#OccupyWalmart Adds A Juvenile Sophomoric Touch To The Shop-In

(Updated 04 DEC 2011)
So far in the latest bitch, whine, and complain demonstration nostalgia of the 1960s we have had Teach-Ins, Sit-Ins, along with piss-and-shit-ins. Now the bush league Ad-Busters scripted, American Nazi Party endorsed #Occupy children, decided to dig out another discarded protest idea that involves a field trip.  This one from the 1960s, pioneered by the Congress Of Racial Equality (CORE): The Shop-In

Cumberland Evening Times, Friday, February 28, 1964

Negroes Stage Shop-in Protests

New Weapon Used By Civil Rights Demonstrators

In the shop-in,. demonstrators enter a store, fill shopping carts with, groceries, wheel them to the counter, have them checked out, then say they can't pay and leave the sacks and boxes piled in front of clerks.

Members of the Congress of Racial Equality began the tactic last week at supermarkets of Lucky Stores, Inc. in San Francisco, at Berkeley, home of the University of California, and at Palo Alto to the south, adjacent to Stanford University.

They contend Lucky didn't fulfill an agreement to hire additional Negroes. Lucky flatly denied it, pointed to its Negro employes and said it would have no part of "reverse discrimination."
Tuesday, the largest Negro group in San Francisco, the Baptist Ministers Union said it would sever its ties with CORE if the shop-ins didn't stop.

"CORE has a right to picket, but if it continues 'to use this tactic, we just can't go along," said the Rev. George L. Bedford, head of the group representing 40,000 of the city's 85,000 Negroes.

In 1964, CORE was picketing grocery stores that they did not like, but that tactic did not impact business enough.  So, they tried a new tactic, clogging up the stores so nobody else could buy anything.  Later in 1967, CORE was a key player in the Detroit Riot.

Now, the new kids come along with their version: #OccupyBlackFriday

Instead of a trespassing protest on private property to get a grocery store that already employs Black people to . . . employ Black people a la CORE, the #Occupy kids make a mess trespassing on private property to demand . . . people shop locally?

The original shopins were so successful that they ended up on the trash-heap of history for almost forty years.  The old fart Commies running this #Occupy circus must have some memory of the shopins of old, and how they went over.  Perhaps they do not, because until recently one had to remember them from the 1960s because there was precious little to be found about them online.  The effect was pissing people off, so maybe they do remember and it fits right in with the rest of #Occupy.  There is an old film or two about the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s that PBS channels play on occasion, but that is about it.  I have been asking for source information about shopins for years and this week was the first time I found a news report from the period that mentioned "shop-ins".

In Liberal Fascism, or during his book tour, Jonah Goldberg mentioned that around the time of Hitler's rise in Germany there were protests against department stores there, similar to the Walmart hate we witness in America today.  I am still looking for direct references to that and any information is welcome.

Daniel J. Flynn has a great response to #OccupyWalmart at Human Events.  Rush Limbaugh mentioned the ruckus on his show, apparently before it spread to Target, Best Buy and other stores.

The Blaze covered the Dayton 'event' like this:

Black Friday shoppers in Dayton, Ohio, were in for a rude awakening when Occupy Dayton protesters (we’ve reported on their antics before) entered a local Walmart and Target and began mic-checking and berating individuals and families.

On the protest group’s YouTube page, a five and a half minute video has been posted. In it, Occupiers document and promote the torment they attempt to inflict on shoppers.

At the 40 second mark, you’ll see the first clip, which was taken at a local Target store. Around 1:08, a male voice can be heard asking, “Ready?” Within seconds, the protesters begin yelling, “Mic check!” Then, they launch into their seemingly endless chant:

“Hello Daytonians. We have a message for you. This will only take a moment. It is shameful that you spend your hard-earned money at a corporation who does not care about your family. They insult the 99 percent. They pay little or no taxes, while profits soar. Our tax money goes to our public schools. We find it an outrage that you continue to shop here in support of a corporation who does not support you.”

Video from The Blaze:

I am not up on Walmart getting any free ride on sales taxes.  They frequently get property tax incentives thrown at them by local governments competing with other local governments for Walmart to build a store in their town, which is really an abuse of government power.  Neither am I certain if Ohioans fund public schools with sales taxes generated at Walmart.  I am betting that the Occupiers have a few tax facts wrong.

Also, if you don't think that the American Nazis are Socialists, try looking at their endorsement of #OWS for their "anti-capitalist" positions.  Just because they mix racism with Socialism does not make them any less Socialistic.

What Is So Bad About Monopolies?

Can a monopoly be sexy?

A monopoly (from Greek monos / μονος (alone or single) + polein / πωλειν (to sell)) exists when a specific person or enterprise is the only supplier of a particular commodity.

Thankfully, the question in the subject line is not so alien today as it was in the mid 1990s when my Strategic Management instructor used that as a lecture topic.  I was in the same boat then as many reading this today, with my reaction somewhere along the lines of How can you even ask that?  Of course they are bad!  They destroy the competition in the marketplace!

He, being a great lecturer, listened to a few of our comments and then launched into a quick destruction of them all: monopolies are short lived and competition destroys them.  Barriers to entry eventually disappear with new innovations and alternate products.  Of course, the lecture was much longer than that.

Now, there has been this lie spread through non-business academia and the mainstream media that once a monopoly is established, nobody can compete with it any more.  The consumer is a captive slave of the monopolist and that is that until the government does something.  As usual, the poets and news readers get this as wrong as one can possibly get anything wrong.  The persistent monopoly exists because of the intervention of government, not a lack of government action.

Need a few examples?

One often cited is Standard Oil of New Jersey.  The way it is told by Professors of History is that Standard had taken over the oil business (omitting that it was primarily kerosine, a replacement for whale oil in lamps, and a replacement for coal fired engines) and was gouging consumers.  They beat their competitors to a pulp and ran the show from derrick to home.

In reality, Standard had about 20% of the refining capacity by the time their case came before the United States Supreme Court and gained that through buying out their competition.  Some monopoly, huh?  By the time the case got to court, crude oil and refining competitors were emerging in the Western States and Getty (the primary shareholder) was boycotting those States because they were not giving him favorable deals to expand Standard to that part of the country.

Another falsehood in this Liberal Arts Department fable is that Standard owned oil fields.  In fact, they did not own a single oil well and were delighted when suppliers undercut each other on the price of crude.  When the government "broke them up" they were "divided" into different firms, all with the same owners with the same proportion of ownership as Standard of New Jersey.  All the government did was add inefficiency to the mix.

In reality, Standard had a short lived spike in market dominance that was going away through competition and a lack of government support from Western States.

The AT&T story is a study in the other half of the monopoly lie.  The story goes that "Ma Bell" (American Bell Telephone Company) created and protected their monopoly on voice telephone service through various sorts of dastardly acts and they thwarted government action to break them up until the feds were finally able to break the monopoly in the early 1980s.

First, the only reason that "Ma Bell" had any monopoly at all was because the federal government granted them one, as a national utility, under the Franklin Delano Roosevelt administration in 1934.  In spite of being granted a monopoly, the US Justice Department decided to muck around and make some headlines for themselves in the 1950s and got the monopoly throttled back to 85% of the US market, along with restrictions on their foreign business.

By the 1980s, the American Bell System had had enough and asked the government nicely to become a "regular" company and compete without the umbrella of government monopoly power.  The agreed settlement resulted in a breakup of the firm into regional operating companies and an explosion in innovation and profit due to normal competition.  Those profits came in spite of overwhelming persistant government regulation that continues to this day.

Note also, in both of the above examples, National Socialist regimes were behind all of the government meddling with businesses that would have succeeded just fine with normal competition.

AOL CD Throne

AOL disk dress

CD bikini

Now for a few "monopoly" examples that should make anybody laugh: AOL, Netflix, Walmart (also accused of being a 'monopsony', NBC, Microsoft, and IBM.