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| Who Else Should Pay Reparations? (Hint: It starts with "D") |
| 2005-07-05 |
| Hat tip: RealClearPolitics No comment necessary - this speaks for itself. News item: The Chicago City Council initiated efforts to cancel contracts with the Wachovia Savings Bank after the bank apologized for its ties with the slave trade. An investigation, required by the bankâs participation in a public housing project, revealed that of the more than a hundred banks North Carolina-based Wachovia has acquired, one of them once put hundreds of African-American slaves to work on railroads and another accepted slaves as collateral for loans that defaulted in the early 1800s. Members of the City Council are also discussing seeking reparations from the bank. An Address to the Chicago City Council Members of the City Council, I stand before you today to offer you my congratulations for your diligent efforts in ferreting out the past support of slavery by the Wachovia Corporation, the Aetna Insurance Company, and other financial institutions. It is a grim irony that, even today, such corporate entities should still be reaping the benefits from what is without doubt the sorriest chapter of our nationâs history. Not only do your efforts help in setting the historical record straight. They also offer the possibility â through the concept of joint-and-several liability and many other doctrines developed by our nationâs great trial lawyers â that these institutions will at long last be made to pay monetary damages for their past acts. I would like to direct your attention, however, to an institution with far greater financial resources whose historical role in abetting slavery and resisting its abolition is manifestly clear, yet which, even today, continues to reap benefits from this nefarious record. I speak, of course, of the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party was, throughout the 19th century, the party of the South and, ipso facto, the Party of Slavery. In the years preceding the outbreak of the Civil War, you will recall, the Democratic Party, north and south, supported slavery. Although there was considerable opposition to slavery in the North, it did not coalesce until the founding of the great Republican Party in the 1850s. In the famous Lincoln-Douglas Debates â which took place right here in your state, Lincoln, the Republican, was the opponent of slavery, while Douglas, the Democrat, supported it under the principle that the majority of people in the slave states were in favor of it. In 1860, the South voted for Douglas, the Democrat, while the North voted Republican. When Lincoln won, the South, rather than abiding by the results of the election, attempted to secede, plunging the nation into our greatest fratricide, the Civil War. After the War, the South regrouped around the Democratic Party, which became known as the party of âRum, Romanism and Rebellion,â the âRebellionâ being the Southâs effort to secede. When Republicans tried to organize state governments in the South that included African-Americans, the Democrats called them âcarpetbaggersâ and âscalawagsâ and attempted to drive them out. The situation remained in flux until the disputed election of Rutherford Hayes, in which Hayes was awarded the Presidency, despite losing the popular vote. In exchange, he agreed to withdraw federal troops and allow Southern Democrats to return to the political system. Hayes had hopes that Republican inroads would hold, but Southern Democrats quickly demolished that effort, barring African-Americans from voting and establishing Jim Crow laws. This bloc of former Confederate States â now called the âSolid Southâ â then became the backbone of the Democratic Party for the next 120 years. This exploitation of vestigial pro-slavery sentiment led to bizarre outcomes. During the 1930s, for example, a group of East Coast intellectuals, masquerading under something called the âRoosevelt Coalition,â were able to impose neo-socialist economic policies on the entire country by winning the support of labor unions while holding the Solid South through the tacit approval of racial segregation. This exploitation of historical pro-slavery sentiment did not end until the Great Election of 1994, when the South finally abandoned its historical allegiance to the Democrats and followed its conservative instincts into the Republican Party. As Newt Gingrich, a northern conservative who led the transformation, commented at the time, âThe Civil War is finally over.â By losing its Southern support and finally resigning itself to being a minority party, you might want to argue that the Democrats have finally paid their debt. As you yourselves have illustrated, however, such debts should not be forgotten. On your behalf, then, I will be filing a class action in Federal Court next week demanding $1,475,456,879,463,647,343,346,980,345.12 on behalf of all those Americans who have been defrauded by the Democratic Party throughout American history. Since the Democrats wonât be able to pay the damages, I will also be naming their principle source of funding, the Trial Lawyers of America, as co-defendant. Under the principle of joint-and-several liability and never-ending recrimination, I am confident they can be brought to the bar to bear their responsibility. It is imperative that so unjust a historical debt should not be left unpaid. The record must be set straight. I thank you for your time and hope you will be joining me in this effort. Now that's a lawsuit I could get behind. :-D |
| Posted by:Barbara Skolaut |
| #12 AC, are you a Firesign Theater "fan"? |
| Posted by: .com 2005-07-05 22:02 |
| #11 Seems to be a regular practice these days for Dem apologists to re-write history whenver possible. It's a lot less risky than standing on principle and making history for the right things in the first place |
| Posted by: Frank G 2005-07-05 22:01 |
| #10 Sorry about the Goebbels crack. I cut and pasted this from my response to a government archivist who had implied very strongly that the Repubs had filibustered the anti-lynching statutes. Seems to be a regular practice these days for Dem apologists to re-write history whenver possible. |
| Posted by: Atomic Conspiracy 2005-07-05 21:52 |
| #9 As for filibustering civil rights legislation: Civil Rights Act of 1964 Senator Richard Russell, Democrat from Georgia, led the so-called opposition forces. The group was also known as the "southern bloc." It was composed of eighteen southern Democrats and one Republican, John Tower of Texas. Although a hopeless minority, the group exerted much influence because Senate rules virtually guaranteed unlimited debate unless it was ended by cloture. The "southern bloc" relied on the filibuster to postpone the legislation as long as possible, hoping that support for civil rights legislation throughout the country would falter. ....... The climax of the filibuster was a 14 hour 13 minute harangue in opposition to the bill from none other than Sen. Robert "Sheets" Byrd of West Virginia. |
| Posted by: Atomic Conspiracy 2005-07-05 21:44 |
| #8 Nice try, Dr. Goebbels, but it was the Dems who stonewalled the anti-lynching statutes (of which there were many over the years): Detroit News While President Franklin D. Roosevelt was kept by fear of alienating the Southern powers in Congress from throwing his influence openly behind anti-lynching legislation, his Justice Department's newly created Civil Rights Division played a key role. In the early 1940s, division attorneys hit upon the idea of reviving old Reconstruction-era federal criminal statutes, which forbade conspiracies aimed at denying a citizen's civil rights and specifically those that did so in collaboration with the police. |
| Posted by: Atomic Conspiracy 2005-07-05 21:18 |
| #7 Missed the Democrats lead on filibustering the federal anti-lynching statute and various civil rights legislation. |
| Posted by: Whomoting Shomp1655 2005-07-05 20:48 |
| #6 Quick, how old is Rove? |
| Posted by: Captain America 2005-07-05 20:13 |
| #5 mmurray - That works for me. :-D |
| Posted by: Barbara Skolaut 2005-07-05 15:20 |
| #4 Excellent! Of course, you would have to sue the ACLU and the NAACP since they aided and abetted the Democratic Party. |
| Posted by: mmurray821 2005-07-05 15:08 |
| #3 I am all behind it. Proceed with all due speed Digby! |
| Posted by: Sock Puppet 0â Doom 2005-07-05 14:21 |
| #2 These are amazing times, lol! |
| Posted by: .com 2005-07-05 13:59 |
| #1 LOL! |
| Posted by: Secret Master 2005-07-05 13:55 |