Black Lives Matter’s Marxist reparations dream now has a price tag

While the rioting and vandalism sparked by the tragic death of George Floyd has been less intense lately, the extremist agenda of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement continues marching forward.

As a self-identified Marxist organization, Black Lives Matter is dedicated to the destruction of “white privileged” America to create a socialist/Communist Utopia. For example, a few years ago co-founder and core organizer of BLM Louisville issued a list of 10 things white people can do to make up for being white, including demands that white people surrender their homes and personal property to people of color.

Obama called that “redistributing the wealth.”

Despite Black Lives Matter’s communist bent, “woke” politicians have embraced their violence and racialism; from California to New York, they have literally surrendered the streets to the organization to help them promote their anti-America agenda.

In the midst of this mayhem, demands for financial reparations has reared its socialist head with politicians in Washington. As I wrote a week ago, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) recently reintroduced the Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African-Americans Act (H.R.40). In addition, Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) and Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) introduced a bill entitled the BREATHE Act — an obvious reference to George Floyd — that would establish a reparations program and defund police and other law enforcement.

The Senate version of Lee’s bill is being sponsored by Cory Booker (D-NJ) — who originally introduced it last year as part of his platform during his brief run for the Democrat nomination for president. Booker described the bill as “a way of addressing head-on the persistence of racism, white supremacy, and implicit racial bias in our country.”

“Since slavery in this country, we have had overt policies fueled by white supremacy and racism that have oppressed African-Americans economically for generations,” Booker added. “Many of our bedrock domestic policies that have ushered millions of Americans into the middle class have systematically excluded blacks through practices like GI Bill discrimination and redlining.”

Every time the reparations argument has been made in the past, proponents have been either unwilling or unable to put a price tag on it. But thanks to the U.S. Conference of Mayors, we now know how much it will cost.

This past Monday, the nation’s mayors released a letter backing Democrat plans for reparations to 41 million black people.

“We recognize and support your legislation as a concrete first step in our larger reckoning as a nation, and a next step to guide the actions of both federal and local leaders who have promised to do better by our black residents,” said the letter from conference President Greg Fischer, mayor of Louisville.

The program they support comes in at the low, low price of a mere $6.2 quadrillion, according to a new study conducted by three college professors. What is a quadrillion?

Quadrillion comes after trillion and has 15 zeros following it. To put it another way, it takes 1000 trillions to equal one quadrillion. This means the reparations plan being supported by the U.S. Conference of Mayors — which is calculated using a complicated formula of unpaid slave hours, an arbitrary price assigned to massacres and discrimination, and interest — will cost over 6000 trillion dollars.

The calculation used to come up with this number is somewhat complicated, but it essentially studies the unpaid hours slaves worked, calculates a price for massacres and discrimination, and adds in interest. It is titled “Wealth Implications of Slavery and Racial Discrimination for African American Descendants of the Enslaved.” It was published last month in the the Review of Black Political Economy.

By the way, this means the tidy little sum of $151 million will be pocketed by each and every black American at a cost of $18.96 million to every American.

Reparations are legally and morally absurd. It’s morally abhorrent to make people who never owned slaves to pay reparations to those who were never enslaved. Those who demand reparations couldn’t care less about right and wrong. They are selfish and greedy people interested in only one thing: lining their own pockets.

 

---

David Leach is the owner of the Strident Conservative. He holds people of every political stripe accountable for their failure to uphold conservative values, and he promotes those values instead of political parties.

Follow the Strident Conservative on Twitter and Facebook.

Subscribe to receive podcasts of his daily two-minute radio feature: iTunes | Stitcher | Tune In | RSS