IT'S BLACK HISTORY MONTH. LET'S TALK ABOUT REPARATIONS.

Denis Rancourt calculates that each slave descendant in the U.S. is entitled to 1.5 million dollars

At the very least, each Black slave descendant can legitimately demand $ 1.5 million payable immediately.

-Denis Rancourt, writing in 2013

HEY FOLKS,

I’m not a proud Ottawan, but I’m from Ottawa, and was aware of Denis Rancourt long before he became the darling of the truth movement.

Most of you probably know Dr. Rancourt as the man who proved that COVID was fake, but he’s been using his indisputable genius to agitate for social justice for many years.

He achieved some notoriety in 2013 when he was fired by the University of Ottawa on a flimsy pretext after blogging some things that the university administration didn’t take kindly to.

At the time, this was a big deal, because it was assumed back then that tenure meant job security.

Anyway, I just wanted to give a big shout-out to Denis Rancourt because he’s put up with a ton of bullshit in his career, and it’s nice to see a man of such integrity and brilliance attain global super-stardom.

If I had to nominate one person as “the smartest man is the world”, it would be Denis Rancourt. He’s also got an extremely impressive CV.

Here’s an excerpt:

He has published over 100 research papers in leading peer-reviewed scientific journals, in the areas of physics, chemistry, geology, materials science, soil science, and environmental science.

He has made fundamental scientific discoveries in the areas of environmental science, measurement science, soil science, bio-geochemistry, theoretical physics, alloy physics, magnetism, and planetary science.

Dr. Rancourt’s scientific impact factors (h-index) is 40, and his articles have been cited more than 5,000 times in peer-reviewed scientific journals.

It concludes with the most epic humble-brag I have ever seen:

In science there are five main categories of measurement methods: (1) spectroscopy (including nuclear, electronic and vibrational spectroscopies), (2) imaging (including optical and electron microscopies, and resonance imaging), (3) diffraction (including X-ray and neutron diffractions, used to elaborate molecular, defect and magnetic structures), (4) transport measurements (including reaction rates, energy transfers, and conductivities), and (5) physical property measurements (including specific density, thermal capacities, stress response, material fatigue…).  I have taught these measurement methods in an interdisciplinary graduate course that I developed and gave to graduate (M.Sc. and Ph.D.) students of physics, biology, chemistry, geology, and engineering for many years. I have made fundamental discoveries and advances in areas of spectroscopy, diffraction, magnetometry, and microscopy, which have been published in leading scientific journals and presented at international conferences.  I know measurement science, the basis of all sciences, at the highest level.

Wow! Someone try to top that!

Anyway, I’m sorry for being so long-winded in this intro, but my point is that Dr. Rancourt is obviously a genius of the highest order, and he’s from Ottawa.

For once, I have something good to say about Canada’s capital city, which I generally regard as a wretched hive of scum and villainy.

No, offence, Mom!

Anyway, I’m big on the idea of what I call “post-woke anti-racism”, and I think that it’s important to recognize that America’s prosperity was built on the backs of black slaves, and that their descendants continue to be the targets of racist oppression.

Because of the insanely annoying sanctimony and hypocrisy of woke pseudo-morality, talking about racism isn’t popular within the truth movement these days. But it’s still a huge part of the socioeconomic matrix of entrapment that keeps the people down. We here at Nevermore are committed to anti-racism whether it’s trendy or not.

Anyway, as a black friend of mine remarked with some bitterness, the massive government spending of the COVID era shows that the U.S *could* have given reparations to the descendants of slaves, but obviously they have different priorities.

So, although what you’re about to read is all about reparations, I’m not advocating to make reparations a central demand of the revolutionary movement we are so badly need.

I’m an anarchist, which means that I’m against the state, which means I’m against the welfare state. Nevermore actually has an editorial policy against publishing anything that calls for a state-based solution to any problem, but the biggest political problem on planet Earth today is the widespread acceptance of statist theft and violence. Because the only true wealth that the U.S. government has is what it can steal through taxation, reparations would arguably amount to robbing Peter to pay Paul.

The only realistic way to make things things better for black folx is to make things better for everyone. Unfortunately, the Powers That Shouldn’t Be seem to have been inciting racial tension in order to forestall the threat to hegemony that a united working class would create.

What the U.S. needs now is a populist, pluralist, multiracial labour movement which understands its bargaining power and knows how to use it as leverage. Treating people differentially according to their race will lead us back into the dead-end oppression Olympics from which wokeness emerged.

In other words, people are going to have to come together on the basis of some kind of common interest and spiritual solidarity. We need to create a culture in which different people of different ethnicities are united, and it wouldn’t exactly help this cause if blacks were given reparations, but indigenous people weren’t. And no one who knows the history of the labour movement in the U.S. would be able to deny that whites have also been oppressed in other ways. Where do you draw the line?

So I’m not actually calling for the U.S. government to start cutting million-dollar cheques, although I guess that would be pretty fucking sweet if it magically happened somehow.

What I am doing is saying that it is important to acknowledge that the historic reality of slavery continues to impact people to this day. If we want to create a powerful multiracial revolutionary movement, a general idea of just how much was stolen from black people should be understood.

I’ll also take this chance to mention that we are welcoming original articles to mark Black History Month.

And with that out of the way, I present this 2013 article written by the one and only Denis Rancourt, in which he offers what seem to me to be very reasonable calculations about the estimated value of the labour extracted from black slaves from their white slavemasters.

I hope that someone out there finds this informative, and I hope it stimulates some debate.

Love & Solidarity,

Crow Qu’appelle

Calculated MINIMUM reparation due to slave descendants: $1.5 million to each Black citizen of the USA

By Denis Rancourt, originally posted in 2013

It is not difficult to calculate a MINIMUM amount of monetary reparation due to every single Black slave descendant living today in the USA.

If we leave out the reparations for physical violence, genocidal stress, inadmissibility to superior social classes, etc., and only take into account the stolen labor, at the today's equivalent minimum wage, then the calculation for the minimum amount due to the descendants of slaves is a simple one, as follows.

This calculation includes only the money due to ancestors and their descendants, in terms of the stolen actual labor counted in person-hours, based on a minimal economic value of that labour, adjusted at a lowest reasonable rate of interest.

Every step in the following calculation will use the lowest possible evaluators, such as to produce a MINIMUM amount due.

In the 70 year period between 1790 and 1860, there were, on average, 2 million slaves at any time in the USA. In the same period the average US population was 14 million.

Moving forward to 2000, the US population was 309 million, with 40 million slave descendants.

To obtain a minimal (under estimated) annual interest rate, we use the population increase from 14 million to 309 million in the 140 years from 1860 to 2000. This gives a population annual growth rate of 2.2%.

Now capital value increase interest rates in the US have been much greater than the population growth rate. Nonetheless, we adopt the underestimate of 2% for the interest rate to be applied to the stolen income value. We further apply the interest rate starting only in 1860, rather than earlier, thereby making our estimate even more of an under estimate.

The value of the stolen labor, for the period 1790 to 1860, at today's US minimum wage of $7.25 per hour is as follows. (Note that using today's minimum wage automatically corrects for valuing the historic currency to its present value.)

70 years (1790 to 1860 period only)

X

2 million slaves (average number in the period used)

X

365 days per year (OK, maybe I should exclude one day off per week?)

X

10 hours of work per day (again a minimum)

X

$7.25 per hour

=

$ 3.7 trillion

Next, I apply the 2% interest rate (compounded annually). This gives a multiplicative factor of (1.02)^140 = 16, for the 140 years from 1860 to 2000. Further compounding could be applied to bring us to the present. (Again, this is a minimum estimate.)

Compounding to 2000, therefore, gives:

$ 3.7 trillion

X

(1.02)^140 (or 16, if you prefer)

=

$ 59.2 trillion

The latter one-time payment would be easy for the USA to make, since its annual GDP is $15 trillion. (Think of a wealthy person's annual salary relative to buying a house in a safe neighbourhood.) The USA would not even need to sell any assets to achieve this modest payment.

For the 40 million Black slave descendants in the US today, the calculated reparation means that US white society owes each and every Black slave descendant a MINIMUM payment of $ 1.5 million, which is long overdue.

After the minimum payment is made, it would be appropriate to calculate and pay the addition reparations that are due.

My goal here was to show that these calculations are simple and unambiguous. Understanding the calculated minimum allows one to move forward from that established basis, towards a more realistic reparation number. At the very least, each Black slave descendant can legitimately demand $ 1.5 million payable immediately.

An obvious question that arises from this straightforward calculation is: Why are Black leaders not demanding reparation, as a priority demand?

Denis Rancourt is a former physics professor at the University of Ottawa, and is the author of the book "Hierarchy and Free Expression in the Fight Against Racism". More essays by this author are HERE.