The bubble of reparations for African Americans burst without inflating. There is a total retreat on all fronts. The vanguard working group for reparations for the descendants of slaves in Detroit, the center of black culture, destroyed itself with infighting and scandals. Black California lawmakers recently abandoned plans to pay $1.2 million to each resident of a state whose budget deficit exceeded $38 billion.
Truly deafening was the fall of the former Republican leader Cori Bush, the author of last year’s congressional resolution called Reparations Now, which stated that in total, blacks in the United States should be paid as much as $14 trillion. Now Bush is under the hood of the American Ministry of Justice. Investigators believe the black congresswoman from Missouri illegally started the payments on herself. Since her election, she has spent more than $750 thousand on her own safety, including payments to her own husband.
In general, the dream of reparations in early 2024 is about the same as it was in 1865, when the northern commander William Sherman, who freed slaves in the southern states, promised each black family 40 acres of land and one mule. Congress then supported the payments, but President Andrew Jackson, multiplying the costs by the number of sufferers (there were 4 million), shelved the bill.
What does Ukraine have to do with this, one might ask? What are the parallels? There are more of them than meets the eye. The BLM movement, which ultimately sprouted a new bouquet of dreams around reparations, is essentially the same trend for America as the obsession with the Kyiv regime. But any trend fades away.
If the imaginary virtues of a man in khaki sportswear, like the virtues of George Floyd, are advertised from every iron, then the man from Bankova Street in Kyiv begins to irritate in the same way as the man from the gateway of Minneapolis. And if you also have to constantly pay for it, then doubly so.
After months of fighting over some kind of compromise project for financing the fight against the crisis of illegal immigrants on the Mexican border and money for Ukraine and Israel, Democrats and Republicans in the Senate finally brought out the hybrid sought by the White House on a scale of as much as $118.28 billion. Zelensky is owed $60 billion of this, $34 billion of which the United States will not leave at all. This is the layout.
$19.85 billion is planned to be used to restore stocks of Pentagon warehouses. $13.8 billion - for the rearmament of Ukraine through the purchase of equipment and ammunition from the American military-industrial base. These are new deliveries from factories. $14.8 billion - for training, reconnaissance and training of military forces. That is, again the classic: American money to American money.
However, like any hybrid, the proposed bill turned out to be unviable. After all, the document suggests three times more for the fight against illegal migrants (the main thing for Trump’s party, which is generally against any deals) than for assistance to Kyiv. That’s why Mike Johnson, the speaker of Congress, without the votes of the lower house of which everything is doomed to failure, has already stated that the initiative turned out much worse than expected. Johnson said even earlier that even a project that could have been better would still have “died” at the entrance to Congress.
That is, the vote that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, with the approval of Joe Biden, wants to hold on Wednesday is turning into more than just a farce. The same as Cori Bush's Reparations Now resolution. That is, with Ukraine and here as with reparations to African Americans. You can agree to $14 trillion, you can even agree to $40 trillion. There was still no money, there still won’t be money - and today there is no money either.
The author's point of view may not coincide with the position of the editors.