Reparations or Rip Off?
By Jay Parker
What may become the most massive attempted financial rape of the American
Government and its 200-million taxpayers, for crimes which no one living
committed, is now being plotted by a consortium of trial lawyers. They are well
known for their excessive class-action lawsuit successes against segments of
U.S. society in the past decade.
With the claim of seeking justice, if they win, the greatest injustice ever
attempted could bankrupt the government and people of the United States. At
least seven attorneys are so far involved. The prize, if they can succeed in
bending up to five Articles of the U.S. Constitution and subsequent federal law
supporting such foundation blocks as the Statute of Limitations and sovereignty
defenses, could go as high as $97 trillion.
The basis for the legal action is, admittedly, a heinous crime by early
society in the United States: 200 years of slavery that culminated in the Civil
War and 100 years of actual and alleged repression that followed emancipation.
The legal remedy the lawyers propose? What else but reparations, which, if
lawsuits achieve victory up to the Supreme Court, would require Congress, state
legislatures (at least in former slave-holding states such as New York and the
South) and the descendants of families whose forebears owned slaves, to cough
up the money demanded. It would punish the heirs of blacks who owned slaves as
well.
The very proposal for reparations is not new. Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) has
had legislation pending for some time in the Congress to force a full-scale
study of possible reparations for the aggrieved black community of slave
descendants. The U.S. House has thus far refused to treat the proposal
seriously, even to the point of a study.
The TransAfrica Forum's Randall Robinson wrote a book recently, entitled
The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks, in urging action. Professor
Charles J. Ogletree of the Harvard Law School (and Anita Hill's lawyer in
Justice Clarence Thomas's hearings) has convened a Reparations Assessment Group
which, so far, consists of himself, Robinson and five tort lawyers.
The attorneys, who are particularly anxious to proceed with the case,
include: Johnnie Cochran, who defended O.J. Simpson and participated in the
black farmers' discrimination lawsuit against the U.S. Department of
Agriculture; Alexander Pires, who was lead attorney for the farmers and came
off with a billion dollar settlement; Richard Scruggs, primarily identified
with the $368.5 billion settlement for states against the tobacco industry;
Dennis Sweet, victor of the "sweet" $400 million settlement of the
"phen-fen" diet medicine case; and Willie Gary, winner of the $500
million judgment against the world's largest funeral home chain--the Loewen
Group, Inc., for a variety of misrepresentations to families of the deceased.
Unabashedly, Gary, Pires, Scruggs and Sweet, joined in a special Harper's
magazine forum (Nov. 2000) with contributing editor Jack Hitt for a
free-ranging discussion in advocacy of the issue, "Making the Case for
Racial Reparations." It was perhaps coincident with that event that
Ogletree called Robinson, Cochran and the four Harper's panelists together to
form the "Assessment Group."
In defense of its sponsorship and publicity of the pro-reparations
arguments, Harper's editors wrote: "... the class-action lawsuit has
become the dominant form of litigation to resolve bitter disputes over
collective guilt and innocence that not so long ago played out in Congress.
Indeed, our preening national legislature, besotted with special-interest
money, seems rivaled by the big budgets and major issues that now thrive in the
class-action courtroom."
Harper's said historians and philosophers have been suggesting such a
lawsuit for slave reparations for quite some time. Since class-action
litigation has addressed the plights of black farmers in the U.S., slave labor
in Germany and forced prostitution in Korea, why not slavery and America's
egregious involvement in same from colonial times to the Civil War's
conclusion?
The estimate of potential awards if the class-action approach turned out to
be successful, even up to the Supreme Court, was based on a Harper's reference
source that claimed that between 1619 and 1865, African-American slaves
performed forced labor for 222,505,049 hours. (That figure was gleaned by
Harper's from a book entitled The Wealth of Races, edited by Richard F.
America and published by the Greenwood Press of Westport, CT.)
The $97 trillion value estimate (from Race and Reparations by
Clarence J. Munford for the African World Press of Trenton, NJ) placed on these
total hours also reflects a rate "compounded at 6% interest through
1993." The convenient choice of this cut-off date seems like a transparent
subterfuge to remove the Clinton-Gore Administration from any obligation to
black America during its term (1993-2001) in office. May we conclude that the
American people are "off the hook" as of 1993?
Palpable signs of greed and hungry eagerness to outdo each other seemed
evident among the "reparations" lawyers in their discussion with
Hitt. While the manifestation of their optimism was on display, they seemed to
see the lawsuit process as an extremely difficult challenge, with legal
hurdles, which, in the end, may be simply insurmountable.
-- Jay Parker is Director of The Lincoln Institute for Research and
Education (Washington, DC).
January 2001
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