Decriminalizing shoplifting has hurt blacks

Decriminalizing shoplifting has hurt black communities and store owners, says Jason Riley in Wall Street Journal, Oct. 19. Walgreens has closed 22 stores in San Francisco where thefts under $950 are effectively decriminalized.

Using Target as another example, Mr. Riley notes the closure in recent years of Target stores in predominantly black sections of Chicago, Milwaukee, and Flint, Mich. in the wake of not only increased store thefts but also rioting, looting, and violent anti-police protests.

"If you are middle class and the nearest big-box store closes, you simply drive to a different one or its equivalent. But if you are a poor single mom without a car, your options are limited. You’ve just lost access, perhaps, to the closest, cheapest and widest variety of fresh produce, medicines and other goods. The alternatives are more-expensive convenience stores and less-healthy processed food for your family."

Mr. Riley says, "The fallout from antipolice protests in recent years has been all too predictable, as has the left’s response to it. Large employers quit urban areas after the riots of the 1960s as well, and some of those communities still haven’t fully recovered. Until the rule of law is restored and enforced, they probably never will."

How are our Democrats/socialists/progressives helping black communities? After destroying businesses with invitations to steal, they blame the investors and profit motive, and call the lack of retain or big box stores "systemic racism." Do all Democrats work for free? Do AOC and Bernie get paid? Do they have nice neighborhoods to shop in, or security guards to protect their belongings? And how about all those CRT free-lance workshops. Aren't they overpaid and living in abundance?

Why is Amazon censoring black opinion, lives, and opinions?

Why did Amazon, owned by the richest man in the world, find this film offensive? Another agency who decides who is black enough or liberal enough to be heard and seen? What are they afraid of?
"Early last month [Black history month, just in case you've forgotten] Amazon deleted a documentary film about Justice Clarence Thomas from its popular streaming service. Titled “Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words,” and culled from more than 30 hours of interviews with its subject, the film recounts Justice Thomas’s rise from poverty in segregated Georgia to Yale Law School and, eventually, to the Supreme Court." . . .

 
Last fall, Eli Steele’s “What Killed Michael Brown?”—a critique of liberal social policies that was written and narrated by his father, the race scholar Shelby Steele—was slated to stream on Amazon in October, then held up for reasons the company never fully explained. Amazon eventually relented and made the film available, but only after these pages weighed in and made a fuss." Wall Street Journal, March 2, Jason Riley

Liberals have made things worse for blacks

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9wWF1_YFBA

 


In "Please Stop Helping Us," Jason Riley examines how well-intentioned welfare programs are in fact holding black Americans back. Minimum-wage laws may lift earnings for people who are already employed, but they price a disproportionate number of blacks out of the labor force. Affirmative action in higher education is intended to address past discrimination, but the result is fewer black college graduates than would otherwise exist. And so it goes with everything from soft-on-crime laws, which make black neighborhoods more dangerous, to policies that limit school choice out of a mistaken belief that charter schools and voucher programs harm the traditional public schools that most low-income students attend.

Between 1940 and 1960 before the Great Society programs and the voting act, and at a time when black political power was nearly nonexistent -- the black poverty rate fell from 87% to 47%. Yet between 1972 and 2011 the implementation of Great Society programs -- it barely declined, from 32% to 28%, and remained three times the white rate, which is about what it was in 1972. Drug offenses are not driving the incarceration rate--violent crime is. It's a red herring to claim it's drugs. When everyone from the president (Obama) on down buy into the Black Lives Matter myth of cops killing young black men, we'll never be able make headway, and the solutions won't come from Washington, but from black people. (paraphrase) Affirmative action and quotas helped primarily the black middle class, not the underclass--it actually lost ground. (paraphrase).

The civil rights movement has become an industry. Liberalism has succeeded in convincing blacks to see themselves as victims.