October 25, 2017
Page 13
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O PINION
No Defending Slavery by Founding Fathers
A tour
guide’s faulty
justification
s arah b rowning
This summer, on the
very day that white su-
premacists rioted in Char-
lottesville, Va., I was
down the road visiting
Montpelier — the home of James
Madison, our fourth president.
On the house tour, we stopped
in Madison’s upstairs library,
where he spent hundreds of hours
reading about earlier attempts at
self-governance.
There, he imagined the previ-
ously unimaginable: freedom of
religion, freedom of expression,
the right to a jury of one’s peers.
Madison would go on to write
those amendments into the Con-
stitution, earning him the name
“Father of the Bill of Rights.”
by
As we stepped outside to Mont-
pelier’s beautiful grounds, we
learned something else: To keep
his small family of four white
people in the height
of 18th century lux-
ury, James Madison
enslaved 100 black
people.
Indeed, Montpe-
lier now has an En-
slaved Community
Exhibit and tour. I was eager to see
how these two Madisons were be-
ing interpreted: the man who con-
ceived unimaginable freedoms
for himself and his kind, while si-
multaneously denying freedom to
countless others.
The Enslaved Community Ex-
hibit is powerful: historians, ar-
cheologists, and descendants have
worked hard to document the lives
of the hundreds of African Amer-
icans enslaved at Montpelier over
the years.
Artifacts of their lives are on
display, and hundreds of their
names are painted on the exhibit
walls. Videos recreate the story
of enslaved people who tried to
escape and were recaptured and
imprisoned.
Then I took the tour.
The white guide began to
explain why James Madison
didn’t free any of the people he
enslaved when he died. “James
Madison was a practical man,”
the guide said. “He knew that
they would not be welcomed
into the deeply prejudiced soci-
ety of the time.”
I tried to give the man a way
out. “Perhaps this is what Madison
told himself so he could sleep at
night. But if he’d asked any of the
people he enslaved, I’m sure they
would’ve preferred freedom.”
“No, no,” the guide continued,
“slave states required that freed
men and women leave the state
within a year. Even the North
wasn’t welcoming. … They
would’ve had to go all the way to
Canada.”
Canada? Would that really have
been worse than slavery?
When I wrote to the Mont-
pelier administration afterward
expressing my outrage that their
staff would justify slavery on any
grounds, the reply included this
information: “A visitor to Mont-
pelier in 1835 noted that [Madi-
son] ‘talked more on the subject
of slavery than on any other, ac-
knowledging, without limitation
or hesitation, all the evils with
which it has ever been charged.’”
My correspondent then ex-
plained that Madison’s solution
was support for the American
Colonization Society, which pro-
posed — and implemented — the
outrageous scheme of sending Af-
rican Americans to West Africa, to
what’s now Liberia.
In other words, though Mad-
ison could imagine a brand new
form of government, he couldn’t
imagine living a more modest
lifestyle, side by side with people
whose skin was a different color
from his own.
Let’s pause a moment and
consider the possibility: What if
James Madison — and the other
most powerful men of his time —
had declared publicly, as appar-
ently they did at home, the evils
of slavery? What if the original
Bill of Rights had ended slavery
outright?
It seems shocking, I know. But
in 1789, so did freedom of reli-
gion.
What if we were the new rev-
olutionaries, and dedicated our-
selves to building a society that
truly enacted the promise James
Madison imagined — for all our
people?
Sarah Browning directs the
Split This Rock poetry collective.
She’s an associate fellow at the In-
stitute for Policy Studies. Distrib-
uted by OtherWords.org.
An Independent Thinker’s Guide to the Tax Debate
There’s a heist
coming; arm up
with the facts
C huCK C ollins
For 40 years,
tax cutters in Con-
gress have told us,
“We have a tax cut
for you.” And each
time, they count on
us to suspend all
judgment.
In exchange, we’ve gotten stag-
gering inequality, collapsing pub-
lic infrastructure, a fraying safety
net, and exploding deficits. Mean-
while, a small segment of the rich-
est one tenth of 1 percent have
become fabulously wealthy at the
expense of everyone else.
Ready for more?
Now, Trump and congressional
Republicans have rolled out a tax
plan that the independent Tax Pol-
icy Center estimates will give 80
percent of the benefits to the rich-
est 1 percent of taxpayers.
The good news is the major-
ity aren’t falling for it this time
around. Recent polls indicate that
over 62 percent of the public op-
pose additional tax cuts for the
wealthy and 65 percent are against
additional tax cuts to large corpo-
rations.
Here’s the independent think-
er’s guide to the tax debate for
by
people who aspire to be guided by
facts, not magical thinking. When
you hear congressional leaders ut-
ter these claims, take a closer look.
“Corporate tax cuts create
jobs.”
You’ll hear that the U.S.
has the “highest corporate
taxes in the world.” While
the legal rate is 35 percent,
the effective rate — the
percentage of income actu-
ally paid — is closer to 15
percent, thanks to loopholes
and other deductions.
The Wall Street corporations
pulling out their big lobbying guns
have a lot of experience with low-
ering their tax bills this way, but
they don’t use the extra cash to
create jobs.
The evidence, as my Institute
for Policy Studies colleague Sarah
Anderson found, is that they more
often buy back their stock, give
their CEOs a massive bonus, pay
their shareholders a dividend, and
lay off workers.
“Bringing back offshore profits
will create jobs.”
Enormously profitable corpora-
tions like Apple, Pfizer, and Gen-
eral Electric have an estimated
$2.64 trillion in taxable income
stashed offshore. Republicans like
to say that if we give them a tax
amnesty, they’ll bring this money
home and create jobs.
Any parent understands the fol-
ly of rewarding bad behavior. Yet
that’s what we’re being asked to do.
When Congress passed a “re-
patriation tax holiday” in 2004,
these same companies gave raises
to their CEOs, raised dividends,
bought back their stock, and —
you guessed it — laid off work-
ers. The biggest 15 corporations
that got the amnesty brought back
$150 billion while cutting their
U.S. workforces by 21,000 be-
tween 2004 and 2007.
For decades now, those big cor-
porations have made middle class
taxpayers and small businesses
pick up the slack for funding care
for veterans, public infrastruc-
ture, cyber security, and hurricane
mop-ups. Let’s not give them an-
other tax break for their trouble.
“Tax cuts pay for themselves.”
Members of Congress who
consider themselves hard-nosed
deficit hawks when it comes to
helping hurricane victims or in-
creasing college aid for middle
class families are quick to suspend
basic principles of math when it
comes to tax cuts for the rich.
The long discredited theory of
“trickledown economics” — the
idea that tax cuts for the 1 percent
will create sufficient economic
growth to pay for themselves — is
rising up like zombies at Hallow-
een. As the economist Ha Joon
Chang observed, “Once you real-
ize that trickle-down economics
does not work, you will see the
excessive tax cuts for the rich as
what they are — a simple upward
redistribution of income.”
“Abolishing the estate tax will
help ordinary people.”
This is the biggest whopper of
them all. The estate tax is only
paid by families with wealth start-
ing at $11 million and individuals
with $5.5 million and up. There is
no credible economic argument
that this will have any positive im-
pact on the economy, but it would
be a huge boon for billionaire
families like the Trumps.
This tax cut plan is an unprec-
edented money grab. Whether the
heist happens, is entirely up to the
rest of us.
Chuck Collins directs the Pro-
gram on Inequality at the Institute
for Policy Studies and co-edits In-
equality.org. Distributed by Oth-
erWords.org.