The Wall Street Journal - 08.11.2019

A14| Friday, November 8, 2019 THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.

An Overreach? But Don’t Free Lori Loughlin

Regarding William McGurn’s “Free

Lori Loughlin” (Main Street, Nov. 5):

Ms. Loughlin and her husband are ac-

cused of serious crimes. Simply be-

cause they are nonviolent doesn’t

eliminate the seriousness of their

acts. Not only are they accused of ly-

ing about their children’s qualifica-

tions, but they allegedly paid an

enormous sum of money to help them

succeed and get away with it. They

were indicted by the feds in April and

charged with laundering their pay-

ments through William “Rick”

Singer’s so-called “charitable founda-

tion.” Their alleged crimes, if proven

to be true in a court of law, are seri-

ous and merit serious jail time.

DANGOLDBERG

Simi Valley, Calif.

Give her a stiff fine and commu-

nity service while tens of thousands

of other nonviolent offenders, many

people of color, do hard time? Send a

message that those with privilege get

a slap on the wrist for using their

status to defraud the federal govern-

ment, a key funding source for these

institutions?

Mr. McGurn does a great disservice

to our society in general by using his

pulpit to try to minimize the damage

done by those who believe laws, eth-

ics and simple human decency don’t

apply to them because they are rich

or famous.

Stephen Semprevivo was among

those who pleaded guilty in this case.

He was my son’s basketball coach. I

coached his kids in Little League and

had dinners at his house with his

wife and family. Our children were

friends. I was shocked and outraged

by his behavior and spent hours dis-

cussing it with my boy. I feel bad for

Stephen, not because he will spend

time in prison and struggle to get his

life back together, but because he

failed his family and his community.

STEVEPROFFITT

Idyllwild, Calif.

Beat the rap? Mr. McGurn’s ratio-

nalization to pardon Lori Loughlin is

an insult to the hardworking parents

and high-school seniors who were de-

nied rightful admission to USC be-

cause of fraudulent applications.

These are life opportunities they have

lost forever. They are the true vic-

tims. If the government’s case, as Mr.

McGurn says, is an overreach, so too

is Lori Loughlin’s plea of innocence.

Let a jury determine the facts.

RICHARDPARSANKO

Scottsdale, Ariz.

We know that 40 years of prison is

rhetoric; the Loughlins will never

come close to getting that. As for her

being a nonviolent first offender, per-

haps Ms. Loughlin’s conviction will

serve to deter the multitude of others

who feel they have the right and priv-

ilege to cheat.

GARYCARTER

Sun City West, Ariz.

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

Letters intended for publication should

be addressed to: The Editor, 1211 Avenue

of the Americas, New York, NY 10036,

or emailed to [email protected]. Please

include your city and state. All letters

are subject to editing, and unpublished

letters can be neither acknowledged nor

returned.

“Please skip the talking points.”

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Plant-Based Meat, Costs and Consciences

In “‘Plant-Based Meat’ Is All Hat

and No Cattle” (op-ed, Nov. 6), Rick

Berman makes some devastating

points about the drawbacks of Beyond

Meat: 400% more sodium than lean

beef, very heavy processing, 40 ingre-

dients including a paint whitener. At

my favorite beer and burger joint in

Brooklyn, you can find a bigger draw-

back—ridiculously higher costs. Billy,

the owner of two8two Bar & Burger,

says he pays more than double the

cost per pound for Beyond Meat. Real

beef costs him $4 a pound over all,

Beyond Meat costs him the equivalent

of $8.50 a pound.

Yet he dare not double the price he

charges his customers for the ersatz

patty. The real Billy Burger will cost

you $9.50 versus $12.50 for the plant-

based version. That is a mere 32%

markup on a 125% higher cost for the

main ingredient. This makes the fake

beef almost a loss leader for him.

What restaurateur will go all in selling

a dish with those numbers? For the

Half and Half Burger—50% beef and

50% applewood smoked bacon with

roasted poblano, cheddar and sauce—

he doesn’t even attempt a Beyond

Meat version. Who knows what might

happen when fried bacon mixes with

methylcellulose, “a bulking agent com-

monly used in laxatives,” as Mr. Ber-

man notes without a spit take.

We see an old lesson in the new.

Sustainable green tech will supplant

incumbent technologies and infra-

structure when it offers a financial

upside and superior quality. Climate-

change guilt and government subsi-

dies will fall short.

DENNISKNEALE

Brooklyn, N.Y.

There is no mention in the article

that a significant motivator for many

people who are trying to move to-

ward plant-based foods is to reduce

animal abuse and the environmental

impact of the modern animal-based

food industry.

JEFFREYPLAUT

Elkins Park, Pa.

I find the current trend to turn

plants into beef rather silly. Haven’t

cows already been doing this forever?

JEFFKESLER

Sugar Land, Texas

Automation, New Jobs and a Worker’s Duty

In his closing sentence, Marc Per-

rone, president of the United Food

and Commercial Workers Interna-

tional Union, states: “Businesses have

a responsibility to use technology in

a way that benefits their customers

and the workers who help them every

day” (Letters, Nov. 5). No, Marc,

workers have a responsibility to pro-

vide their employer more value than

their paycheck. If they don’t, they

won’t have jobs. That’s been my phi-

losophy since my first paid job baling

hay for farmers around my hometown

in Iowa at age 14.

BILLHARRIS

Melbourne, Fla.

While I don’t doubt that automa-

tion has caused some workers to lose

jobs, there is another side to this

coin. The grocery that I use has initi-

ated a program whereby people can

order groceries online and then pick

them up at the store or have them

delivered. There is a small charge for

the service. To implement this pro-

gram the store needs workers to do

the shopping, and to separate the

food into refrigerated, nonrefriger-

ated and frozen. For the shoppers

who select delivery, the store has

workers for that. Because these are

tasks that workers didn’t have to do

previously, I would think additional

people were hired for this new work-

load. Workers are put out of work be-

cause of new technology, and new

jobs are created by that same tech-

nology, just as in the past.

MARVLEIBOWITZ

Universal City, Texas

Pepper ...

And Salt

Green Windmills: Disaster for Birds and Bats

In response to the letter of the Nat-

ural Resources Defense Council’s Rich-

ard Schrader (“Cuomo’s Right About

Limiting Gas Pipelines,” Nov 1): The

first law broken by ideologues is the

law of unintended consequences. The

NRDC supports the couple dozen or so

wind turbines on mountain tops in and

around Sanford, N.Y. This is even

though three bat species have just

been placed on the New York state’s

“special concern” list, even though the

most recent Cornell University study

concluded that the bird population of

the U.S. is in serious decline, even

though the Sierra Club publication

Desert Record has set out in detail the

serious detrimental health effects of

infrasound from wind turbines on

wildlife and humans, even though the

town of Sanford won’t receive one

kilowatt-hour of electricity from the

wind turbines, even though the eight-

square-mile project will clear-cut for-

ests on top of the mountains, even

though the project will be on a major

migratory bird route and the unique

scenic divide of the head waters area

of both the Delaware and Susquehanna

Rivers. The project seeks a “kill per-

mit” for eagles, other birds and bats.

Yet Mr. Schrader believes that “all ar-

rows are now pointed in the right di-

rection.” Perhaps the NRDC needs a

new compass.

CHRISTOPHERDENTON

Elmira, N.Y.

Targeting Mark Zuckerberg

P

erhaps the most important political divide
in our polarized times isn’t between those
who support Donald Trump and those
who oppose him. It’s between
those who think American val-
ues like free expression still
matter and those who think Mr.
Trump’s Presidency is a license
to dispense with them.
The relentless campaign
demanding that CEO Mark Zuckerberg police
the political ads of candidates for accuracy on
Facebook shows the prevalence of the latter
view. In the panic over Mr. Trump, academics
and journalists have embraced censorship they’d
find unconscionable in another context.
The arguments being deployed can be mind-
bending. A Columbia law professor opines in
the New York Times that, with its recent deci-
sion not to fact-check or censor ads by politi-
cians, Facebook is “refusing to stay out” of poli-
tics and therefore asking to be broken up.
That’s backwards. Facebook’s policy is wise
precisely because it takes the company out of
the political fray.
Imagine if Facebook were in the business of
approving or disapproving candidate claims
about the cost of Medicare for All or the efficacy
of climate-change policy. The company would
need to take political positions. It could put its
thumb on the scale of elections far more than
it can today and it would be a perpetual punch-
ing bag for candidates.
Mr. Zuckerberg seems to genuinely want
Facebook to be neutral, not a vehicle for one or
another of America’s clashing political tribes.
For the Resistance press, neutrality is an abdica-
tion.Everyonemust take a side. But this wanton
partisanship is responsible for plummeting trust
in institutions from higher education to media
companies to the American Bar Association, and
Mr. Zuckerberg is wise to avoid it.
Facebook could ban political ads altogether.
That’s the policy Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey an-
nounced last week in a grandstanding gesture
designed to pressure Mr. Zuckerberg. The move
could favor incumbent politicians with large fol-
lowings. Online advertising is especially valu-
able for little-known challengers and causes. Mr.
Dorsey says campaigns should “earn reach” in-
stead of buying ads, but that could encourage
provocations and personal attacks that are most
likely to be shared.
Freedom House, the D.C. organization that
has promoted democracy, is the latest to join
the call for increased political control of the
web by large corporations. In a new report it

raises alarm about “elected incumbents with

authoritarian ambitions” using social-media

platforms as “instruments for political distor-

tion.” Translation: Republican

Presidents can use social me-

dia to engage in political advo-

cacy that Freedom House dis-

approves of.

The authoritarian sensibil-

ity is widespread. Freedom of

speech should be curtailed because it protects

“bad actors who hide behind it to weaken our

society,” Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán re-

cently said. Actually, that was former Obama

State Department official and former Time mag-

azine managing editor Richard Stengel writing

in the Washington Post last week.

The current high-minded justification for in-

ternet censorship is that free speech is “sowing

division” with “misinformation.” Yet this view

of social media’s political effect reflects preju-

dice more than evidence. A 2017 study in the

National Bureau of Economic Research found

more polarization among groups that spend

less time online.

An analysis last month by two Penn State re-

searchers said the popular theory of YouTube

driving the radical right is not well-supported.

Yet the theory may have gained traction, they

argue, because “it implies an obvious policy so-

lution—one which is flattering to the journalists

and academics studying the phenomenon.” Es-

tablished gatekeepers want to shut out alterna-

tive perspectives. The same dynamic may be

driving the Facebook pile-on.

The tech columnist Kara Swisher said last

week she expects Mark Zuckerberg to “change

his mind” on Facebook’s ad policy. A liberal

group on Tuesday chartered a plane to fly over

Facebook’s headquarters with the banner “Face-

book [heart] right-wing lies.”

The pressure will increase as the 2020 cam-

paign heats up and Mr. Trump posts another ad

that outrages the press like his attack on Joe Bi-

den that started the avalanche. The record in re-

cent years of blue-America executives with-

standing wall-to-wall liberal shaming

campaigns is not cause for hope.

The fight over fact-checking prompted by

Mr. Trump’s ad is one skirmish in a broader of-

fensive by Democrats and liberals to turn so-

cial-media platforms into their information-

enforcement arm. We hope Mr. Zuckerberg

shows more foresight and fortitude, and that

he accepts the temporary loss of allies on the

left as a price for keeping the internet open for

political speech.

The avalanche of attacks

against Facebook’s

speech policy continues.

Parody of a Climate Trial

W

ell, that was anti-climactic. New
York’s attorney general spent the
past three weeks in state court trying
to prove that Exxon Mobil de-
ceived investors with its cli-
mate-change disclosures. The
trial ended this week with the
AG dropping two charges of
fraud, proving the lawsuit’s
dirty political provenance.
To recap: In 2015 former AG Eric Schneider-
man launched a sprawling probe aimed at show-
ing that Exxon deceived the public about what
it knew about CO2’s climate harms. The AG
combed four million pages of documents and in-
terviewed dozens of employees, but well after
well ran dry. Then last year the AG’s office sued
Exxon for deceiving itself.
The suit claims Exxon told investors that it
was projecting a $80 per ton “proxy cost” of car-
bon in 2040 but had used lower greenhouse-gas
cost calculations internally to forecast profit-
ability of particular investments. The prosecu-
tors were the real confused party.
Exxon’s “proxy cost” estimates consider fu-
ture demand for oil and take into account cli-
mate regulation from carbon taxes to electric-
car mandates. Its internal greenhouse-gas cost
accounts for particular climate expenses related
to specific investments in specific jurisdictions
such as the Alberta oil sands. Costs for projects
are naturally different than the proxy cost.

Not a single Exxon shareholder at trial

claimed to have been deceived. A Pricewater-

houseCoopers director who performed 13 years

of audits for Exxon said he was

not aware of any attempt to

manipulate either cost, though

he once inadvertently used the

two costs interchangeably in

aninternalmemo.

The AG says Exxon’s ficti-

tious fraud cost investors between $476 million

and $1.6 billion based on declines in its share price

after government investigations were reported.

But as one economic consultant interviewed dur-

ing the trial quipped, “You don’t shoot the arrow

and then draw a bull’s-eye around it.”

New York Supreme Court Justice Barry Os-

trager several times lectured state attorneys for

“agonizing repetitious questioning” and lack of

preparation. “This isn’t a teaching exercise

here,” he sighed. On Thursday state attorneys

dropped two fraud charges that require proof

that Exxon knowingly or intentionally defrauded

investors who relied on its disclosures.

Current AG Letitia James is now hoping to

salvage this joke of a case by resorting to the

much lower level of proof required by New

York’s Martin Act, which allows that a “reason-

able” investormight havebeen deceived and

doesn’t need proof of fraudulent intent. Inves-

tors were more likely fooled by the AG’s decep-

tive press releases than Exxon’s disclosures.

After three years, the

NewYorkAGdropstwo

charges against Exxon.

Meritocracy’s Waterloo?

S

ocial-justice organizations last week
threatened the University of California
with a lawsuit unless it halts the use of
standardized testing in ad-
missions, claiming the tests
discriminate against minori-
ties. Who knows what success
they may have before a sym-
pathetic judge. But the issue
may be settled sooner as the
political mood in the UC moves against test-
ing. This shift could have baleful nationwide
consequences.
Standardized tests have been a target of the
left for decades, but in 2018 something changed.
Dozens of colleges, most significantly the Uni-
versity of Chicago, have been dropping their
standardized-test requirements. The number of
students who take the SAT and ACT has been
holding steady because enough schools still use
them. Yet the UC is by far the largest university
system in the country, and if it throws out test-
ing the admissions landscape would fundamen-
tally change.
Several UC regents are on record criticizing
the test as unfair to the underprivileged. Gover-
nor Gavin Newsom, who appoints most regents,
said last month that tests exacerbate “the ineq-
uities for underrepresented students.” A UC fac-

ulty task force will give recommendations early

next year.

Anti-testing campaigners have been unable

to explain how they would aca-

demically compare students

across schools with different

grading standards. They want

to stamp out performance dis-

parities on tests, but tackling

the achievement gap requires

improving education in poor areas. Standard-

ized tests can seem frustrating and arbitrary,

but so is the entire college admissions tourna-

ment, which weighs activities, personal charac-

teristics, “character” and often race. Testing is

at least objective.

The UC began using the SAT in 1960 consis-

tent with its mission of finding talented students

no matter where they came from, and it contin-

ues to enroll more low-income students than the

Ivy League. At that time California’s K-12 school

system was among the best in the U.S. Today it

is run by teachers unions and consistently ranks

in the bottom half.

If they scrap testing, California policy makers

will effectively be announcing that instead of ad-

dressing the failures that have left so many stu-

dents with diminished opportunity, they choose

to look away.

The University of

California may scrap

admissions testing.

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