Big Business 1, Washington 0

Anyone who thought that our state legislature had any chance at all of forcing Wal-Mart to act less like Wal-Mart raise your hand. Yeah, none of you. House speaker Frank Chopp sat on the "Wal-Mart Bill" yesterday instead of allowing a vote on it, despite a big push by his traditional allies in organized labor. The bill would force employers of 5,000 or more in the state of Washington to allocate 9% of their payroll to health benefits. Chopp alternately doesn't think it will help, doesn't want to piss off businesses and doesn't think it has the votes, or, some say, he made a deal with someone. The world may never know. The P-I speculates that he may be killing the bill in favor of a voter initiative which could help bring out the progressives next election day, but screw that. Progressives will already be out (or mailing it in) to stand up against the homophobes and their jackass king Eyeman. To Seattlest's knowledge no such initiative campaign currently exists and even if it did it's an abuse of the initiative process because the legislation is sitting right there on his desk staring him in the face and all he has to do is put it to a damn vote. Ahem.

Speaking of Wal-Mart; you may have come across this book if you browsed the employee picks wall near the register at Elliot Bay Books, or heard any of the shows about it on NPR or checked the NYT bestseller list lately. It's The Wal-Mart Effect: How the World's Most Powerful Company Really Works--and How It's Transforming the American Economy by Charles Fichman and we haven't read it (although we feel that we've read it after taking in that title). No doubt it contains documentation of all the evils you've internally ascribed to Wal-Mart, but haven't been able to adequately explain.

We've been tipped off to a segment of the book that relates to Wal-Mart's amazing ability to sell salmon at convenience store hotdog prices. Wal-Mart salmon is farmed, of course. Salmon pens were a hot issue in the '90s but that seems to have cooled to the point where we can't even determine whether salmon farming is still taking place in Puget Sound today. Wal-Mart buys their farmed salmon from Chile where the laws are loose and the fish are cheap. A duffel bag full of salmon for twenty bucks may sound like a good deal, but, you know, it's all the same ocean.