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 ...
Reading last Sunday's "Perspectives" section of the paper -- the op-eds and letters-to-the-editor -- I suddenly had a horrible feeling. There were letters and editorials about a number of subjects -- limiting urban sprawl, the price of gas, mountain lions, the federal government's new plans to increase "harvesting" of timber in the national forests, the threat of a future battle between the U.S. and China for Middle Eastern oil. But, you know, it suddenly struck me that almost everything discussed had to do with one simple fact: the human population of this planet, which was perhaps a bit less than three billion when I was born, hit six billion a year or so ago, and is still growing.
We think of this as a third-world problem, mostly, but right here in California ... well, when my family moved here in 1960, the population was fifteen million. Today it's thirty-five million, if I remember correctly. If it increases by the same amount over the next 45 years, by 2050 the population of California will be fifty-five million -- about half the population density of modern Japan. If it increase at the same rate, it will be pushing eighty-two million. That is more than a quarter of the population of the entire United States in 2004.
What does this mean? People need certain things. They need a place to stand (or, taking up more space, a place to lie down). They need energy, usually in the form of food. They need water. They need some place to dispose of their waste products. (Computers, TV sets and SUVs are luxuries. People don't need them.)
Let's consider water for a moment. Do we have enough? I don't think so. Once upon a time, the word "drought" meant "less than the normal amount of rain falling". Today we use it differently: it means "less than an optimal amount of water per capita". Today, we seem to hear the word "drought" bandied about every year. Does this mean that there is actually less water than there used to be? No, it simply means that there is a whole lot more capita than there used to be.
It was a study of water resources that convinced the Chinese, a third of a century ago, to institute the one-child-per-family rule. That rule, while perhaps not as strictly enforced as it might be, has had an enormous effect on Chinese population growth. Unfortunately, because of the demographics of the situation, the effect was not as enormous as it might be: the Chinese population has grown by around 300 million during that 35-year period, i.e., it has added a population equivalent to the entire United States. Still, one can't sneer; the growth rate has slowed considerably, and is far less than that of California. Maybe, if it doesn't change the rules yet again, Chinese population will top out at about one and a half billion sometime in this century. That will only be about 50% more than China has water resources to serve (hence, one may suppose, the Three Gorges Dam, which Western environmentalists have decried as a sin against the Chinese environment).
We talk about "limiting sprawl", maintaining green belts, etc. Problem is that, as you add people, you have to put them somewhere, and that somewhere is, of necessity, going to be in places not already occupied by other people. You are going to have to provide them with food not already being eaten by others, with water not already being drunk by their neighbors, with waste disposal locations not already full of their predecessors' waste. This means that green belts must give way to houses and factory farms and waste treatment plants and landfills, that urban regions will sprawl further and further out, that forests must continue to be leveled to build houses. With the best will in the world, this is unavoidable.
And the mountain lions, which I mentioned? When it comes to a competition between six or ten or eighteen billion people and a few mountain lions for habitat, I can tell which ones will have to give way, which ones have already given way.
Is there a solution? The Chinese experiment would work if imposed early enough and maintained long enough. Unfortunately, nobody but the Chinese seem interested in it -- India, whose population has hit the levels China's reached three decades ago, is not even considering it, and, of course, the United States, still probably a century and a half short of that billion, simply sneers at it. So, no, I don't think that there's a solution in the ordinary sense of the word.
Nature, of course, always has her own solutions.
You know, I never watch the Super Bowl. So I missed the great half-time show, and particularly Janet Jackson's bit of overexposure. Well, perhaps I can more properly say that I didn't miss it -- not at all. (Though I did catch several dozen of the roughly ten thousand replays of this particular bit of show business that Should Never Have Been Shown On Television ...)
One anchorfellow complained about the fourteen million children watching the game who were exposed to the woman's naked breast. This raises two questions in my mind:
(1) Are there really fourteen million children in this country who have nothing better to do?
(2) Can anyone actually point to even one of those fourteen million children who has never seen a naked female breast, or -- worse! -- attached his or her mouth to one at some time or another?