WAL-MART UPDATE….Wal-Mart’s plans to open 40 Supercenters in Southern California got off to a slow start yesterday: voters in Inglewood (former home of the Lakers) told them to get lost. By a huge margin they voted down an initiative that would have allowed Wal-Mart to open a “colossal retail and grocery center” without an environmental review or public hearings. Hey, why would anyone object to that?
Meanwhile, up in Sacramento, Democrats have introduced a couple of bills aimed at stores “larger than 75,000 square feet that devote a portion of their space to selling groceries” ? SL7SFTDPSSG for short. Or Wal-Mart, for even shorter. One bill would require SL7SFTDPSSGs to reimburse government for the cost of providing public healthcare to workers. Another would require the stores to pay for studies on whether they harm local economies by crushing competition and offering inadequate benefits to workers. Hmmm, I wonder what conclusion those studies would come to?
While all this was going on, Arnold was in Wailea, where he’s vacationing after a brutal 19 weeks without a break. Speaking to reporters, he suggested that the California legislature has too much time on its hands. “I want to make the Legislature a part-time Legislature,” Schwarzenegger said. “Spending so much time in Sacramento, without anything to do, then out of that comes strange bills.”
I wonder what he had in mind?
