We have been discussing the worsening economic conditions in Chicago as Mayor Brandon Johnson and the far-left city council spend wildly while virtually chasing businesses out of the city. The city just floated a massive bond to delay the growing economic meltdown. Despite carrying a roughly $150 million deficit and committing two-fifths of the budget just to debt service and pension costs, Johnson announced that the city has approved $500,000 in funding for the implementation of a reparations program.
Johnson announced a program of town halls and meetings under the “Repair Chicago” effort to “gather lived experiences of harm of Black Chicagoans” to implement reparations for Black residents.
Johnson declared, “Your experience is evidence and we’ve placed it at the center of our work.” He said that the city will fund “bus tours, panel discussions, town halls, and hearings” to “better understand Black Chicagoans’ experiences across generations and how systemic racism has shaped their lives, opportunities, and well-being.”
The city has a 40-member task force headed by Chief Equity Officer Carla Kupe to make good on the reparations pledge announced in 2024. This money is merely to lay the foundation for the reparations to come in the Chicago.
The fact that the city is facing a corporate fund budget gap of more than $1 billion while losing major companies tired of the high taxes and poor services, Johnson wants to make reparations a priority.
Illinois was a free state that sent over 250,000 men to fight for the Union and lost roughly 35,000 in the Civil War.
The reparations, however, will cover years of racism in the city.
People. If you can in ANY way manage it, get the hell out of blue cities–and states! But leave your blue voting behind.
Spend chicago money any way you want. That’s fine
When a US city defaults, who ends up paying the piper? It’s not like city-owned assets get sold off piece-by-piece until the city ceases to exist. That may happen eventually as a consequence, as city services are cut or local taxes are raised, and residents cut their losses and flee. There are plenty of examples of the federal government bailing out Democrat cities and government service employees union pension funds and other Democrat entities (art least if Democrats are currently in power), which smears out the cost to the entire country. But do those most responsible for the default end up paying a price, beyond perhaps losing a reelection or shaving a few percentage points off an overly-generous union retirement benefit? I suspect there is very little in the way of consequences for the responsible parties, which explains why Democrats never change their ways.
Last I checked it was illegal for the government to discriminate on the basis of race. So if reparations are to be paid for slavery then I as the descendant of slavs should be able to get some. For racism? Then the descendant of Irish ancestors should be able to get some too. Actually they should be able to get some reparations for slavery as well since the first slaves brought to the Americas were Irish.
No, I’m not holding my breath on this one.
The law or fundamental law you’re referring to is unconstitutional because it infringes on individuals’ constitutional rights and freedom of discretion, choice, and discrimination and must have been denied and struck down before passage or adoption.
The first step of freedom is to differentiate, distinguish, choose, discriminate, etc., as when one turns right or left when he leaves his house in the morning.
The $500,000 is for “implenting” the program rather than actually reaching the identified beneficiaries.
It appears to be just another program to put taxpayer money into the purses of government grifters and their accomplices in theft. Sort of like building a bullet train from nowhere to nowhere.
Not that anybody actually deserves reparations. Maybe they could demand refunds from the African nations that sold them into slavery in the first place. But the Africans might demand the return of the merchandise before paying.
Any publicly-traded corporation that stays in the greater Chicago area must seriously consider exiting while it still can. Shareholder lawsuits against the Board of Directors are, at a minimum. Likely to become commonplace, and large institutional investors will begin divesting themselves
It’s strange for Professor Turley to start this and other posts with “we have been discussing” when the Professor does not participate as a commenter and does not respond to any comments when he does a future post on the same subject.
Are you sure? He may be one of the many Anonymous people commenting to add a little to the discussions.
Concerned, the Professor is paid to teach. How much are you willing to pay so that he answers your questions?
Johnson doesn’t care about Chicago’s budget crisis in the first place, much less what his ‘reparations’ spending will do to make it worse. He is fully expecting his fellow Democrats in Congress to come to the rescue with a financial bailout to cover all of his incompetence and foolishness. He will consider it to be problem solved. But he will start weeping and wailing until Mrs. O’Leary’s cow comes home if the Republicans in Congress or the White House prevent any such bailout. And then it will be their fault and not his own.
Once again, the Dems remain vigorously self-indentured to Identity Politics as they have been for the past 60 years. Which is why they need to keep bringing in masses of illegals every 20 years or so, in order to keep the show going since without such replenishing of Indenturees they’d never win sufficient legitimate voting majorities at national and even state levels.
If ANY Fortune 500, Fortune 1000 company ran their books like this, in what is essentially a Ponzi Scheme, they, the CEO and Corporate Officers, would be in prison.
Eureka! Now I can see why a majority of “graduates” of public schools in Chicago and elsewhere are unable to do or understand math at grade level is likely by design. As long as public school teachers in the Chicago teacher’s Union (in which Mayor Johnson held a leadership position before being elected mayor) continue to produce arithmetically and mathematically illiterate graduates, the Chicago electorate will continue to be full of voters unable to comprehend the trajectory of the economic death spiral the “leaders” they elect have set them on. They will then continue to elect these economic charlatans even to their own economic demise. The smart people that live in Chicago and other economically progressive hellholes run by economically incompetent progressives should get out while they still can. The ones that remain likely are afflicted with mural dyslexia: the inability to read the handwriting on the wall.
Great last sentence!!!
Speaking of getting out,
I could be wrong, but the authors of this covetous act of stealing, born of false witness, may have committed a typographical error and meant to say “repatriation” considering the clearly manifested convictions of the American Founders.
_______________________________________________________________
To wit,
Naturalization Acts of 1790, 1795, 1798, 1802
United States Congress, “An act to establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization,” March 26, 1790
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America, in Congress assembled, That any Alien being a free white person, who shall have resided within the limits and under the jurisdiction of the United States for the term of two years, may be admitted to become a citizen thereof….
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
“We the people of the United States…secure the blessings of liberty TO OURSELVES and OUR POSTERITY….”
– Preamble to the Constitution of the American Founders
Reparations to blacks? Whites should pay?
How about Portugal, Spain, Britain, France, Brazil, even Arabs, India too, they were all involved in slavery and its transport beginning in the 1500’s. Johnson should ask them for reparations. And he should ask his black brother in the Eastern African who captured and traded blacks into slavery?
The popular line about Congress discovering “it can bribe the public with the public’s money” is almost certainly not Tocqueville, but it survives because it captures a danger the framers actually described. Jefferson said it plainly in Notes on the State of Virginia, Query 13, when he warned that once public money and public liberty were concentrated in one set of hands, legislators would purchase the voices of the people, and make them pay the price. The fake Tocqueville gives us a clever bumper sticker. Jefferson gives us a real constitutional diagnosis: when representatives learn to buy support with taxpayer funds, the corruption runs through the citizenry as well as through the government.
And your point is?
Got sources?
What you need pictures to under? Gold Star to anyone.
Can you at least draw? Try, a grammar checker while you’re at it.
Who gets the money? Who votes Dem?
Sure, go ahead give them money. Then deduct all the money the federal gov, state handed them as welfare etc.
Then reparation for the families of the people blacks killed over the last 250 years through slaughter, drugs, theft, drugs, corruption.
They owe us!
Indeed. If reparations is going to be a thing–basically multi-multi-multi generational punishment, tax the hell out of all the families whose members victimized others. That’ll do the trick. Retards.