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Aetna - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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In 2000 Deadria Farmer-Paellmann, head of the nonprofit Restitution Study Group of Hoboken, New Jersey, disclosed that from approximately 1853 to approximately 1860 Aetna had issued life insurance policies to slaveowners covering the lives of their slaves.[68]
Aetna acknowledged that concrete evidence exists for Aetna issuing coverage for the lives of slaves and released a public apology.[69]
The US Department of Commerce has determined that in modern US dollars slavery generated trillions of dollars for the US economy.[70] In 2002, Farmer-Paellmann brought suit against Aetna and two other companies in federal court asking for reparations for the descendants of slaves. The lawsuit said Aetna, CSX and Fleet were "unjustly enriched" by "a system that enslaved, tortured, starved and exploited human beings. " It argued that African-Americans are still suffering the effects of 2½ centuries of enslavement followed by more than a century of institutionalized racism. The complaint blamed slavery for present-day disparities between blacks and whites in income, education, literacy, health, life expectancy and crime.[14]
This suit was denied, and the denial largely upheld on appeal.[71][72]
In 2006, Farmer-Paellmann announced a nationwide boycott of Aetna over the issue of reparations for its policies covering slaves. Aetna stated that its commitment to diversity in the workplace and its investment of over 36 million dollars in such areas as education, health, economic development, community partnerships, and minority-owned business initiatives in the African-American community is more effective at aiding descendants of slaves and African-Americans in general than making restitutions for Aetna's life insurance policies on slaves.[73][74][75][76][77][78]
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Slavery and the American Economy
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To determine the economic value of slavery, the population of slaves in the US was obtained from the US Census Bureau. It was assumed that, on average, slaves worked some 60 hours per week for 51 weeks during the years with the average pay rate over the 164 years at $.10 per hour. All of these assumptions are conservative since underreporting was a common practice since state and local taxes had to be paid on the number of slaves. This practice was offset since congressional representation counted slaves as 3/5 of a person.
The results of the economic value of this free labor are, when inflated conservatively at 3% to 2006 dollars, a staggering value of 20.3 trillion dollars or to put this number in a more visual perspective; it amounts to $563,450 per African American currently living in the US. This amount is low since slave labor was counted from the year 1700 instead of 1619 and, as mentioned previously, the census data, in all likelihood, is low for various taxing demands and for those members of the Black race that were able to pass for white or elude the census. The undercounting of Blacks still is a major problem for adequate representation, particularly in the South.
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Peter DeFazio proposes transaction tax to blunt Wall Street abuses | OregonLive.com
- WASHINGTON - Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., escalated his long-running skirmish with Wall Street on Wednesday, offering - for the third time - a plan that would levy a small tax on financial transactions to discourage what he says are ruinous high-volume traders."Wall Street is 40 percent of the economy," DeFazio said during a news conference Wednesday to present the latest version of his plan."They don't make things. They don't feed people. They churn. They have created volatility; they created the great crash, a recession. And we need to recover. Part of the recovery effort would be aimed toward squeezing out themost speculative of traders; those who are trading either derivatives contracts, futures, stocks a thousand times a second," he said.
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Wednesday, November 9, 2011
noted. 11/09/2011
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