand the issue and wish something could be done. But I also don't want it to fall on ME and MY family, as we had nothing to do with slavery. I can't help what my great-great-great-great-grandpeople did. But I do agree that the lack of the "apology package" (or whatever you want to call it) when slavery was abolished, along with the way blacks were treated for sooo many years, is a large reason why so many blacks are in poverty today.

[J m HofMarN]

Hawaii - Let them do whatever they want as long as the flow of my fruit cups is not interrupted. The pineapple must flow. Seriously though, the US came by the islands in an unfair way, but that doesn't give a green light to random secession. The black panthers wrote extensively on the issue of cultural nationalism, and I agree with them: Fuck that.

If the secessionists have economic and political goals to help the native and other peoples of the islands, then I say go for it. If they feel native Hawaiians are treated unfairly under a foreign government, then I'm with them. But if this is about "Hey, we're Hawaaians, they're not, let's secede!" then I don't see that as good grounds for it. I will definately read up on the issue to learn about the causes for this movement. Maybe taxation of trade routes is involved.

Reparations for slaves - Fuck that. I want reparations/prosecutions for the families of civil rights leaders and black panther party members killed by reactionary elements or the police. Reparations and freedom for BPP members in prison. There should be investment in urban centers both in industry and education, and community control of the police as called for by Bobby Seale. There are plenty of living people who have experienced and are currently experiencing the continued policies of Jim Crow, and we should deal with current injustices and correct those before we think about going back to the previous epoch of racism. Also, we must consider that 1 out of 10 young black men in this country are still enslaved within the prison industrial complex, where they work largely just for their room and board, the very same conditions they labored in in the 1800s.

Case in point: Judge Julius Hoffman, at the Chicago 7 trials, had Bobbly Seale chained to a chair and gagged during court procedings when he attempted to act as his own counsel after finding his court appointed attorney incompetent. He deserves reparations. Same with the families of Emett Till, Fred Hampton, and others. And we must also free Leonard Peltier and Mumia Abu Jamal.

So, no, I don't at all agree that we should be distributing mules to any black folks, until we deal with the current societal ills that plague them.

[civilian_number_two]

Slave reparations: let's say I offer JM $6000 for his car, in 10 payments. Before I make the second payment, someone kills him. His son and sole heir appeals to the court and the court demands that I pay his son and sole heir the remaining payments for the car that I own. Guess what? I have to pay it!

I doubt reparations will ever be paid to anyone who can show a direct bloodline to a victim of slavery from the period where reparations were promised. However the legal question is simple.

I don't know anything about Hawaiian Sovereignty but maybe I'll read up on it and form some kind of knee-jerk response to it.

[Spoon Poetic]

Yeah, but, Civ - I didn't buy that car from JM. I don't want to have to pay for it. But if we did some sort of grand bought-the-car-from-JM-reparations scheme, I would have to.

I think it would be more productive to, like Jm said, take care of what's happening NOW rather than try to clumsily make up for what different people did to different people in the past.

[Otal Nimrodi]

This is more... You bought a car from JM, and then JM and you died. Then the car was forgotten about for a hundred years. Now all of JM's descendants want all of your descendants to pay them each the six thousand you promised JM.

As far as reparations go, as great as it would be, its simply not economically viable. we have a bank bailout and an auto bailout. We can't afford a black people bailout.




As far as Hawaii goes, if the majority of Hawaii wants to secede, then Hawaii should secede. But I somehow feel that this isn't the opinion of the majority.

[TheOrator]

The family of Emmit Till doesn't deserve reparations any more than any other families of murder victims deserve reparations.

Sure, Emmit Till was a bad deal, but the government was not responsible.


And Civ, Sherman's "Forty Acres and a Mule" was his position, but it was not the government's. After Lincoln's assassination, Johnson became president and overruled his promise. There is no legal claim to any number of acres or mules. Besides, the idea that every black person in America is a descendant of slaves is absurd, and I doubt very much we have accurate enough genealogical records to determine who is.

[civilian_number_two]

I never said that every black person in America descended from slaves. I said every black person descended from slaves would have a legal right to any promise formally made by a government.

I agree in principle with the idea that it's nuts to try to resurrect a century-old argument all of a sudden, but that's not the case. This is in fact an argument that hasn't ended since it was opened back then. This isn't a car that was forgotten about for a century and then suddenly brought up. But to complete the analogy, only one party died. The US government, the car buyer, is still alive and capable of making good on its debt to the children of the original car owner.

So ... banks and automobile companies should get governent because in the former case they have enormous profits but are able to show a loss in exactly one fiscal year and in the latter case becasue they have made substandard products for 4 decades. But displaced and abused people shouldn't ever be repaid money even if it was promised to them, because it was a long time ago and we should get over it.

The long time ago argument is interesting. When does that start? If the government ignores the question long enough, would the legal claim of the victims eventually run out? Does this give governments the ability to act as they please and to make whatever promises they like, knowing that they can ignore the consequences and they'll eventually go away?

The point Orator makes about it never being a government promise is the only interesting one. If one president promised it and another tried to repeal that promise, that would be one thing. But you're saying that it was Sherman, and not Lincoln? Did Sherman have government authority when he made the promise? If so, then too bad for that argument. I don't know enough about the history of American atrocities, but this seems analogous to the Canadian treatment of her native peoples. In that case certian promises were made in exchange for treaties and military alliances, and the payments were never made. Those argumenets rage on still, and folks here like to say that we can't pay back dead people so we should just wash our hands of it and move on. And all the systemic abuse of the reservation and residential school system should be forgotten as well, even if it's only 30 years old. Because come on, we got today's problems to deal with.

Just to head off a common mistaken counterargument: paying a man's ten children money owed to the man isn't to pay ten times the amount owed. It is to pay the same amount, divided ten ways.

[Otal Nimrodi]

Whether Sherman had the authority or not, he would have been making the promise on the part of the executive branch. The head of which would be able to repeal it.

And the US government is still around, but it clearly doesn't have the same members. Johnson, Sherman, and Lincoln are long dead. The current government be a descendant of the former government.

And if I may ask, by the way, if we are giving this to all the descendants of black people who were slaves at the time of emancipation, where are we GETTING it?

At the time it was a lot clearer. We're getting it from people who seceded from the United States. Its a lot easier to say we're going to punish them than it is to say that the government should take the land from the farmers who work it now.

We couldn't really take 40 acres and a mule these days without pissing off a lot of people.

And speaking of the mule, how are we going to divide it between all of the slave's descendants? Just curious on that one, that's not a counter-argument, that's a curiosity. Would we give them mule-meat dinners?

Although as it seems, we never promised anything anyway, if Snopes is to be believed.

http://www.snopes.co...es/blacktax.asp

This post has been edited by Otal Nimrodi: 13 December 2008 - 07:13 PM

[civilian_number_two]

Well, that may be why it's never been repaid. Again I know very little of American domestic attrocities. I'm just saying if a real promise was made by an eternal instittution to an individual, then it can be paid to that individual's descendents.

And of course now it would just be the cash equivalent. Noone has much use for a mule nowadays, much less 1/18 of one, or whatever.