Fluid ImaginationFrom What If Trump Refuses to Concede:
We talk about it, some worry about it, and we imagine what it would be. But few people have actual answers to what happens if the machinery of democracy is used to prevent a legitimate resolution to the election.
From Why the U.S. Supreme Court has nine justices:
Nine justices make up the U.S. Supreme Court: one chief justice and eight associate justices. But it hasn’t always been this way. For the first 80 years of its existence, the Supreme Court fluctuated in size from as few as five to as many as 10 before settling at the current number in 1869. Here’s how the court ended up with nine justices—and how that could change.
I follow The National Review on Facebook because I like to keep an eye on what passes for intellectualism on the right. I don’t read every article, but I read the headlines, and if something seems particularly saucy, I’ll dive in.
They recently published an essay by Andrew McCarthy titled, Systemic Racism? Make Them Prove It, in which he argues that systemic racism does not exist, and if it does, it is the fault of progressives, since “they are the system.”
The judges, the top prosecutors, the defense bar, the experts who craft the sentencing guidelines and the standards of confinement — overwhelmingly, they are political progressives.
To be sure, he doesn’t accuse these political progressives of racism; instead, he sees them as “professionals [who are] doing the best they can.”
He continues:
Still, the legal elites will insist there is systemic racism…because the outcomes the system produces are not “equal” — equality being a utopia in which the racial composition of those arrested, convicted and sentenced aligns perfectly with the proportion of that race in the overall population, as if all racial and ethnic groups committed crimes at exactly the same rates.
I had to stop reading at that point.
Notice how McCarthy conflates arrests, convictions, and sentencing with the committal of crimes as if the former somehow gives us a real sense of the latter.
We currently have a President of the United States who brazenly violated the Hatch Act and certainly obstructed justice (not to mention the complete catalog of his criminal acts and cruelties), and yet, after 50+ years of criminal activity, this bonafide conman and historically recognized practitioner of systemic racism has never been charged with a felony.
No member of Big Tobacco spent a night in jail for knowingly giving cancer to millions upon millions of customers. No member of Big Oil will do time for lying to consumers about the economic realities of recycling, thereby encouraging the continual production of virgin plastic and the continuing degradation of our planet.
You don’t have to look any further than the FinCEN Files to see the vast criminal activity taking place in the financial sector ($2 trillion worth of dirty transactions), and yet how many felony convictions will this scandal likely result in? None.
McCarthy’s conflation reveals his deep misunderstanding of systemic racism. He’s incapable of noticing the crimes that don’t result in arrests, convictions, and sentencing, the crimes that the dominant caste generally gets away with.
McCarthy wants to force progressives to prove systemic racism (and to be sure, it’s easy to prove), but for evidence, he’s only willing to accept information produced by the system as it exists, which is racist. If a white-collar criminal destroys the lives of thousands of people, as President Trump did with Trump University, the chance of them being arrested, convicted, and sentenced is next to zero, but a black man selling loose cigarettes can be murdered on camera by law-enforcement officers who in turn will not be charged with a crime.
Unfortunately for those who want to rebut Mr. McCarthy, it is impossible to provide reliable information regarding the commitment of criminal acts broken down by race. If no one is arrested and charged with a crime, or no accusation is made to a reporting authority (as is the case for most sexual violence), how could we know a crime was committed?
The charge of systemic racism comes from a 400-year-long collection of lived experiences. It comes from anecdotes, memories, past and present traumas, cell phone footage, investigative journalism, documentary films, songs, and local, state, and federal policies (past and present). It is supported by a wide range of statistical evidence relating to the different (and sometimes starkly tragic) challenges a person is likely to face in their life simply because of the color of their skin.
According to the systemic racism argument, law enforcement in the United States (as well as other systems and institutions) reinforces the unwritten rules of our racially divided caste system. It argues, among other things, that rich, white men generally get away with committing whatever crime they want, while poor persons of color get arrested, charged, and sentenced for crimes they did not commit.
But to prove such an argument, Mr. McCarthy would like progressives to produce evidence that rich, white men commit just as many crimes as poor, black men. The only way to do that would be to interrogate their priests for confession rates, and I recall a papal law against that.
Mr. McCarthy writes that, for progressives, “equality [is] a utopia in which the racial composition of those arrested, convicted and sentenced aligns perfectly with the proportion of that race in the overall population, as if all racial and ethnic groups committed crimes at exactly the same rates.”
While he doesn’t say it outright, his statement implies an affinity for the countering thesis: racial and ethnic groups commit crimes at different rates. He doesn’t develop this counter thesis, however, because: a) it’s racist as fuck, and b) he can’t demonstrate evidence for it. Like me, all he can do is demonstrate evidence of convictions and not the committed acts.
Instead of supporting his terrible, racist counter-thesis with evidence he can’t provide, he transitions to accusations of systemic racism in academia, calling the Middlebury College President a “doyen of higher education” whose observation that racism occurs on her campus seems to have really troubled Mr. McCarthy.
He asserts that those who claim to see evidence of systemic racism are practicing “Marxism and voodoo, mainly.” This is how he denies the concept of disparate impact, which recognizes that a system designed to be neutral can still have discriminatory effects.
For an example of disparate impacts, look at the Fair Housing Act of 1934. A creation of President Roosevelt’s New Deal, the act was designed to make homeownership more accessible to Americans, but it did so in ways that reinforced the 300-year-old caste system. Nothing in the Fair Housing Act of 1934 would have predicted this effect. The act is, in essence, race-neutral, but in effect, it was incredibly harmful to black Americans.
Though Mr. McCarthy writes for a supposedly intellectually rigorous publication, his argument misunderstands the basic premises of systemic racism and reveals his desire to maintain a status quo where “professionals [who are] doing the best they can” continue to be given the benefit of the doubt over the subordinate caste members who have been crying out for 400 years for relief.
From The Case for Consequences
A democracy is not only a collection of laws, and norms of behavior by political elites. It is a set of beliefs by the people. The conviction that crime pays, and that the law is a weapon of the powerful, is a poison endemic to states that have struggled to establish or to maintain democracies.
Yesterday was my mother-in-law’s birthday. As I type this, her husband is preparing a pandemic-style, blow-out, surprise birthday party for her at their home in suburban Chicago, to take place later this evening.
My mother-in-law has three daughters. One (my wife) lives here in Vermont. Another (the youngest) lives high in the Adirondacks with her partner. The other (the oldest) lives with her husband, daughters, and stepchildren about 400 yards (as the crow flies) from my mother-in-law’s house.
This pandemic surprise party will involve a three-plus-hour Zoom call that will bring in guests from the northeastern and southwestern United States. The daughter who lives nearby, plus her family, plus my mother-in-law’s two stepchildren and their partners, plus some old friends who live in the area — all will attend the party in person.
My stepfather-in-law has been working hard to pull the party together. He’s hired a DJ to set up in their home. He’s coordinated to get my mother-in-law out of the house. He’s attempted to get President Barack Obama to make a cameo appearance (his aunt is a member of the Illinois delegation to United States House of Representatives), and while I doubt he’ll be successful, I wouldn’t put it past him to hire a look-a-like or someone just as surprising and as interesting. He’s been texting with his stepdaughters and their partners, plus his son and daughter for weeks now, trying to make sure everyone understands how important this party is to his wife.
Three days ago, my sister-in-law who lives in the Adirondacks informed all of us via text that something had come up at her work and she wouldn’t be able to attend the surprise party. She asked if my stepfather-in-law could change the date.
He agreed: “Plug in next Friday at 7 and wait for us. The rest of us will be partying this Saturday.”
She replied, “Ok well sorry I can’t be there / Yup really really sorry…”
Meanwhile, my sister-in-law texted her two sisters that she was just fucking with him; she would, in fact, be on the Zoom call. After keeping up the charade for two days, she received this suggestion from my stepfather-in-law: “how about getting dizzy and collapsing at work or cutting off a finger and having to go home around 7:30ish?”
Instead of doing either of those, she admitted to the prank.
He responded with, “I wasn’t kidding about cuttIng off a finger. Looove ya.”
Yesterday, my daughter received an early birthday present from my mother-in-law and her husband: a 24-volt Razor Pocket Mod Electric Scooter, an adorable, electric-powered moped that reaches a top speed of 15 miles per hour and is perfectly sized for an eight-year-old girl.
I unboxed it while she was at a friend’s house, installed the front wheel and handlebars on it, plugged it into a charger on the front porch, then called her home. My wife called my mother-in-law on FaceTime so she could watch my daughter discover the present.
My daughter came onto the porch, saw the electric scooter, and fell to her knees with tears in her eyes, crying to herself, “I’m so happy. I’m so happy. I’m so happy.”
My mother-in-law made that happen, and my stepfather-in-law busts his ass at work to help her make that happen.
Tonight, my beloved Celtics will be playing in Game 3 of the Eastern Conference Finals, the most important game this team has faced all year, and yet instead of cheering them on, I will gladly sit in front of our laptop for a three-hour Zoom call that celebrates the love we hold for my mother-in-law.
I love her and her husband with all my heart, and I respect the hell out of both of them. I make fun of them (only to their face), call them “Boomers” (only to their face), and bitch about being their tech support (only to their face), but I don’t want to imagine calling a different mother- and stepfather-in-law family.
From U.S. democracy is at risk for political violence:
Political violence in democracies often seems spontaneous: an angry mob launching a pogrom, a lone shooter assassinating a president. But in fact, the crisis has usually been building for years, and the risk factors are well known. The United States is now walking the last steps on that path.
I believe the United States of America owes reparations to the descendants of the individuals who were kidnapped from their homeland, shipped across the Atlantic Ocean aboard slave ships (where an estimated 15% of prisoners died at sea), sold in flesh markets, beaten, tortured, raped, their children and parents and spouses ripped from their arms, their wombs turned into slave mills, and their descendants relegated to the lowest caste in American society for four-hundred years and counting.
I believe the United States of America owes reparations to the descendants of the individuals whose labor was stolen from them, whose right to own property was denied them, whose right to vote continues to be challenged by white-supremacist power brokers in the Republican party, whose right to healthcare continues to be withheld lest upper-caste doctors, pharmaceutical brokers, and insurance executives see their profits diminish, whose bodies continue to be objects of fear and scorn to publicly-funded security professionals, whose freedoms have been curtailed and whose ability to earn an honest income has been stolen by a prejudicial justice system, whose families have been broken by ghettoization, unjust imprisonment, untreated mental illness, and the need to self-medicate after a life of continuing, constant trauma caused by nothing more than their subordinate role in the caste hierarchy.
I do not know how to determine which living individuals in the United States deserve to be the recipient of these reparations, nor do I know how the cost of reparations could be funded, but I believe the bill is long past due.
In June 2019, the U.S. House of Representatives held a hearing on H.R. 40, which is a bill named after the “forty acres and mule” promise made by General Sherman during the Civil War. H.R. 40 aims “to establish a commission to study and consider a national apology and proposal for reparations for the institution of slavery.”
The bill was originally introduced by Rep. John Conyers in 1989 and reintroduced by him every year until he left Congress in 2017. Rep. Conyers passed away in 2019 without ever getting the bill to a vote.
Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee took up Conyers’ cause last year and introduced it to the 116th Congress. The bill is now cosponsored by 154 other representatives, including every member of “The Squad” and my representative, Peter Welch, but not including a single Republican politician.
The Juneteenth hearing on H.R. 40 held in 2019 lasted three hours. If passed, the bill would “authorize $12 million for a 13-member commission to study the effects of slavery and make recommendations to Congress.”
As of today, that Juneteenth hearing is the only action taken on the bill. It still sits in the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties, waiting for a vote.
There is a version of H.R. 40 in the Senate as well. S. 1083 was introduced by Senator Cory Booker in April 2019 and cosponsored by 19 other senators, including my senator, Bernie Sanders, and again, not including a single Republican politician.
Neither H.R. 40 nor S. 1083 will move forward until Sen. Mitch McConnell’s leadership of the Senate is removed, which all good Americans hope will happen this November.
There is no consensus yet on the cost of the moral, physical, and financial debt accrued by the United States’ white-supremacist policies, but there have been plenty of proposals.
The Black Manifesto of the National Black Economic Conference of 1969 was penned by James Forman, an active member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a Black Panther, and a member of the League of Revolutionary Workers, as well as an author and professor.
The Black Manifesto demanded “white Christian Churches and Jewish Synagogues, which are part and parcel of the system of capitalism” pay $500 million to the estimated 30 million black people in the United States, or as Forman formulated it, “$15 a n****r.”
The NBEC manifesto called for the $500 million to be spent in the following ways:
Written by William Darity, Jr., a professor of Public Policy, African and African-American Studies, and Economics at Duke University, and A. Kirsten Mullen, a writer, folklorist, museum consultant, and lecturer on race, art, history, and politics, the Roosevelt Institute Report, titled Resurrecting the Promise of 40 Acres: The Imperative of Reparations for Black Americans, expands on the work the writers completed for a book on reparations.
Darity and Mullen contend that the United States government is “the culpable party” who must pay a debt worth $10-$12 trillion (in 2016 dollars) to “black American descendants of persons enslaved in the U.S,” a group whose number they estimate to be around 40 million Americans.
To qualify for reparations, an individual must have “self-identified as black, negro, or African-American on an official document—perhaps making public the self-report of their race on the U.S. census—for at least 12 years before the enactment” of reparations.
The claim anchors on General Sherman’s Civil War-era promise in Special Field Orders 15 to provide the former slaves of the South with “a plot of not more than forty acres of tillable ground” of confiscated Confederate land, but it does not rest on that claim. It brings into focus three eras for which reparations are due, each of which individually would make a compelling case, and as a group, are undeniable.
The $10-$12 trillion figure is based on closing the gap in the black-white (pre-tax) wealth differential (though don’t ask me to explain the math).
With that being said, they argue that however the figure is calculated, “the racial wealth gap is the economic measure that best captures the cumulative effects of the full trajectory of American white supremacy from slavery to the present,” and the final tally ought to be indexed to it.
In an article published in the journal Social Science Quarterly, Professor Thomas Craemer from the University of Connecticut placed a value on the unremunerative hours the slaves labored (18 hours a day in some instances) and multiplied it by historical free labor market wages, compounded by 3% interest. Craemer’s results ranged from $5.9 to $14.2 trillion (in 2009 dollars).
The amount, however, does not take into account the emotional and physical trauma suffered by the slaves or their descendants, the colonial era preceding the creation of the United States, the inequalities of the Jim Crow era (since his estimation ends with slavery), nor the inequalities following the Civil Rights era and continuing today.
In the 2018 book, The Divide: Global Inequality from Conquest to Free Markets, Jason Hickel, an economic anthropologist with the London School of Economics, goes further than Craemer’s formula by including the colonial era in his estimate of unremunerated labor.
He writes that “the United States alone benefited from a total of 222,505,049 hours of forced labor between 1619 and the abolition of slavery in 1865. Valued at the US minimum wage, with a modest rate of interest, that is worth $97 trillion today.”
Like Craemer’s formula, however, Hickel does not take into account anything that happened following President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.
On July 14th of this year, the City of Asheville, North Carolina, unanimously passed a resolution “Supporting Reparations for Black Asheville.” Along with apologizing for a variety of offenses against the city’s black residents going back to the time of lawful slavery, the resolution directs the City Manager “to establish a process within the next year to develop short, medium and long term recommendations to specifically address the creation of generational wealth and to boost economic mobility and opportunity in the black community.”
The resolution also calls for the creation of a commission to make recommendations, and it imagines (though does not require) the following solutions recommended by the commission:
It does not give a cost to these priorities or solutions, nor does it provide any direct funding to the commission, but if we extrapolate from its priorities and assign them to the country as a whole, we will probably end up at a figure similar to the ones above: somewhere around $10 trillion.
In this year’s Democratic primary, one of the “political outsider candidates” was businessperson Andrew Yang, whose major policy proposal was the creation of a Universal Basic Income (UBI) for every American. Yang envisioned a new entitlement program whereby each American citizen over the age of 18 receives a “Freedom Dividend” of $1,000 a month.
Yang’s rationale for establishing a UBI focuses on the economy’s shift to automation. Over four-million manufacturing jobs have been lost since 2015 due to automation, and “the smartest people in the world now predict that a third of all working Americans will lose their job to automation in the next 12 years.”
Yang’s Freedom Dividend hopes to cover the basic costs of living for most Americans. While $1,000 a month won’t cover everything (the average rent in the U.S., for example, is roughly $1,400/month), it would ease the paycheck-to-paycheck stress that forces Americans to allow their employers to exploit them.
The number of citizens over the age of 18 in the United States is roughly 255 million. At $12,000 per citizen, we’re talking a gross cost of roughly $3 trillion per year. The net cost, however, would be (according to some estimates) roughly $539 billion per year, or roughly 2.5% of the U.S.’s 2017 GDP.
But if we’re to reimagine reparations as a pilot proposal for UBI, we don’t want to do the math for every citizen. We want to do it for every black citizen. I don’t have a number for how many black Americans are above the age of 18 in the United States, but there are roughly 44 million black individuals in the country, which would give us a gross cost of roughly $529 billion per year. The net cost would be lower.
For comparison, the U.S. spends roughly $182 billion a year (2017) to support the nation’s mass incarceration policies.
To pay for his proposal, Yang would like to add a Value-Added Tax (VAT) on the production of goods and services produced by American businesses. Every country in Europe already has a VAT, and 160 of 193 countries have one. He also adds that governments can’t tax the incomes of robots or software, so as automation increases, the country’s revenue from income taxes will decrease. A VAT, however, keeps the money flowing.
Yang estimates that the country could pay for a UBI through not just a VAT, but also a reduction in social-service expenditures (a citizen can choose the current array of social-service programs [welfare, food stamps, etc.] or the Freedom Dividend, but not both), a reduction in healthcare costs (since the dividend would be used to fund regular doctor visits), a reduction in prison costs (since people would be able to take better care of themselves, and thus not be forced into a life of crime), a growing economy (since every U.S. citizen over the age of 18 would have an extra $12,000 to spend each year), and changes to the tax system to draw in more money from top earners and big polluters.
Yang’s rationale for a UBI makes sense, and virtually every major Democratic politician (excluding V.P. Joe Biden, the party’s current standard-bearer) supports some version of either a UBI or a Federal Job Guarantee to offset the losses to automation and software. The same politicians (and still excluding V.P. Joe Biden) support some form of reparations.
The Democrats could combine these efforts to help reduce opposition to both UBI and reparations. If the Democrats take both houses of Congress and the White House in November, they should put forward a UBI pilot program that envisions paying black adults $1,000 a month and black minors $500 a month for the next ten years
Throughout the decade of reparations payments, researchers could study the effect of the UBI, and if it results in the rewards that Yang and other supporters predict (above and beyond the improvements in racial equity predicted by the supporters of reparations), Congress could use the data to inform the effort to pass a true Universal Basic Income for every American.
A cost of $5 trillion over 10 years (gross) is among the lowest proposals on the table. It would need to be accompanied by a national reckoning, apology, and truth-telling initiative to help Americans face our nation’s long history of institutionalized racism. This initiative would have costs of its own, but it would probably not exceed the $12 million requested by H.R. 40.
Combining UBI with reparations for slavery would allow the United States to (as a friend of mine likes to say) “feed two birds with one seed.” It won’t cure every ill facing the United States, but it will start to put the bloodiest stains of our nation’s past policies and actions behind us and urge us toward a better, more equitable future.