The Greanville Post — Britain must pay reparations to India—and possibly others she victimised

Refresher course in colonialism. Some interesting history here — a truly disgusting tale. Churchill may not have been Stalin, but.…...

At the beginning of the 18th Century, India’s share of the world economy was 23%, as large as all of Europe put together. By the time the British departed India, it had dropped to less than 4%.

The reason was simple: India was governed for the benefit of Britain. Britain’s rise for 200 years was financed by its depredations in India.

By the end of the 19th Century, India was Britain’s biggest cash-cow, the world’s biggest purchaser of British exports and the source of highly paid employment for British civil servants – all at India’s own expense.

And then there was that opium "trade" forced on China at gunpoint.

The Greanville Post
Britain must pay reparations to India—and possibly others she victimised
Staff

Calculating The Reparations & Refunds Owed To The Working Classes (claims against WalMart are just a start)

(Commentary posted by Roger Erickson. And a hat tip to Jim Valensi, and all union members from San Pedro, California.)

Citizens are finally waking up to the excessive, distributed looting and concentrated gain that business lobbies have come to practice, while exploiting the fundamental loophole that politicians in the USA can be bought, and cheaply too.

WalMart gets tax breaks as a "job provider" to drive out competitors, and then sticks local communities with added unemployment, to pay the living wage of the people WalMart supposedly "employs." Parasites are jealous! It's a diabolically brilliant method for killing your host nation.





Ironically, however, WalMart is just the tip of the parasitic iceberg*. If we're gonna talk reparations and refunds, we gotta be consistent, and start at the top of the hierarchy. No sense in just arguing over crumbs.

Over the last 4 generations, NeoCons have bamboozled untold Trillions from every single person in the USA - including themselves!

What would the refund to the MiddleClass be if we demanded back 4 generations of completely unnecessary FICA taxes? With interest & penalties (for policy stupidity)?

Remember, while taxes are fundamental to national solidarity, tax distribution is 100% policy, and taxes are NOT revenue for a currency issuer, only necessary - but not sufficient - policy.

Business owners get corporate welfare & tax breaks just for being in business.

Why don't working people get equivalent tax breaks for being in "labor" ?

Any anthropologist will tell you that clan & class competition continues, expressed nowadays primarily as excessive efforts to over-tax and under-fund PERCEIVED competitor families, clans & classes. That inability to see & explore bigger collective options is holding back the USA, and citizens of every other country in the world too.

We came out of a BIG option - WWII - with an agile, all powerful MiddleClass that made us the most capable nation on Earth. Since then, a few greedy, misguided bastards have been busy promoting the idea that 1% of us should shoot the nation not just in the foot, but in every internal organ as well. It wasn't always like this. Businesses from Kaiser Construction to (early) Hewlett-Packard once placed fair profits and fair wages on an equal footing. What happened?

Time for a refund? Big time!

How? Just take back the group brains that we've been tricked into NOT using, and refund our own damn policy. What's the option? Ceding ownership of our national carcass to the 1%? What on Earth are THEY going to do with a dead culture, after they've sucked it dry? Emigrate to new host colonies? What if they're all dead too?

If the USA is to light it's "shining beacon" again, it's gotta include a PARASITE LIGHT to attract and then neuter or re-purpose our own parasites. ("BlackLight" seems to work well on Control Frauds.) Otherwise, we'll be consumed by our own cloud of deranged capitalist mosquitoes and the greed-borne social diseases that they carry. Every time we get careless, another crop of antibiotic-resistant capitalists evolve, starts spewing onco-memes, and the aggregate barely survives. Re-purposing parasite functions is an honorable, ancient method as old as evolution. There's no shame in shaping parasites to aggregate or Public Purpose.

Can we get back to an ounce of prevention, so some insanely great cultural evolution can continue unabated for awhile?

* All FICA taxes to the working classes, since 1936? With compound interest and fines? Anyone wanna take a stab at that? Add damages and lost opportunities? We could have had an AWESOME middle class!!!

Squarely rooted — Capital and Moral Inheritance

On reparations for slavery.

Squarely rooted
Capital and Moral Inheritance
(h/t Brad DeLong)


First, beyond the economic and moral questions involved, there is also the pragmatic question of negative externality. What is the cost of the negative externality of not dealing with this issue for a century and a half? What is the economic cost in wasted resources and social costs? Worse, what is the human "cost" in terms of lost opportunity and well-being, and psychological and physical suffering?


Secondly, once reparations for slavery on the table for discussion, what about primitive acquisition of territory through conquest, enclosure and other forms of exploitation through power.


Thirdly, this suggests that the effects of institutional power in general also need to be examined for legalizing criminal behavior by a privileged cohort.

Matt Bruenig — Robert Nozick Agrees With Ta-Nehisi Coates

Earlier, I explained that libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick agrees with Thomas Piketty. Like Piketty, Nozick feared the entrenched wealth of patrimonial capitalism and proposed steep taxes (inheritances taxes in Nozick's case) to break it up. In the aftermath of Ta-Nehisi Coates' new piece on reparations, it might be worth pointing out that Nozick also thinks reparations is pretty cool.

Under Nozick's theory of entitlement (i.e. theory of what should belong to who), there are three principles. The first principle is justice in acquisition (i.e. initial acquisition must be just). He fails to show how this is possible, but we'll leave point that aside here. The second principle is justice in transfer (i.e. subsequent trading must be just). And the final principle is rectification of injustice. It is that last principle where reparations comes in....
Demos — PolicyShop
Robert Nozick Agrees With Ta-Nehisi Coates 
Matt Bruenig