Newsom being pressured to wave ‘woke’ executive wand to enact reparations if CA legislature doesn’t

California Governor Gavin Newsom is being pressured to act like the little dictator his critics claim he so longs to be.

If the state’s overwhelmingly Democratic legislature doesn’t agree to dole out billions of taxpayer dollars to black residents as the California Reparations Task Force is poised to recommend that he does, Newsom should just wave his woke wand and enact the proposals himself, according to Human Rights Watch researcher Dreisen Heath.

“The task force is doing the grunt work of preparing final recommendations, but at the end of the day these recommendations are non-binding and still require uncompromising political will to enact remedies that will begin to address centuries of compounded harm,” Heath told Fox News Digital (FND). “Governor Newsom has the authority to enact these recommendations, if they are in fact aligned with the entire descendant community’s wishes, following the issuance of the final report on July 1, and should do so, if state lawmakers fail to act.”

As American Wire News reported in January, how much taxpayers will be forced to pay black Californians in “reparations” for the “lingering negative effects” of slavery — a practice in which the state never participated — was the subject of much debate from five uber-progressive economists, including one who suggested that up to $14 trillion be doled out to African Americans nationwide.

In June of last year, the task force issued what was hailed as a “historic” 500-page document in which it suggests prison system reforms, a state-subsidized mortgage program, free health care, and free college tuition for black residents of the Golden State.

Today, the task force, which was formed thanks to 2020 state legislation in the wake of George Floyd’s death, is considering a proposal that would give “just under $360,000 per person to approximately 1.8 million Black Californians who had an ancestor enslaved in the U.S., putting the total cost of the program at about $640 billion,” Fox News reports.

The group’s final recommendations will be sent to the California Legislature, and, according to Heath, it needs to cover the “cumulative harms” black Californians — none of whom were ever enslaved — have “endured.”

“We know that Black Californians have not only endured economic damage, but also psychological, emotional, and political harms too, and thus additional compensation and targeted remedies must be developed if this is to be considered a true reparations program,” Heath said. “Final recommendations should include a full calculation of these cumulative harms.”

Naturally, the small detail of how California will pay for such a staggering mea culpa is unclear, as Newsom claimed in January that the state is looking at a projected budget deficit of $22.5 billion for the coming fiscal year.

“To make matters worse, the California Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO), a government agency that analyzes the budget for the state legislature, estimated in a subsequent report that Newsom’s forecast undershot the mark by about $7 billion, thanks to about $10 billion less in tax revenues than expected,” Fox News notes.

Meanwhile, on the local level, San Francisco — which is facing an estimated $728 million deficit — is considering more than 100 reparations recommendations, including one that would hand qualifying black residents a lump-sum payment of $5 million each, at a cost of what Stanford University’s Hoover Institution believes will be at least $600,000 to non-black families.

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors showed “unanimous” support for a draft plan of the absurd recommendations on Tuesday.

According to Fox News:

The city board also expressed interest in other forms of reparations for San Francisco’s roughly 50,000 Black residents, such as a guaranteed annual income of at least $97,000 for 250 years and a home in the area for just $1 a family.

Another idea under consideration is a “comprehensive debt forgiveness” program that would clear all personal, educational and credit card debt of low-income Black households.

 

But according to Heath, who currently works for the advocacy group Where Is My Land, the expense is totally justified given what blacks have added to the “global economy.”

“Each of these recommendations should be given equal consideration,” she said. “An analysis should accompany the $5 million proposal, and the reparations committee has time to conduct that work. But if we are going to have a real conversation about what is owed, we need to be real about the value Black people have contributed to the global economy.”

The activist also believes there shouldn’t be any limitations other than skin color on who should get paid.

As it stands, the task force considers only those 1.8 million black Californians who had a U.S. slave as an ancestor to be eligible.

Things would be easier for San Francisco blacks, who need to be over the age of 18 and check two of eight other criteria boxes — such as living in the city during a specified time period or “descending from someone incarcerated for the police war on drugs” — so long as they have identified as “Black/African American” on public documents for at least a decade to receive a check.

“Racial violence does not discriminate by lineage — it comes for all Black people,” Heath said. “To deny that fact is to deny reality and many people of African descent’s lived experiences. Any task force that seeks to narrow eligibility for their reparations program based on ‘lineage’ runs the dangerous risk of underselling the extent of pervasive and structural anti-Black racism in the U.S., both historically and presently.”

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