Maxine Waters not waiting for reparations, wants banks to pay NOW!
Apparently tired of waiting for legislation authorizing reparations to be passed, Maxine Waters and a group of her Marxist brothers and sisters want to pass legislation requiring banks to compensate Blacks after years of “predatory” lending practices responsible for disenfranchising minorities.
Earlier this week, the US House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, part of the Financial Services Committee, held a hearing entitled An Enduring Legacy: The Role of Financial Institutions in the Horrors of Slavery and the Need for Atonement to discuss ways to force banks to pay up while waiting on federal government to for reparations, including the creation of a new cabinet-level department to force them to do so. (via the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University:
The hearing, chaired by Texas Rep. Al Green, summoned lawmakers, scholars, and activists to speak on US financial institutions’ culpability in the historic disenfranchisement of Black people in America.
Primary sponsor of HR 919, Green took the opportunity to tout the bill, which calls for a Cabinet-level Department of Reconciliation with a Secretary of Reconciliation who would report directly to the president.
Maxine Waters, chair of the Financial Services Committee, argued that financial institutions be held accountable for their predatory practices now – without waiting for federal reparations legislation.
“Shouldn’t we not wait for reparations?” the California Democrat asked. “Shouldn’t there be a way that the banks and insurance companies move forward now?”
Dr. William Darity Jr., a Duke University professor of public policy, African and African American studies, economics, and business, said that while financial institutions are not off the hook, politicians should also remain focused on creating a national reparations program.
The minimum amount needed to close the racial wealth gap is $14 trillion, he said, adding that “only the federal government has the capacity” to meet that required sum.
“While all the actions [financial institutions] took were wholly immoral, they were actually legal under the conditions of law that existed in the United States of America,” he continued. “The ultimate degree of culpability has to be assigned to the federal government, and it’s the federal government that must ultimately pay the bill for reparations.” (emphasis mine)
Actually, Dr. Darity is a little short on his reparations estimate, at least according to the U.S. Conference of Mayors. In a July 2020 letter supporting Democrats’ plans for reparations, we learned that the price is much, much, much higher — to the tune of $6.2 quadrillion.
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 — costs over 6000 trillion dollars.
This would result in the tidy little sum of $151 million being pocketed by each and every black American at a cost of $18.96 million to every American.
It was Waters’ Marxist ally Sheila Jackson Lee who introduced the Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African-Americans Act (H.R.40) in response to demands by Black Lives Matter during the George Floyd-inspired riots in 2020:
“We now have an opportunity, through H.R. 40, to have the highest level of discussion about systemic racism and race. And we are able to do it in a manner that is bringing people together; that acknowledges that Black lives matter; and acknowledges that there has to be a response.
“There is no better time for H.R. 40 to be part of the national dialogue, and part of the national legislative response.” (emphasis mine)
“Systemic racism” is the “woke” word used by social justice warriors to hide their anti-white hatred, and it’s a fundamental part of the demand for reparations by the self-identified Marxist organization Black Lives Matter. 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.
The Senate version of Jackson Lee’s bill is sponsored by Cory Booker (D-NJ) — who originally introduced as part of his platform during his brief run for the 2020 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.” (emphasis mine)
House Financial Services Committee Chairman Rep. Maxine Waters has been working overtime on her “banks are racist” angle to reparations, and she has introduced other legislation along those lines.
Last year, Waters held hearings to discuss ways to dramatically overhaul the credit reporting system within the United States because, just like criminal background checks, credit reports are “racist.”
“Good credit is a gateway to wealth. Yet, for far too long, our credit reporting system has kept people of color and low-income persons from access to capital to start a small business; access to mortgage loans to become homeowners; and access to credit to meet financial emergencies.” (emphasis mine)
If her legislation — the Comprehensive CREDIT Act and the Protecting Your Credit Score Act of 2021 — ever becomes law, credit score reporting will be taken over and run by the federal government because, according to Waters, this will make credit reporting “less racist.”
Reparations are legally and morally absurd, and so is Maxine Waters’ suggestion that banks be forced to compensate blacks until such reparations are mandated by the federal government — which appears to be inevitable.
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.
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