Well, Tuesday is election day. Fun all around! In California, we Democrats have a delightful selection of ten different names for the presidency (though around half of those have already dropped out of the race), while the poor Republicans have a wide choice of George W. Bush, their Party evidently having decided ahead of time (as the Democrats also do, when they occupy the White house) that the voters don't need alternatives. Of course, if you go a bit further down the ballot, you will find that the Republicans have something like ten candidates running for the privilege of facing off with Senator Barbara Boxer, who, on the Democrat ballot, is running unopposed. I guess it's six of one, half a dozen of the other, hey?
Locally, there's the usual batch of school bonds, reservoir expansions, road-building programs and the like. My favorite, however, has got to be Measure L. If I remember correctly, Measure L -- if passed -- would ban discount super-stores which have more than 90,000 square feet of floor space and devote more than 5% of that space to untaxed products (i.e. groceries) from being constructed in the unincorporated part of the county. There is, as you may already know, only one company that builds stores that fit these parameters: Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart -- and something called the "Contra Costa Consumers for Choice" -- are out in force to defeat this measure, inundating voters with "No On L" mailers paid for primarily by Wal-Mart (yes, it says so right here in small print: "With major funding provided by Wal-Mart Stores, Inc."). (1)
Is this law discriminatory against Wal-Mart? Most likely. Nobody else, as I said, builds such stores, and so nobody else (Albertson's, Safeway, CostCo) will be affected by the measure. But stop to think a bit. All laws discriminate against somebody. Laws against drunk driving discriminate against those who have a genetic predisposition to alcohol. And laws are also written to work in favor of certain individuals. I would be willing to bet (and give good odds) that if you dug through the entire U.S. tax code, you could find paragraphs that look like they were specifically written (and, in fact, probably were specifically written) to give Wal-Mart special tax breaks not available to anybody else. This is SOP whenever Congress sits down to tighten up the code; there are always lobbyists there for big corporations to make sure that the tightening not only doesn't hurt them but in fact benefits them.
Will this measure prevent Wal-Mart super-stores from being constructed in Contra Costa county, as one lady complained on TV the other day? (I think she was the mayor of Oakley.) Answer: not at all. There are three possibilities:
(a) Wal-Mart need only build a store with 89,999 square feet of floor space. This is perfectly permissible under the measure, as I remember it.
(b) If Wal-Mart really needs 90,000+ square feet of floor space, it need only reduce its grocery section in favor of, e.g., DVDs. This will also put Wal-Mart in compliance with the measure.
(c) And, if Wal-Mart really needs all that floor space and all those groceries, the measure only applies to unincorporated areas of the county. The lady mayor of Oakley is perfectly at liberty to invite Wal-Mart to build its superstore within the boundaries of her small city; and, voilá!, instant easily accessible discount superstore. Unfortunately, I greatly fear that she, like most of her fellow townspeople, really would like to have a Wal-Mart, but preferably in somebody else's back yard.
Wal-Mart also argues, from time to time, that it will be bringing needed jobs into the county. Unfortunately, my understanding of Wal-Mart's history is that it tends to drive other neighboring companies that deal in the same products (e.g. Albertson, Safeway, Target, etc.) out of business with its heavily discounted prices. It can afford to make these discounts partly because it hires only the cheapest of labor. So, in fact, in the long run there's no net gain of jobs, only a replacement of poorly-paid and poorly-benefitted jobs by even-more-poorly-paid and totally unbenefitted jobs.
Well, it will be interesting to see what happens next Tuesday ...