Navajo Nation to sign $554 million settlement from U.S. government. That's about 1.8 million for each of the 300,000 registered members of the tribe. The settlement results from litigation over the U.S governments mismanagement of trust fund assets beginning in 1946.

This confuses me. Our government is willing to pay reparations for trust mismanagement, yet for enslaving and murdering millions of African Americans in the 18th and 19th centuries and barely recognizing they were humans in the 20th century, nothing is due to them?

My math was way off. Each Indian would get only $1,813.13. Still my logic stands although not as compelling.

Stirring the pot as usual

Mismanaging people's money and paying money to a bunch of blacks that were never slaves are totally different things dean

The negs already get paid monthly it's called welfare. More than half of them don't even deserve what they get. They are just as able to work and make a living as the next man they are just too damn lazy. I wish there was a box that I could check somewhere that says I do not wise to pay taxes this country is going to shit for sure.

Deep down all the politicians know who the true injustices were committed against I reckon.

I'd like to know the total cost of all the government welfare and government assistance given to the American African Americans. It will make the 554 million look like pennies.

^^ that's bullshit. First off u can't say we enslaved. I've never owned one of them and my money says you haven't either. If you can produce just one that has actually been a slave in the United States then possibly you could have a valid argument.

They live a way better life here than there. Look at all the Ebola outbreaks and the civil unrest. It seems to me our ancestors did them a favor.

My problem is they don't know how good they have it.

Also the American government didn't enslave Africans. They did how ever steal land and murder a bunch of damn Indians. That's most likely the reason they are gettin money. To be an intelligent person dean, sometimes you just make yourself look stupid!

U know what I mean...

Lol

Dean, this is the reason there shouldn't be reparations for coloreds. It would be pointless!!

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VFSdtMf2cGc

tapatalk_1409324162059.jpeg

America didn't go get them, their own people brought them here and sold them. Get their money from them. If they don't like it go back to Africa. You can't tell me they aren't better off now living here drawing a check for voting democrat and sitting on their ass than if they still lived in Africa.
Here

There

I can copy and paste, too

Michael Medved says slavery wasn't THAT bad.
bychumley

103 Comments / 103 New
Mustachioed Gene Shalit-wannabe Michael Medved, who ran into the loving arms of the rightwing movement years ago after years of doing the thumbs-up, thumbs-down thing as a Hollywood movie reviewer (in other words, the front line in the fight against Isalmofascism), thinks that people have been making too damned big a deal about the U.S. history of slavery, and for too damned long.

The rightwing syndicated radio host and columnist doesn't deny that slavery existed, per se, mind you. And to be fair, he doesn't deny that it was a bad thing. On balance. If you really wanna make an issue of it. If you (sigh!) must. Again.

But, says Medved, in approximately 700,000 words -- it wasn't THAT bad. Come on! And it's time, um certain people got over it. *CoughcoughNEGROEScoughcough.*

Sit back and enjoy the magic, won't you? (More after the flip..)

Medved's article is titled "Six Inconvenient Truths About the U.S. and Slavery." Right off the bat, he's got my interest, because..."inconvenient truth?" What an intriguing, well-turned phrase. If someone wanted to do a documentary about, say, an issue of global importance about an imminent catastrophe, that might make a good title.

Of course, it quickly becomes apparent that Medved thinks that a catastrophe has already occured -- the United States has had to face up to its history of enslaving human beings, in all its detail, and...well, enough already, you P.C. S.O.B.s!!!

Mr. M. apparently thinks the fact that people make a Big Hairy Deal About Slavery is an issue of vital current importance, right along with his recent debunking of the myth that Native Americans could be considered victims of anything called "genocide." Yup, he's fighting the good fight these days, this former studio junket jumper.

(I won't link, because the article is at ClownTownhall.com. But you can find it pretty easily, if you don't mind giving Jonah Goldberg more chalupa money.)

Here's Medved's stirring intro. Please note that the nefarious "Those" are at it again, bashing America! Sometimes referred to as "Some people," these lousy nameless bastards LIVE to see America brought down as low as Fred Thompson's jowls:

Those who want to discredit the United States and to deny our role as history’s most powerful and pre-eminent force for freedom, goodness and human dignity invariably focus on America’s bloody past as a slave-holding nation. Along with the displacement and mistreatment of Native Americans, the enslavement of literally millions of Africans counts as one of our two founding crimes—and an obvious rebuttal to any claims that this Republic truly represents “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” According to America-bashers at home and abroad, open-minded students of our history ought to feel more guilt than pride, and strive for “reparations” or other restitution to overcome the nation’s uniquely cruel, racist and rapacious legacy.

Medved goes on to strain the tensile strength of his mustache as he unleashes a cri du couer against the "current mania for exaggerating America’s culpability for the horrors of slavery" (examples? less than none.)

Here are his pearls of wisdom, nestled in a bed of straw men. In the article, each point is expounded on at length, but I'm wary about copyright violations:

SLAVERY WAS AN ANCIENT AND UNIVERSAL INSTITUTION, NOT A DISTINCTIVELY AMERICAN INNOVATION.
SLAVERY EXISTED ONLY BRIEFLY, AND IN LIMITED LOCALES, IN THE HISTORY OF THE REPUBLIC – INVOLVING ONLY A TINY PERCENTAGE OF THE ANCESTORS OF TODAY’S AMERICANS.
THOUGH BRUTAL, SLAVERY WASN’T GENOCIDAL: LIVE SLAVES WERE VALUABLE BUT DEAD CAPTIVES BROUGHT NO PROFIT.
(more on this one below)

IT’S NOT TRUE THAT THE U.S. BECAME A WEALTHY NATION THROUGH THE ABUSE OF SLAVE LABOR: THE MOST PROSPEROUS STATES IN THE COUNTRY WERE THOSE THAT FIRST FREED THEIR SLAVES.
WHILE AMERICA DESERVES NO UNIQUE BLAME FOR THE EXISTENCE OF SLAVERY, THE UNITED STATES MERITS SPECIAL CREDIT FOR ITS RAPID ABOLITION.
THERE IS NO REASON TO BELIEVE THAT TODAY’S AFRICAN-AMERICANS WOULD BE BETTER OFF IF THEIR ANCESTORS HAD REMAINED BEHIND IN AFRICA.
There is an amazing amount wrong with all of these arguments, and I hope you will have at them below.

But I'd like to focus on just two things. One is from point # 3, which continues Medved's obsession with ensuring that nothing involving the murder of dark-skinned people is called a "genocide." Here's part of his elaboration on # 3, a truly stunning statement:

THOUGH BRUTAL, SLAVERY WASN’T GENOCIDAL: LIVE SLAVES WERE VALUABLE BUT DEAD CAPTIVES BROUGHT NO PROFIT. Historians agree that hundreds of thousands, and probably millions of slaves perished over the course of 300 years during the rigors of the “Middle Passage” across the Atlantic Ocean. Estimates remain inevitably imprecise, but range as high as one third of the slave “cargo” who perished from disease or overcrowding during transport from Africa. Perhaps the most horrifying aspect of these voyages involves the fact that no slave traders wanted to see this level of deadly suffering: they benefited only from delivering (and selling) live slaves, not from tossing corpses into the ocean.
Is there any other way to read this but: it was bad for the slaves, but it was horrfying for the slavers...seeing their profits go down as African deaths went up!? Tell me how this is an unfortunate turn of phrase, and maybe I'll understand, since I can't believe that even Medved is that twisted.

The he goes on to say:

Here, the popular, facile comparisons between slavery and the Holocaust quickly break down: the Nazis occasionally benefited from the slave labor of their victims, but the ultimate purpose of facilities like Auschwitz involved mass death, not profit or productivity. For slave owners and slave dealers in the New World, however, death of your human property cost you money, just as the death of your domestic animals would cause financial damage. And as with their horses and cows, slave owners took pride and care in breeding as many new slaves as possible. Rather than eliminating the slave population, profit-oriented masters wanted to produce as many new, young slaves as they could. This hardly represents a compassionate or decent way to treat your fellow human beings, but it does amount to the very opposite of genocide. As David Brion Davis reports, slave holders in North America developed formidable expertise in keeping their “bondsmen” alive and healthy enough to produce abundant offspring. The British colonists took pride in slaves who “developed an almost unique and rapid rate of population growth, freeing the later United States from a need for further African imports.”

Conclusion by Medved: Slaves were never beaten, raped, murdered, or maltreated in any way. They were valuable property, and people don't just kill their property!

It's also loathsome to pit one horrible genocide against another, especially when the point is, clearly: stop whining about YOUR genocide, you fricking babies, this one was worse!

I think you have to come to "Inconvenient" "Truth" # 6 to really understand why Medved is getting all hot and bothered about the slavery bitcherz-n-moanerz today, in 2007 (....besides the fact that there's so little else going on in the world):

THERE IS NO REASON TO BELIEVE THAT TODAY’S AFRICAN-AMERICANS WOULD BE BETTER OFF IF THEIR ANCESTORS HAD REMAINED BEHIND IN AFRICA. The idea of reparations rests on the notion of making up to the descendants of slaves for the incalculable damage done to their family status and welfare by the enslavement of generations of their ancestors. In theory, reparationists want society to repair the wrongs of the past by putting today’s African-Americans into the sort of situation they would have enjoyed if their forebears hadn’t been kidnapped, sold and transported across the ocean. Unfortunately, to bring American blacks in line with their cousins who the slave-traders left behind in Africa would require a drastic reduction in their wealth, living standards, and economic and political opportunities. No honest observer can deny or dismiss this nation’s long record of racism and injustice, but it’s also obvious that Americans of African descent enjoy vastly greater wealth and human rights of every variety than the citizens of any nation of the Mother Continent. If we sought to erase the impact of slavery on specific black families, we would need to obliterate the spectacular economic progress made by those families (and by US citizens in general) over the last 100 years. In view of the last century of history in Nigeria or Ivory Coast or Sierra Leone or Zimbabwe, could any African American say with confidence that he or she would have fared better had some distant ancestor not been enslaved?
(and SNIP, for copyright worries...wish I could post more of this tripe.)

Astonishing, isn't?

Quite aside from a million other things, it never occurs to Medved to compare African-Americans to other Americans, only to their distant ancestors in Africa, and make the case that African-Americans today got a good deal out of slavery!...acting as if this very same generation of American citizens would now just exist in Africa, in some kind of weird parallel universe, somehow untinged by the genes of the men who raped and impregnated their great-great-great grandmothers.

I love this country dearly. it's my home, and always will be. But to a moral midget like Medved, you can't hold that idea AND the idea that slavery was a massive evil at the same time. It burns out the circuitry. He resorts to what conservatives supposedly decry -- moral relativism, which says hey, it may have been kinda bad, but everyone was doing it! (They weren't, by the way.)

For a shameless dolt like Medved, we can only love America and its promise if we whitewash the truth.

He has so little faith in this country.

Sent from my beeper

In all of medveds rantings, there are a few valid points...

African tribes did raid other tribes and sell their captives to the European buyers.

The 13th Amendment was ratified Dec 1865, 149 years ago, and only 89 years after the birth of the USA. Prior to 1776, this soil was claimed as a British colony. In addition, the importation of slaves was banned in 1807 by the US.

Was slavery right, no, but my dad's partner, Wilbur (who calls himself "an American who happens to be black, I AM NOT AN AFRICAN-AMERICAN") puts things in perspective with, "sure pay reparations for slavery for ANYONE WHO WAS A SLAVE. IF YOU WEREN'T A SLAVE, SHUT THE PHUCK UP AND GET A JOB LIKE I DID. IN ADDITION, I BENEFITED FROM THE ATROCITIES THAT HAPPENED TO MY ANCESTORS HUNDREDS OF YEARS AGO, BECAUSE I WAS BORN IN THE GREATEST COUNTRY WITH THE GREATEST POTENTIAL AVAILABLE FOR ANYONE WILLING TO WORK."


If its good enough for Wilbur, its good enough for me.

Yesterday a Vanderbilt Law graduate friend of mine called about renting a newly built house until the new one they were building could be finished. After confirming with the agent on the phone it was available, the lawyer arranged a visit today to view the home. She waked into the front office but no one was at the desk. In a side office she heard the office manager tell the receptionist that she had researched the prospective renter, found out she was black and told the receptionist to call my friend and apologize, that there had been a mistake and the house was already committed to a lease. Upon hearing this my friend knocked on the door and said it would not be necessary to call.

Shit's about to hit the fan.

My point: there isn't enough money to pay for that kind of humiliation. This still happens everyday. The ironic thing about it is she is a republican and so is her African American husband/physician. The legacy of slavery still manifests itself today. My friends will be fine and receive just compensation through the judicial process, but for those who have suffered silently reparations are the only recourse.

Sent from my iPhone using

Every notice how the ones jumping up and down asking my for reparations are the same ones who are already living off of the government? Black people who are successful, contributing, members of society. And the majority of the blacks in the south are the type that give their race a bad name by being worthless non-contributors who leach off of others.

Dean I am not racist and I have no prejudice against black people. But I cannot stand a sorry, worthless, no count negro. I also cannot stand a sorry, low life, no good piece of white trash.

I am Choctaw, where is my money?

The first slave owners in America were my ancestors on my mother's side, the Indians.

The first slave owner in America that owned black slaves was a black man. In fact, his court case set up that black slaves were slaves by virtue of their skin color and they were deemed as property.

I never owned a slave nor did my dad or my grand dad or my great grand dad. I never enslaved anyone, and in fact I am totally against it.

I really want to drive hundreds of miles to bass fishing on the Henderson Flats, with loud music, wearing a yellow rain jacket......

Don't worry, I wont fish close enough to be defined as "interfering with a lawful hunt"... just close enough to get your blood pressure up.

Do you guys have that law down there? It's one of the few laws in the People's Republic of MD, aka Marylandstan, that makes sense.

I wonder how much I get I part of the slapahoe tribe ??

the rest of us tax payers are in the bohica tribe

bend over here it comes again