As fellow law professor sent me this video of Oakland police shooting a photographer. The video raises serious questions of the unjustified use of force.
In the video, the police appear to be standing without challenge when, around the 33 second mark, an officer suddenly shoot a photographer who is a good distance from the police line.
I cannot imagine the claim of justification in this case when the use of rubber bullets present significant potential harm to citizens, as shown below.
Kudos: Professor Alberto Bernabe (John Marshall Law School)
Source: Lowering Bar
Mike Spindell:
I did read the shorter one and about 1/2 of the longer one and the conclusion.
I posted them because they seemed to be fair in their assessments.
Just out of curiosity do they seem fair to you?
We agree that consumerism isnt a good thing, production is what drives an economy. Production has been driven out of America. Look at the pipe line that isnt going to be built. I dont think Wal Mart is the problem (although I pretty much agree with your assessment and shop at Costco which isnt that cheap either but the turnover is good, for vegetables we go to the local Asian Market or Farmers Market).
Why has production been driven out of America? Profits? Probably, but why is it harder to make a profit here than in some other country? Other countries have their costs of doing business that may not be direct wages and benefits.
I would love to see American companies hire American workers in America but one group of people seem hell bent on preventing that from happening. Why is that?
By the way I worked in different states in America and got to know the people from many states.
“Wal-Mart jobs tend to be significantly lower paying than comparable retail sector jobs (Dube and Jacobs, 2004). This is an outgrowth of Wal-Mart’s aggressive cost-cutting, as well as its well-chronicled hostility toward unionization of its workers. Thus, the modest overall increase in
local employment translates to an even more modest increase – or maybe even a decline – in overall incomes associated with the coming of a Wal-Mart”
“From the NC State Economist – Nov./Dec. 2005”
Bron,
Read the articles in both the links you posted. Their conclusions were mostly
non-committal about Wal-Mart and did tend to state further study was needed.
The tone of the quote above illustrates this inconclusiveness. One of the aspects of the study was there was a mild belief that there was some benefit in Wal-Marts lower prices, but I take issue with this apparent truth.
I’ve done the food shopping for my family for thirty years primarily because I am very good at it. In the latter years since my retirement, the fact of a fixed income has made economy even more important and so I tend to food shop in more than one venue. About 6 months ago I began to think about the claim that Wal-Mart was cheaper, so despite my own prejudice against patronizing them
I shopped there for my usual two week at a time food supply. What I found was that there were some items where Wal-Mart Super Store was cheaper, but in many others they had the same or higher prices than the supermarket (Publix), Target and BJ’s.
As far as quality goes their vegetables seemed to be of lower quality. Their low salt Roast Beef at the deli counter was inexpensive, but it went bad very quickly. Their Jarlsberg Lite Cheese was the cheapest around. Since we eat a low fat, low salt diet I’m quite aware of these contents in products. Wal-Mart did not offer as many to choose from as the supermarket. Their household and cleaning products showed little price differentiation than the other stores and this was the case with paper goods. I checked out the other sections such as electronics, housewares, furniture and clothing (both male and female and found the prices cheap and the quality generally poor) and was surprised to find there were few bargains to be had in the first three categories. My conclusion is that their “lower” prices apply to some featured items but in the main it was the same old retail “bait and switch”. Target and BJ’s were comparable and in some items significantly cheaper. The supermarket remains the best choice if a family likes to watch its weight and salt intake.
My point is that Wal-Mart has created an illusion of being cheaper than its other competitors. Add that to ongoing poor treatment of its employees, cast iron supermarket wagons that are hard to push even empty, dimly lit unattractive stores, bad checkout, intrusive security and I find that I’ve missed nothing in avoiding them on principle..
As far as your “protectionist” charge aimed at Elaine, I would point out that open US trade policies have been a disaster. That American workers have to compete with what is virtual slave labor is intolerable. Beyond that though if you look at the tariff/import system of places like China and Japan, you will find that it is quite difficult for the Us to compete in those countries on an equal footing. “Free Trade” should be a two way street, it isn’t.
Now too Bron when I was talking about small business I wasn’t talking specifically about Mom and Pop stores. Bron my first degree was a BBA in Marketing and Management. I am fairly sophisticated when it comes to business. A small business to me can have a thousand employees and gross
$10,000 million a year for instance. It can also be a displaced local accounting firm, Law Office and/or trucking company. Your own links show that the ancilliary service are negatively effected by Wal-Mart.
When small town Main Street America loses its magnet stores a chain reaction occurs that eventually lowers property values and decreases an areas prosperity. the chimera of supposedly lower prices does not make up for that in the loss of local economy. Having travelled by car all over this country i am appalled by the effect upon it of super conglomerates creating
a homogenized country, where Wal-Mart and Mcdonald’s have become ubiquitous. In our travels my wife and I shun eating crappy chain food and always find local restaurants. The difference in choice and quality is amazing and in our small way we help a local economy sustain itself.
It amuses me that those who profess to be the sole possessors of American values are the greatest apologists for the propaganda driven consumer society that makes those values obsolete. I am also amused that this old Jewish guy from Brooklyn is more attuned to the real America, than the blowhards preaching the blessings of its destruction through corporatism.
.
Bron,
One last thing: Did I say it was unpatriotic to buy products that weren’t manufactured in the United States? Don’t put words in my mouth!
Are products manufactured in China of higher quality than products manufactured in the United States? Is that what you’re trying to say?
P.S. I don’t shop at Costco either.
I believe in freedom of choice. My choice is to never buy anything from Wal-mart.
*****
The Wal-Mart You Don’t Know
By: Charles FishmanDecember 1, 2003
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/77/walmart.html
Excerpt:
The giant retailer’s low prices often come with a high cost. Wal-Mart’s relentless pressure can crush the companies it does business with and force them to send jobs overseas. Are we shopping our way straight to the unemployment line?
A gallon-sized jar of whole pickles is something to behold. The jar is the size of a small aquarium. The fat green pickles, floating in swampy juice, look reptilian, their shapes exaggerated by the glass. It weighs 12 pounds, too big to carry with one hand. The gallon jar of pickles is a display of abundance and excess; it is entrancing, and also vaguely unsettling. This is the product that Wal-Mart fell in love with: Vlasic’s gallon jar of pickles.
Wal-Mart priced it at $2.97–a year’s supply of pickles for less than $3! “They were using it as a ‘statement’ item,” says Pat Hunn, who calls himself the “mad scientist” of Vlasic’s gallon jar. “Wal-Mart was putting it before consumers, saying, This represents what Wal-Mart’s about. You can buy a stinkin’ gallon of pickles for $2.97. And it’s the nation’s number-one brand.”
Therein lies the basic conundrum of doing business with the world’s largest retailer. By selling a gallon of kosher dills for less than most grocers sell a quart, Wal-Mart may have provided a ser-vice for its customers. But what did it do for Vlasic? The pickle maker had spent decades convincing customers that they should pay a premium for its brand. Now Wal-Mart was practically giving them away. And the fevered buying spree that resulted distorted every aspect of Vlasic’s operations, from farm field to factory to financial statement.
Indeed, as Vlasic discovered, the real story of Wal-Mart, the story that never gets told, is the story of the pressure the biggest retailer relentlessly applies to its suppliers in the name of bringing us “every day low prices.” It’s the story of what that pressure does to the companies Wal-Mart does business with, to U.S. manufacturing, and to the economy as a whole. That story can be found floating in a gallon jar of pickles at Wal-Mart.
Wal-Mart is not just the world’s largest retailer. It’s the world’s largest company–bigger than ExxonMobil, General Motors, and General Electric. The scale can be hard to absorb. Wal-Mart sold $244.5 billion worth of goods last year. It sells in three months what
number-two retailer Home Depot sells in a year. And in its own category of general merchandise and groceries, Wal-Mart no longer has any real rivals. It does more business than Target, Sears, Kmart, J.C. Penney, Safeway, and Kroger combined. “Clearly,” says Edward Fox, head of Southern Methodist University’s J.C. Penney Center for Retailing Excellence, “Wal-Mart is more powerful than any retailer has ever been.” It is, in fact, so big and so furtively powerful as to have become an entirely different order of corporate being.
Wal-Mart wields its power for just one purpose: to bring the lowest possible prices to its customers. At Wal-Mart, that goal is never reached. The retailer has a clear policy for suppliers: On basic products that don’t change, the price Wal-Mart will pay, and will charge shoppers, must drop year after year. But what almost no one outside the world of Wal-Mart and its 21,000 suppliers knows is the high cost of those low prices. Wal-Mart has the power to squeeze profit-killing concessions from vendors. To survive in the face of its pricing demands, makers of everything from bras to bicycles to blue jeans have had to lay off employees and close U.S. plants in favor of outsourcing products from overseas.
*****
You’ll have to continue this discussion without me. I’m leaving for Chicago today–and I’m not taking a computer with me.