Sunday, November 30, 2014

Who Boycotts Wal-Mart?



By Kevin D. Williamson
Sunday, November 30, 2014

Columbia County, Ark. — There’s no sign of it here in Magnolia, Ark., but the boycott season is upon us, and graduates of Princeton and Bryn Mawr are demanding “justice” from Wal-Mart, which is not in the justice business but in the groceries, clothes, and car-batteries business. It is easy to scoff, but I am ready to start taking the social-justice warriors’ insipid rhetoric seriously — as soon as two things happen: First, I want to hear from the Wal-Mart-protesting riffraff a definition of “justice” that is something that does not boil down to “I Get What I Want, Irrespective of Other Concerns.”

Second, I want to turn on the radio and hear Jay-Z boasting about his new Timex.

It is remarkable that Wal-Mart, a company that makes a modest profit margin (typically between 3 percent and 3.5 percent) selling ordinary people ordinary goods at low prices, is the great hate totem for the well-heeled Left, whose best-known celebrity spokesclowns would not be caught so much as downwind from a Supercenter, while at the same time, nobody is out with placards and illiterate slogans and generally risible moral posturing in front of boutiques dealing in Rolex, Prada, Hermès, et al. It’s almost as if there is a motive at work here other than that which is stated by our big-box-bashing friends on the left and their A-list human bullhorns.

What might that be?

If you want an illuminating example of the fact that there is more to the way that prices work in a free market than can be captured by the pragmatic calculations of cold-eyed util-traders, consider the luxury-goods market and its enthusiastic following among people who do not themselves consume many or any of those goods. One of the oddball aspects of rich societies such as ours is the fact that when people pile up a little bit more disposable income than they might have expected to, they develop a taste for measurably inferior goods and outdated technologies: If you have money that is a little bit obscene, you might get into classic cars, i.e., an outmoded form of transportation; if your money is super-dirty obscene, you get into horses, an even more outmoded form of transportation.

Or consider the case of fine watches: Though he — and it’s a “he” in the overwhelming majority of cases — may not be eager to admit it, a serious watch enthusiast knows that even the finest mechanical timepiece put together by magical elves on the shores of Lake Geneva is, as a timekeeping instrument, dramatically inferior to the cheapest quartz-movement watch coming out of a Chinese sweatshop and available for a few bucks at, among other outlets, Wal-Mart. (To say nothing of the cheap digital watches sold under blister-pack at downscale retailers everywhere, or the clock on your cellphone.) But even as our celebrity social-justice warriors covet those high-margin items — and get paid vast sums of money to help sell them, too — they denounce the people who deal in less rarefied goods sold at much lower profit margins.

If economic “exploitation” means making “obscene profits” — an empty cliché if ever there were one — then Wal-Mart and the oil companies ought to be the good guys; not only do they have relatively low profit margins, but they also support millions of union workers and retirees through stock profits and the payment of dividends into pension funds. By way of comparison, consider that Hermès, the luxury-goods label that is a favorite of well-heeled social-justice warriors of all sorts, makes a profit margin that is typically seven or eight times what Wal-Mart makes, even though, as rapper Lloyd Banks discovered, its $1,300 sneakers may not always be up to the task. If Wal-Mart is the epitome of evil for selling you a Timex at a 3 percent markup, then shouldn’t Rolex be extra-super evil?

Strangely enough, Jay-Z remains “a celebrity quite serious about social justice,” according to the Huffington Post, even as he offers paeans to high-end horologist Hublot; though he does, as advertised, seem to favor the platinum Rolex Day-Date II. Celebrity dope Ashton Kutcher angrily demanded: “Wal-Mart, is your profit margin so important you can’t pay your employees enough to be above the poverty line?” It is safe to bet that Rolex earned a much higher margin on the Milgauss watch that Kutcher wears, as surely as does the maker of the fairly spendy Baume & Mercier watches for which he served as a celebrity pitchman.

A few weeks ago, I was very much amused by the sight of anti-Wal-Mart protests in Manhattan — where there is no Wal-Mart, and where, if Bill de Blasio et al. have their way, there never will be. Why? Because we’re too enlightened to let our poor neighbors pay lower prices. The head-clutchingly expensive shops up on Fifth and Madison avenues? No protests. Rather, they were bustling with the same class of people behind the protests, people busily accumulating — or at least making like Holly Golightly in the window at Tiffany’s.

Here in Columbia County, Ark., a not-especially-prosperous locale behind the Pine Curtain where the median household income is about half the national average and where a few twists and turns down county roads find you in a world of shacks and chained-up dogs out of a Snuffy Smith cartoon, nobody is boycotting the local Wal-Mart. In fact, the locals seem rather fond of this purported outpost of economic exploitation and wicked capitalist blah-blah-blah. And it is not difficult to understand why: It is an important part of local commerce in a community that is hungry for enterprise.

People buy Rolex watches for reasons other than their timekeeping excellence, just as people buy Ferraris and horses for reasons other than going to the store to pick up a gallon of milk and a loaf of bread. Economists talk about “Veblen goods,” which are more valued because of their high prices rather than in spite of them, coveted not for their conventional utility but for their exclusivity. Owning a Rolls-Royce isn’t about the car — it’s about you. Which is why you see magazines such as The Robb Report — one of those glossies full of “bland advertisements for being wealthy,” as the novelist William Gibson put it — for sale in places such as Wal-Mart, where the typical customer is not actually in the market for a yacht or Kiton overcoat. If you’ve ever seen the heartbreaking sight of a young woman stopping a Wal-Mart checker three-fourths of the way through ringing up her purchases — because she does not have enough money to pay for what’s left in her cart — then you can be pretty sure that what’s going in her sack is more or less the opposite of Veblen goods.

Ironically, the anti-Wal-Mart crusaders want to make life worse for people who are literally counting pennies as they shop for necessities. Study after study has shown that Wal-Mart has meaningfully reduced prices: 3.1 percent overall, by one estimate — with a whopping 9.1 percent cut to the price of groceries. That comes to about $2,300 a year per household, savings that accrue overwhelmingly to people of modest incomes, not to celebrity activists and Ivy League social-justice crusaders.

Ultimately, these campaigns are exercises in tribal affiliation. The Rolex tribe, and those who aspire to be aligned with it, signal their status by sneering at the Timex tribe — or by condescending to it as they purport to act on its behalf, as though poor people were too stupid to know where to find the best deal on a can of beans. Or call it the Trader Joe’s tribe vs. the Wal-Mart tribe, the Prius tribe vs. the F-150 tribe.

We see this everywhere: In Ferguson, self-righteous and self-appointed spokesmen for the marginalized point to the fact that the criminal-justice system generally produces far worse outcomes to the poor and the non-white than it does to the well-off and white. This is, generally speaking, true. And though the dynamics are equally complicated, the same thing is true of the government schools, which do a pretty good job for rich white kids in the suburbs while functioning as day prisons and incubators of dysfunction for poor minority kids, especially in big cities. But the social-justice warriors in Ferguson will fight on bloody stumps to prevent reform of the government-school cartels, the endless failures of which do far more to harm the lives of the economically and socially vulnerable than any police department does. Why? The teachers are part of the tribe, and the cops are part of a rival tribe, which is why nobody ever bought a Rolex out of the royalties of a song titled “F**k the Milwaukee Public Schools.”

On the one hand, we have Wal-Mart, which makes a modest profit margin by helping to feed and clothe people who typically do not have a lot of spare money. On the other hand, we have a grotesque exercise in snobbery — snobbery frequently compounded by stupidity. The view from Fifth Avenue is rather different from the view from Columbia County.

The Silence around Ferguson



By Deroy Murdock
Friday, November 28, 2014

Millions of moms and dads will celebrate this Thanksgiving break with their kids. Alas, Michael Brown’s parents will mark this holiday without their late, world-famous son. That is a sad fact, whatever one thinks about the blazing controversy that has engulfed Ferguson, Mo.

Jermaine Jones’s family, too, will not share turkey and gravy with their son. On October 18, Jones, 29, stood with a few friends on a street in Berkeley, Mo., adjacent to Ferguson. Police say an unknown black male opened fire, killing Jones and wounding three other black men near him. (Strangely, Jones’s sister, Margaree Dixson, was shot fatally a half-mile away, just three hours earlier. In her case, too, police suspect yet another unidentified black man.)

“There’s too much violence going on,” Nicole Rice, Jones’s sister, told KTVI. “I can’t sleep. I can’t think. I can’t work. I can’t do anything wondering if my son will be a victim to the streets.”

Why has Jones’s death not unleashed riots and looting? Simple: Jones was killed by a fellow black man. Therefore, his death and his loved ones’ agony generate silence.

As a St. Louis County grand jury ruled Monday, Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson, 28, lawfully shot Brown, 18, in self-defense last August 9. This decision has fueled widespread chaos, including arson in several cities and infernos in Ferguson that cremated 25 local businesses. The national outrage still is at full boil over this white cop shooting an unarmed black man who acted very aggressively after stealing cigars from a convenience store.

But one can hear birds chirp while listening for public outcry over the deaths of black citizens killed by black perpetrators. Somehow, these black lives don’t seem to matter.

Ferguson is within the St. Louis metropolitan area. The FBI’s latest homicide-rate data ranked St. Louis as America’s fourth deadliest city. Its 38 killings per 100,000 residents in 2013 put it behind only Nos. 1 to 3, Detroit, New Orleans, and Newark.

Drawing on FBI figures and his own research, University of Missouri–St. Louis criminologist David A. Klinger counts 1,265 murders in his city from 2003 through 2012. Approximately 90 percent of those killed were black, reports Klinger, a former LAPD officer. Among these 1,138 decedents, roughly 90 percent (1,025) were slain by other blacks. Klinger found 32 blacks killed by cops, with 22 of them shot dead by white officers. So, across 10 years, white cops killed a whopping 2 percent of St. Louis’s black homicide victims. Investigations indicated that all of these police killings were legally justified.​





“While I understand the people are concerned about the use of deadly force by the police, by far — about 50 to 1 — more blacks in St. Louis are killed by other blacks as compared to white police officers,” Klinger told KMOX-TV.

Meanwhile, 98 percent of black murders go virtually unremarked. Where are the angry crowds demanding justice for blacks such as these, who were wiped out in St. Louis by other blacks in recent memory?

• Willie Earl Reed, 54, faces first-degree murder charges for taking a baseball bat and beating to death his girlfriend, Delores Hundley, 64, on March 24.

• Dominic Arrington, 38, allegedly stabbed to death April Fields on January 28. The 25-year-old business student just had dropped her daughter Skylar, 3, at her day-care center. Arrington had been on parole since 2004 for the 1995 killing of his then-girlfriend’s son, also age 3.

• Carnez Winslett, 36, was gunned down outside his birthday party on September 7, 2013. Police say Darnell Hollings, 21, shot ten bullets at Winslett and his guests. Winslett was wounded mortally. Three other black men were struck, but survived. Hollings also is among four men charged with non-fatally striking hot-dog vendor Edward Newa in the skull with a ball-peen hammer that they just had shoplifted from a Home Depot that August 21.

“What about the poor black child who was killed by another black child?” former New York City mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani correctly asked on last Sunday’s Meet the Press. “Why aren’t you protesting that?”

Giuliani also told the Washington Post:


    The danger to a black child in America is not a white police officer. That’s going to happen less than 1 percent of the time. The danger to a black child . . . is another black. . . . If my child were shot by a police officer, I would be very, very frustrated. I’d also be frustrated if my son were shot by a gangster in the street. But if the chances were — that my son would be shot by the gangster in the street — nine times out of ten, I’d spend an awful lot of time on the nine times out of ten.

The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports demonstrate that in 2013, 90 percent of black murder victims were killed by other blacks. Among whites, 83 percent of those snuffed out died at the hands of other whites. Only 8 percent of blacks who were killed that year were slain by whites. Black-on-white murders were just 14 percent of all white homicides last year.

Milwaukee Police Chief Edward Flynn recently excoriated demonstrators who, predictably, rail against police shootings while ignoring black-on-black homicide. In a stirring statement to journalists, Flynn dramatically put all of this in perspective:


    I was following developments with a 5-year-old little girl sitting on her dad’s lap who just got shot in the head by a drive-by shooting. And if some of the people here gave a good goddamn about the victimization of the people in this community by crime, I’d take some of their invective more seriously. . . . Now they know all about the last three people who’ve been killed by the Milwaukee Police Department over the course of the last several years. There’s not one of them that can name one of the last three homicide victims we’ve had in this city.​

Left-wing racial-grievance–mongers scream that bigoted white cops lie in wait around every corner, jonesing to blast black men into their graves. Yes, there are bad policemen, just as there are bad priests and bad teachers. However, the overwhelming majority of officers work tirelessly and thanklessly to shield law-abiding black Americans from their natural enemies: black murderers.
 

Saturday, November 29, 2014

Progressive Mythography



By Andrew C. McCarthy
Saturday, November 29, 2014

As Ferguson burned this week, the law books got a workout. Suddenly, grand-jury procedure was all the rage. Commentators better known for parroting the bromide that a prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich went berserk when the sandwich on offer was a white cop and the grand jury refused to bite.

As it turns out, there was no need to thumb the legal treatises of Blackstone or Joseph Story. If you were going to hit the books, Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism would have served you better. Brilliantly illustrating modern liberalism’s roots in 20th-century progressivism — a movement as comfortable marching lockstep with Stalin as it was borrowing copiously from Mussolini — Jonah homes in on the centrality of myth. It is irrelevant whether an idea around which the Left’s avant-garde rouse the rabble is true; the point is the idea’s power to mold consciousness and rally the troops.

For the American Left, a bedrock myth is that white cops kill black kids. It derives from the overarching myth that casts racism as our indelible national sin. As Heather Mac Donald explains, citing exhaustive criminology studies, it flows seamlessly from the quackery that dismisses the disproportionately high incidence of violent crime in African-American communities as an illusion — as the product of police racism and the consequent hyper-targeting of black boys and men, rather than of racial differences in patterns of defending.

Darren Wilson was a white cop and Michael Brown was a black teenager killed in a violent confrontation with Wilson. Therefore, Brown was the victim of a cold-blooded, racially motivated murder, Q.E.D. That is the myth, and it will be served — don’t bother us with the facts.

Once you’ve got that, none of the rest matters. In fact, at the hands of the left-leaning punditocracy, the rest was pure Alinsky: a coopting of language — in this instance, the argot of grand-jury procedure — to reason back to the ordained conclusion that “justice” demanded Wilson’s indictment for murder. And, of course, his ultimate conviction.

I could spend the rest of the day rehearsing why these legal claims are specious. Particularly risible is the story line that the grand jury convened by St. Louis County Prosecutor Robert McCulloch was a sham — a story line that is itself an elaborate fraud.

Prosecutors can indict a ham sandwich, we were lectured, because the state’s burden in a grand-jury proceeding is so scant. Prosecutors need not prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt, as they must do at trial; they merely need show probable cause that a crime was committed — and by the person of whom it was alleged — and a trial should therefore be held. There was conflicting testimony about who the aggressor was in the Wilson–Brown confrontation; therefore, the story line goes, there was more than enough cause to indict Wilson and let the ultimate determination of guilt — and you can be sure they mean guilt — be made at a public trial. McCulloch instead used the grand jury to exculpate Wilson, a white (cop) privilege that a black defendant could never dream of obtaining.

To describe this as nonsense is a slander on nonsense. It is freely conceded that the grand-jury inquest into Brown’s killing was more a political than a legal exercise. That, however, was the result of intimidation by the Left’s race-mythology agitators — very much including the president and the attorney general of the United States. It was clearly not aimed at benefitting Wilson.

In a typical case, prosecutors rely on the low probable-cause threshold applicable in grand-jury investigations only for the purpose of limiting how much evidence they need to present. Contrary to another regnant myth, guilt is not in doubt in most criminal cases. Overwhelmingly, they are open-and-shut, often supported by post-arrest confessions. As a result, the grand jury can appear to be a pro forma exercise — a cookie-cutter procedure the Constitution requires before an accused person can be convicted of a crime he not only clearly committed but to which he will almost certainly plead guilty.

On the other hand, when convinced that the subject of an investigation either is innocent or is incapable of being proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, prosecutors do not present the case to the grand jury. That’s because their focus is the trial, not the indictment. If, after preliminary investigation, prosecutors do not assess the evidence as strong enough to convince a trial jury to render a unanimous guilty verdict, they dismiss the case on the basis of their own professional judgment — it never sees the grand-jury room.

At a proper trial, Wilson could not have been convicted of murder. That does not mean what happened was not horrible — it was. It does not mean Wilson is not civilly liable (although I doubt that he is). It simply means the circumstances of the shooting do not meet the high criminal-law standards for either intentional homicide or the criminally irresponsible causing of death.

The critics’ claim that Wilson’s innocence is put in doubt by “conflicting testimony” is legally and factually frivolous. Legally, our system resolves all doubt in favor of the accused — as the Left is apt to remind us when a terrorist is in the dock, this is called the “presumption of innocence.” Factually, the chatter about “conflicting testimony” falsely implies that all testimony is created equal. In reality, accounts given by anti-Wilson witnesses, where not patently fabricated, tended to be discredited by forensic evidence. The forensics, instead, corroborated the exculpatory testimony — much of which came from African-American witnesses, a fact that undermines the myth and therefore goes largely unnoticed. The grand-jury rules are more permissive than those that govern criminal trials, but prosecutors are still ethically barred from asking the grand jury to rely on testimony they believe is false, inaccurate, or unconvincing.

Add to that the facts that Wilson’s own testimony would have powerfully influenced a jury (as a credible defendant’s testimony always does), and that Wilson would have had the benefit of Missouri law, which looks favorably on the use of deadly force by police officers who are endangered in attempting to make an arrest. A jury would have acquitted Wilson in short order — assuming for argument’s sake that the judge had not dismissed the case for lack of evidence before letting it get to jury deliberations.

If the Michael Brown shooting were an ordinary case, a grand jury would never have been asked to consider indicting Officer Wilson. McCulloch, the chief prosecutor, directed his office to present it to the grand jury because it was not an ordinary case — because it was a racially charged case in which Al Sharpton’s notorious “No Justice, No Peace” demagoguery was amplified by the community organizers in the White House and the most politicized Justice Department in American history.

Ordinarily, prosecutors unilaterally decide whether or not to seek an indictment and, in the rare instance when anyone asks why they decided as they did, are restrained by investigative-secrecy protocols from explaining their decision. But McCulloch was understandably unwilling to make a unilateral judgment for which he would have been unable to defend himself from inevitable charges of racism. He thus directed his office to make an exhaustive presentation to the grand jury. It was both a Pontius Pilate–style abdication that made the community, rather than himself, accountable for the charging decision; and a vehicle that, with the court’s blessing, enabled him to disclose the voluminous evidence justifying the decision not to indict.

All very reasonable, but let’s not pretend reason has anything to do with what happened in Ferguson this week. In Liberal Fascism’s focus on myth, Jonah recalls Mussolini’s assertion, “It is faith that moves mountains, not reason. Reason is a tool, but it can never be the motive force of the crowd.” The crowd in Ferguson was moved to riot on the article of a false faith that condemns America and its police forces as incorrigibly racist. It is from this condemnation that all purported “reasoning” proceeds.

Such reasoning dictates that our constitutional right not to be indicted in the absence of just cause should be subordinated to the mob’s demand for a public trial. Succeeding in that legerdemain, it next dictates that our constitutional right not to be convicted in the absence of proof beyond a reasonable doubt be subordinated to the mob’s demand for a guilty verdict.

Such a verdict that would have had only the most tangential connection to the tragedy of an 18-year-old’s death or a police officer’s well-founded fear for his life. But it would have fed the myth.