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Why the CVS Burned
Slate ^ | May 1 2015 | Louis Hyman

Posted on 05/03/2015 4:55:05 PM PDT by Second Amendment First

The rioting in Baltimore wasn’t hooliganism. It was a protest against the depredations of the ghetto economy.

Most people can sympathize with the anger on display this week in the streets of Baltimore. It’s relatively easy to feel compassion for people who’ve suffered police brutality and abject poverty, even if you’ve never experienced either. Looting and burning is harder to understand, since torching a CVS store would hardly seem to have anything to do with protesting the actions of the Baltimore Police Department. President Obama decried the Baltimore riots as “senseless violence and destruction.” Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake also despaired at the destruction. “We worked so hard to get a company like CVS to invest in this neighborhood,” she said, “this is the only place that so many people have to pick up their prescriptions.” Why would anyone burn down the only CVS in their neighborhood?

The reason, I think, is likely the same reason that poor black Americans in cities across the country burned “their own” neighborhoods in the late 1960s: They did not experience those places as their own. Then, like now, police brutality was a precipitating cause of the violence, but it was the long-term experience of the indignities of the ghetto that gave shape to the riots. Then, like now, commentators compared the rioters to animals who had run wild and needed discipline. Rioting, to these bystanders, was not proper political protest but the criminal actions of poor people who merely wanted to grab what they could for free. This narrative, which I heard throughout my childhood growing up in Baltimore in the 1980s, put the blame not on the depredations of the ghetto, but on the character of its residents. It completely misapprehends the political economy of our poorest neighborhoods.

(Excerpt) Read more at slate.com ...


TOPICS: Crime/Corruption; Culture/Society; News/Current Events; US: Maryland
KEYWORDS: baltimore; blackkk; demagogicparty; elijahcummings; louishyman; maryland; memebuilding; partisanmediashill; partisanmediashills; slate
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Louis Hyman is assistant professor of history at Cornell University. He is the author of Debtor Nation: The History of America in Red Ink, Borrow: The American Way of Debt, and American Capitalism: A Reader.

So the high prices in the ghetto are not related to lack of competition, higher insurance rates, economies of scale, higher rates of "shrinkage" or lack of hardworking employees.

I guess they never heard of combat pay.

1 posted on 05/03/2015 4:55:05 PM PDT by Second Amendment First
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To: Second Amendment First

Help this poor man out. All businesses immediately leave Baltimore and all ghetto cities.


2 posted on 05/03/2015 4:57:10 PM PDT by TigersEye (STONE COLD ZOMBIE SCOURGE)
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To: Second Amendment First

They burned down the CVS because they are stupid, short-sighted subhuman thugs.


3 posted on 05/03/2015 4:57:25 PM PDT by King Moonracer (Bad lighting and cheap fabric, that's how you sell clothing.....)
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To: Second Amendment First

What a Libtard.
Tell it to the owners, employees, insurance company and the people in the area that used the store for their prescriptions and groceries.


4 posted on 05/03/2015 4:58:13 PM PDT by RedMDer (Keep Free Republic Alive with YOUR Donations!)
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To: Second Amendment First

The main reason the CVS was looted then torched was because of the Oxy and other controlled drugs that the looters took first.


5 posted on 05/03/2015 4:58:24 PM PDT by Doc91678 (Doc91678)
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To: Second Amendment First

It’s always somebody else fault with these people.


6 posted on 05/03/2015 4:58:26 PM PDT by Timber Rattler (Just say NO! to RINOS and the GOP-E)
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To: Second Amendment First

What? They burnt it to protest corporate donations to Obama at the expense of blacks?

They burned it to protest the constant use of blacks by Slate to profit from clicks and ad dollars? Without doing squat for blacks or ‘giving back’?

Those ‘depridations?


7 posted on 05/03/2015 4:58:54 PM PDT by Norm Lenhart
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To: All

Apparently the black communities want to do business with and commune with their own kind - AKA self-segregate. Who am I to object?


8 posted on 05/03/2015 4:59:15 PM PDT by rockrr (Everything is different now...)
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To: Second Amendment First

The reason the CVS burned was because it was built in the middle of a third world hellhole full of coddled, spoiled, indolent, work-shy, bone-idle ingrates.

Other than that, I think he may be on to something.


9 posted on 05/03/2015 4:59:20 PM PDT by Lonesome in Massachussets (This is known as "bad luck". - Robert A. Heinlein)
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To: Second Amendment First

Not sure they didn’t think of it as ‘their own’....the ghettos had barely begun to coalesce in the 1960’s never mind the 1940’s when race riots also burned and looted their own


10 posted on 05/03/2015 4:59:28 PM PDT by erlayman
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To: Second Amendment First
Most people can sympathize with the anger on display this week in the streets of Baltimore.

Not even close; only brain-dead liberals.

11 posted on 05/03/2015 4:59:29 PM PDT by facedown (Armed in the Heartland)
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12 posted on 05/03/2015 4:59:40 PM PDT by RedMDer (Keep Free Republic Alive with YOUR Donations!)
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To: Second Amendment First

Well that article has to be the biggest load of tripe I’ve read all week. They want to completely excuse criminal behavior for the colored people, don’t they?


13 posted on 05/03/2015 5:00:09 PM PDT by Gasshog (DemoKKKrats: Leaders of the Free Stuff World)
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To: Second Amendment First

Now these communities can look forward to 50 years of zero capital investment, boarded up storefronts, greater deprivation and even less economic opportunity.

I can tell you what I’d do as the CEO of CVS. Raze the burned out husk of a store, embed I beams and steel reinforced cement posts on the property and leave it as a complete eyesore and constant reminder of the self-inflicted economic damage the community visited upon itself.

I’d continue to pay property tax but I would never, under any circumstance rebuild.


14 posted on 05/03/2015 5:00:34 PM PDT by PittsburghAfterDark
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To: Second Amendment First

15 posted on 05/03/2015 5:01:53 PM PDT by Bratch
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To: Second Amendment First
They did not experience those places as their own

Because the socialists created urban renewal, section 8 housing, etc. At the same time attacking private property ownership. So yeah, dimwit - because of commies like you.

16 posted on 05/03/2015 5:02:18 PM PDT by P.O.E. (Pray for America)
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To: Second Amendment First
Why the CVS burned? Slate? Let me guess...Bush's,and Bush's,and Reagan's,and Ford's,and Nixon,and Eisenhower's fault?
17 posted on 05/03/2015 5:02:20 PM PDT by Gay State Conservative (Obama;A Low Grade Intellect With Even Lower Morals)
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To: Gasshog
They want to completely excuse criminal behavior for the colored people, don’t they?

0bama and Holder have been saying (and doing) that for six plus years.

18 posted on 05/03/2015 5:02:32 PM PDT by TigersEye (STONE COLD ZOMBIE SCOURGE)
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To: Second Amendment First

The Roman army had a long-term solution to problems like these...


19 posted on 05/03/2015 5:02:33 PM PDT by SuperLuminal (Where is another agitator for republicanism like Sam Adams when we need him?)
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To: Lonesome in Massachussets

20 posted on 05/03/2015 5:02:59 PM PDT by Lonesome in Massachussets (This is known as "bad luck". - Robert A. Heinlein)
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