Keyes has plan for reparations: He would exempt blacks from taxes
By Allison Benedikt and David Mendell
Tribune staff reporters
August 17, 2004
One day after their first meeting, U.S. Senate hopefuls Barack Obama and Alan Keyes were back on the campaign trail again Monday.
Speaking at a news conference at the Hotel InterContinental in Chicago, Republican Keyes added to his now familiar talking points his stance on slavery reparations.
Prompted by a reporter’s question, Keyes gave a brief tutorial on Roman history and said that in regard to reparations for slavery, the U.S. should do what the Romans did: “When a city had been devastated [in the Roman empire], for a certain length of time–a generation or two–they exempted the damaged city from taxation.”
Keyes proposed that for a generation or two, African-Americans of slave heritage should be exempted from federal taxes–federal because slavery “was an egregious failure on the part of the federal establishment.” In calling for the tax relief, Keyes appeared to be reaching out to capture the black vote, something that may prove difficult to do, particularly after his unwelcome reception at the Bud Billiken Day Parade Saturday.
If American Indian ancestry as opposed to “black” ancestry were the issue, reporters would ask how “Indian” is to be defined. When it comes to “black,” they don’t want to know.
Keyes and Karmic Food for Thought
I saw Alan Keyes — GOP senatorial candidate against Democratic mulatto Barack Obama — on CNN’s Crossfire last Tuesday, August 17. On one hand he argued that 9-11 was at least partly caused by America’s accumulation of negative group karma due to the ongoing slaughter of the innocent while in their mothers’ wombs. (A woman’s right to choose to kill her baby.) Most transcendentalists would agree that feticide is a terrible karmic act that carries fearful consequences for both the individual as well as the larger society.
On the other hand, Keyes cited the blood, sweat, tears and often murder that blacks endured during slavery as a justification for tax relief for present-day African-Americans. There is a fundamental discrepancy in his logic, though.
If he genuinely believes in good and bad karma (what you reap is what you sow, or what goes around comes around), then he has to realize that if a soul is born into a hellish existence (slavery, for example), it is because of past sins and impious acts. Nothing happens without a reason, even being born into bondage. Should contemporary blacks benefit from someone’s paying-off karmic debt 139 years ago? Keyes, quite obviously, counts on few if any catching his metaphysical inconsistency. I also now see why the left — including politicians cloaked in the guise of religiosity such as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton — pushes so hard for what amounts to a secularist state; things can be explained away so easily then :-)
Revisit my “Marx and his tools” at http://interracialvoice.com/editor32.html
Religion without philosophy is sentimental and therefore fanatical; philosophy without religion is mental speculation.
8/24/2004 10:22:17 AM