Despite Mayor Eric Adams (D) complaining that the city doesn’t have sufficient cash to handle its ongoing welfare for migrants, while expanding his payoffs to migrants in the form of debit cards and $4,000 each to 150 of them to find new housing, the New York City Council voted September 12 to create a panel to produce a plan to expand the welfare problem, under the absurd misuse of the handle “Reparations.”
It's a sad, illogical, immoral attempt to create new victims and beneficiaries, as determined by the political plantation overseers, and yet, many politicians seem to adore the idea.
Alexander Hall reports for Fox News:
“New York City will soon be the largest city in the U.S. to enact a reparations program.
Councilmembers Crystal Hudson and Farah Louis sponsored a pair of bills to establish a Truth, Healing and Reconciliation Commission and a reparations task force. Both bills passed on Thursday and will be effective immediately.
‘Today, the New York City Council voted to pass legislation establishing municipal efforts to acknowledge and address the legacy and impact of slavery and racial injustices in New York City,’ the New York City council announced in a press release. ‘The package of legislation would establish a Truth, Healing and Reconciliation process on slavery within New York City (which had one of the highest rates of slave ownership in the country in the 1700s), a reparations study, informational signs at the City’s first slave market, and a taskforce to consider the creation of a 'freedom trail' commemorating abolitionist movement and Underground Railroad sites.’"
All of which is meaningless, except to signal to ethical people that the coercive power of the government is gearing-up to take money from folks who never harmed others and give it to others who were not harmed, all predicated on a flimsy, neo-Marxist, race-baiting, touchy-feely fantasy that creating new victims of government-forced slavery will “make up for” crimes that other people committed when slavery was legal.
Related: CA 'Reparations Activist' Claims $223K Per-Person Handouts Aren’t Enough
As I noted in 2023, when California’s absurd “Reparations Taks Force” was conducting meetings and throwing around welfare numbers as high as $223,000 per recipient (Gavin Newsom has asked for numerous amendments to the resultant “reparations” bills, thus pushing back their possible passage, and putting their future in question) this kind of thinking is utterly perverse and sick:
“Beyond the fact that none of these potential ‘recipients’ of ‘reparations’ was injured and, therefore, cannot be made whole through these fictitiously termed ‘reparations,’ there is the fact that, even if one were to believe that the descendants of slaves deserve to have the state make slaves out of people today, such that these new slaves – the taxpayers – will hand over big sums of cash for things they never did, the history of slavery is such that virtually every individual in any race can claim that, at one time or another, his or her ancestors were enslaved or preyed-upon. Where does this ‘original sin’ for slavery concept end?”
I also wrote that Dr. Thomas Sowell, noted:
“Blacks were not enslaved because they were black but because they were available. Slavery has existed in the world for thousands of years. Whites enslaved other whites in Europe for centuries before the first black was brought to the Western hemisphere. Asians enslaved Europeans. Asians enslaved other Asians. Africans enslaved other Africans, and indeed even today in North Africa, blacks continue to enslave blacks.”
And the likely etymology of the term “slave” reveals more on how widespread and ancient the terrible crime of slavery has been. As AtlasofEnslavement notes:
“(A) large number of Slavs are said to have been captured in battles with armies from the Eastern Roman Empire and taken away as slaves. From the 9th century on, the name of the people and the legal status became mixed. The name of the Slavs may have been given to slaves as a result of the long-distance slave trade. According to this theory, this trade increased significantly in the early Middle Ages, when large numbers of Slavs were ‘on the market’.”
But, hey, perhaps if the two main sponsors of this NY move are so animated about blaming contemporary Americans for the wrongs of the past, both Democrat Crystal Hudson and Democrat Farah Louis could tell us whether they support Kamala Harris for President, since, of course, Harris’ four-times-paternal-great-grandfather, Hamilton Brown, was one of Jamaica’s most notorious slaveowners.
The Irish Times notes that he was born in Ireland, circa 1776, and:
“Brown emigrated to Jamaica, then a British colony, and became an enthusiastic slave owner on the sugar plantations that were the mainstay of the island’s economy. He opposed the abolition of slavery across the British Empire in 1832…”
And, of course, the elephant in the redistribution of wealth room is the government. If people want to claim the NY City government was at fault for slavery, they cannot affix culpability to anyone but the government officials and their supporters who were alive in that era. Making residents of NY City responsible for the wrongs of others from another era is wrong, in itself, but, let’s say the current city government were engaged in some kind of criminal act (in reality, all operations of political institutions are based on theft and threats of theft), and let’s say it were readily seen by most people as criminal in nature.
The only people responsible for that are the politicians, the bureaucrats who enforce their criminal acts, and the voters who supported the politicians.
But, of course, other innocent people will be forced to pay, because government pretends to be “we, the people” when it never is.
And, be it contemporary or based on historical wrongs, some people recognize the immoral attack on natural rights at the heart of this “everyone is culpable” canard.
FoxNews’ Hall reports:
“…(N)ot all New York City councilmembers are happy about the bills.
‘I’ll move before I’ll pay,’ Minority Leader Joseph Borelli told the New York Post. Borelli was one of the eight councilmembers to vote against the legislation.
‘If they can introduce me to one New Yorker who owned a slave I’d be happy to consider it,’ he added. ‘But until then, I am not paying a dime as a reparation for a harm I did not cause, nor condone, nor once participated in.’"
It remains to be seen if the “reparations” panel will push for monetary “payments” in New York City, but the entire “investigation” will require tax money to operate.
Isn’t that sufficient enslavement to see more New Yorkers stand against it?
The entire paradigm is corrupt, from the government taking money from people for the “panel” to the concept of “reparations” that take from the innocent and give to those who have not been harmed.
But if anyone thinks the politicians who already back the nonsense will stop, they are as mistaken as the pushers of the “generational reparations” concept, itself. This is another tool in their box of collectivist tricks, and if the political slave-masters can use it, they will.