Politics
Biden Taps Outspoken Reparations Advocate for Treasury Transition Team
“It should have been a priority since 1865, I mean we’ve been kicking this can down the road for hundreds of years,” she said.
University of California Professor Mehrsa Baradaran, who has called for reparations to black Americans in order to correct capitalist “white supremacy,” has been tapped as a member of the Biden-Harris Department of the Treasury transition team.
Baradaran, a reported “expert on financial inclusion and discrimination”, argues that reparations are needed to close the racial wealth gap in American and that the direct financial supplementation to black Americans can come in many forms.
“A reparations program could take many forms from simple cash payments or baby bonds to more complex schemes such as subsidized college tuition, basic income, housing vouchers, or subsidized mortgage credit,” Baradaran wrote in her 2017 book “The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap.”
She has also argued that there is little excuse as to why reparations can’t be put into practice, pointing to the Federal Reserve’s ability to inject liquidity directly into markets.
“We have the funds. We saw this with the coronavirus. Over a weekend, the Fed infused trillions of dollars into the repo markets and into the economy. We don’t have limits of resources. We have limits of empathy and imagination.”
When recently asked whether or not Americans should make reparations a priority after the coronavirus pandemic is under control, Baradaran replied, “absolutely.”
“It should have been a priority since 1865, I mean we’ve been kicking this can down the road for hundreds of years.”
Before joining the Biden team, Baradaran helped advise Sen. Bernie Sanders, Sen. Elizabeth Warren and former South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg on race based economic policies.
The professor openly took issue with Biden’s unwillingness to address whether or not he would support reparations during a democratic presidential debate last year, writing: “Biden just dodged that reparations question like a much nimbler and younger man.”
Joe Schoffstall of TheWashing Free Beacon notes:
Biden, who left reparations out of his racial equity plan, said he would study the issue. “[Biden] believes that we should gather the data necessary to have an informed conversation about reparations, but he has not endorsed a specific bill,” a spokeswoman said during the campaign.
Harris has been similarly noncommittal. “When you are talking about the years and years and years of trauma that were experienced because of slavery, because of Jim Crow and because of all that we have seen in terms of institutional and legal discrimination and racism, this is very real and it needs to be studied,” she said during a CNN town hall in April 2019.
On the Treasury team, Baradaran will be teaming up with another race focused professor, Michigan State University’s Lisa Cook, who according to The Hill has extensively studied the economic effects of racism.
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Joseph Jankowski is an Editor-at-Large for Planet Free Will. His works have been published by major news publications such as ZeroHedge.com and Infowars.com