Reparations: How to Fund Them & Avoid a Wall Street Takeover is a fireside chat with Jeremy Bearer-Friend (George Washington University Law) and Alvin Velazquez (SEIU) moderated by Ericka Taylor (Take On Wall Street and Americans for Financial Reform). Bearer-Friend authored a novel proposal for how to pay for reparations. His approach proposes capitalizing a multi-trillion dollar reparations fund with corporate equity in lieu of cash payments.
During the event, Taylor lays out the case for reparations and the current landscape, then Bearer-Friend breaks down his proposal, followed by Velazquez sharing lessons learned from labor unions’ pension funds experience. Their conversation then centers around how to actually design the governance of the proposed reparations fund to maximize its benefits to its intended beneficiaries and prevent the fund from being co-opted by the financial industry to further its own interests.
The live webinar took place on Thursday, March 7th, 2024