County Slavery-Accountability Law Fails (Oakland, CA)

Oakland Tribune ^ | 12/22/2005 | Michelle Maitre

[CAWats]

County Slavery-Accountability Law Fails

Supervisors who vote against plan want to focus on future, not what companies did in past By Michelle Maitre, STAFF WRITER

Alameda County supervisors narrowly defeated a proposed law Tuesday that would have required companies doing business with the county to disclose whether they ever profited from slavery. The ordinance, authored by Supervisor Keith Carson, failed on a 3-2 vote. Supervisors Gail Steele, Scott Haggerty and Alice Lai-Bitker voted no, with Carson and Supervisor Nate Miley supporting the measure.

[Darkwolf377]

Oh for God's sake, get over it. Slavery will never be in our past as long as people keep bringing it up.

We will never, ever repay all of the damages done in our past, as individuals, as a nation, as a race. (That's the HUMAN race, of which we're all apart, and not the "black" or "white" "race", btw.) We should focus on reparations from specific individuals TO specific individuals for their actions--say, living criminals and living victims. To attempt to do otherwise would lead to a never-ending regurgitation of past sins, BY dead people TO dead people.

No American former slave is alive today; no American slave owner is alive today. If we could somehow make reparations to the actual victims--as opposed to people who happen to have their same skin color--that would be proper, but we can't. To perpetuate this "guilt" over moral crimes and lay it on people whose only connection to those crimes is that they are of the same skin color as the slaveowners is not only silly, it's actively harmful to our CURRENT society--the society those former slaves became a part of.

End this useless, destructive crap.

[injin]

oh! this must mean that Alameda County may not be able to do business with a host of Saudi and other Middle Eastern based countries wherein secret slavery is still a widely held practice today . These moslems were the great slavers way back then and still are the main offenders today .

[Nathan Zachary]

People just can't seem to think beyond black and white in this country. Slavery isn't just a black and white issue, it happened, and still happens to people of all colors.

Perhaps the whole world should start marching backwards in time and demand 'reparations' for all the wrongs done to people of all races by other people of all races.
Germans should be paying for what Hitler, there fore THEIR government, therefore they themselves. Russians should be paying for what their past governments did to Poles, Ukrainians, etc etc.
Muslims should be repaying and returning land to Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, Greeks, East Indians, And all others they massacred from the time of Muhammad.
The Japanese repaying the Chinese, the Chinese repaying Mongolian Africans repaying Indian's On and on we could go.

The past is past, It's history. Hopefully we have learned from history, grown as a human race and have become more civilized. Or have we?
Continue down this path and we will undoubtedly repeat history all over again, because reparations can never be made to satisfy the entire human race.

[CAWats]

Oh for God's sake, get over it. Slavery will never be in our past as long as people keep bringing it up.

We will never, ever repay all of the damages done in our past, as individuals, as a nation, as a race. (That's the HUMAN race, of which we're all apart, and not the "black" or "white" "race", btw.) We should focus on reparations from specific individuals TO specific individuals for their actions--say, living criminals and living victims. To attempt to do otherwise would lead to a never-ending regurgitation of past sins, BY dead people TO dead people.

This isn't about slavery, it's about money. These people always have their hand out, ready to pimp their race.

[CAWats]

"oh! this must mean that Alameda County may not be able to do business with a host of Saudi and other Middle Eastern based countries wherein secret slavery is still a widely held practice today ."

Maybe they should rename it Allahmeda County.

[Alia]

mark. Gray Davis supported the early proposals for this reparations shakedown.