Sins of the father 200211/19/2022 Think of the possibilities of a successful conclusion of this court battle, or shall we say out-of-court battle, since thats really where its going to be fought, and won or lost We could sue the descendants of the East India Company for the immiseration they caused of our country. And, in 1988, the US Congress authorised the payment of $1.6 bn to the 80,000 Japanese-Americans who had been interned during World War II. The German government, it appears, paid the state of Israel damages for utilising the services of 10 million Jews as slave labour in the World War and, after a fresh campaign in the 1990s, German companies set up a $5.2 bn fund to pay the living victims and the descendants of the rest. Besides, as the venerable newspaper argues, is the modern African-American in the US really worse off than the descendants of those left behind in Africa)īy the way, in case you think this lawsuit is so ridiculous its going nowhere, there are several precedents. (Ironically, The Economist argues, the owners of the slaves may not have benefited by all that much as this benefit was really passed on to consumers in Europe in the form of cheaper cotton and tobacco. Of course, if the applied rate of interest is halved, this cuts the amount to $1.6 trillion. Using an interest rate of 6 per cent which Fogel estimated was the long-term rate, the amount that will have to be paid today could work out to as high at $97 trillion which is more than nine times the size of the US economy today. The Economist then uses a calculation made by Robert Fogel of the University of Chicago who estimated that the slaves back pay is around $24 billion according to Fogel, things werent so bad since the slaves were paid just around 10 per cent less than what the free workers got, in terms of getting food, shelter and so on. In which case, each dollar of back pay is worth between $6,250 and $400,000 today. The Economist reports Fagans argument as essentially this: each dollar that the slaves got (less than the market wage) should be paid back with interest, and thats an interest which is based on the profits these firms earned in the last 150 years. The lawyer, Edward Fagan, who is fighting the suit against 60 companies believes the settlement could run into tens of billion dollars. The companies that face action include Aetna, that insured the lives of the slaves for their white masters, Lehman Brothers, New York Life and even Lloyds of London. There is a class action suit being brought by around 30 million descendants of American slaves against companies that benefited from the sweat and blood of their forefathers before slavery was abolished in 1850 so this is actually going even beyond the Bible, where the iniquity is to be visited up to just the third and fourth generation of children. And quite appropriately, therefore, the venue for this is none other than the United States of America. The will of God is being enforced through, ironically, the much-maligned symbol of our times, the lawsuit. Read the latest issue of The Economist to find out just how. The Bible, it appears, had it right after all about the iniquity of the fathers being visited upon their children.
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