Bernie Sanders announces 2020 presidential run

[EnglishALT]

A rather interesting form of attack by Julian Castro on Bernie Sanders. Pointing out that Senator Sanders is willing to write big checks for a laundry list of programs but not for reparations. Considering the rather massive hurdle that Senator Sanders needs to overcome with the black community this could be a very potent line of attack against him early on.

There's a tremendous amount of disagreement on how we would do that, but let me say something about Senator Sanders's response there. He was also asked this question in 2016. What he said on The View the other day, I think, he didn't think the best way to address this was for the United States to write a check. To my mind that may or may not be the best way to address it. However, it's interesting to me that when it comes to 'Medicare for all,' health care, you know the response has we need to write a big check, that when it comes to tuition-free or debt-free college, the answer has been we need to write a big check. So if the issue is compensation think the argue about writing a big check ought to be the argument you make if you're making the argument that a big check needs to be written for a whole bunch of other stuff.

https://www-m.cnn.com/2019/03/10/politics/julian-castro-bernie-sanders-reparations-cnntv/index.html

 

[gimmepie]

Snip

That's a pretty terrible angle of attack if anyone is planning on looking at this logically. Things like free tuition and socialised medicine benefit everyone while reparations only benefit the black community - and quite frankly the idea of still paying reparations for the actions of your ancestors is bloody stupid anyway. That money would be better spent actually fixing the issues faced by the black community - which free tuition and socialised medicine would go a long way to help with.

 

[Nah]

That's a pretty terrible angle of attack if anyone is planning on looking at this logically. Things like free tuition and socialised medicine benefit everyone while reparations only benefit the black community - and quite frankly the idea of still paying reparations for the actions of your ancestors is bloody stupid anyway. That money would be better spent actually fixing the issues faced by the black community - which free tuition and socialised medicine would go a long way to help with.

That would kind of be the thing, people tend to not think about things logically or rationally. Humans have a penchant for going for quick, feel-good, band-aid fixes rather than the solutions that work better and in the long-term.

It's like, who would be getting these reparation checks anyway? People far removed from any direct impact of slavery? Who will be paying for this, people who never had anything to do with slavery? It might not even be all black people living in this country who would get these reparation checks, it very well could be just ones who can trace their ancestry back to someone who was enslaved. The time for these sorts of reparations was over a century ago, not today. And like you said, the ultimate way to really make reparations for America's racist past would be to fix all the goddamn problems this country has (some of which, y'know, affect (racial) minorities more than anyone else), which benefits the entire community and not just whoever gets these finite checks.

But this is modern American politics, and Julian Castro saw an easy way to take a shot at an opponent+boost his own support, so he naturally took it. I'm sure that someone would or will try it on Biden if he runs or Hillary Clinton if she decided to run and they don't explicitly say "yes we should pay reparation checks to the black community". It's very easy to frame it as "hey Bernie Sanders (an old white man) is a racist", and the masses will gladly eat that up, even though going by the quote in the above post it sounds more like either a lack of an explicit answer or that he has other ideas in mind for what to do about it and not a definite "no".

 

[gimmepie]

Snip

Fair point.
I guess I'll stick to hoping that enough people are intelligent enough to see that's what Castro's up to for it not to cause too big of an impact.

 

[VisionofMilotic]

I agree with Bernie Sanders on reparations.

Castro is the same fellow who gifted houses he foreclosed on to Wall Street as Hud Secretary. He has some nerve bringing up property and people.

https://www.politico.com/story/2016/06/julian-castro-vice-president-hud-225003

There are better ways that we can help American descendants of slaves than reparations, desegregation of housing is one such example, and Castro was obstructive with even this simple investigation.

https://www.dallasobserver.com/news...lain-his-dallas-desegration-decision-11417163

Bernie Sanders does not need any advice from Julian Castro.