In a boorish game of gubernatorial one-upmanship, the heads of the California and Washington state governments are engaged in an intense match of piggyback riding, where Gavin Newsom earlier this year carried Jay Inslee on his shoulders. The much-maligned politician earning the ire of moderate to right wing voters resulting with a special recall election, earned the honors of his Northwest counterpart by attending a swanky San Francisco Italian restaurant dinner and drinking extravaganza, after imposing a strict lockdown and travel restrictions. Inslee followed up inexplicably tanned and rested during one of his trademark guileless Covid-19 press conferences, after allegedly embarking on a vacation to the tropics during the height of the first major wave of deaths and hospitalization.
Now, the two are at it again, as Inslee has imposed a ban on “single use” plastic grocery bags on residents to go along with an existing tax on paper grocery products, the insidious campaign stolen right out of Newsom’s playbook of hardcore Socialism, and just in time for the holiday rush. California first imposed a state ban and subsequent tax schedule on plastic bags in 2014, and it took Inslee and his cronies only 7 plus years to create echo chamber legislative malarkey. The Washington Governor, best known for his Green New Deal power trip of grossly inefficient energy sources phasing out hydroelectric production in a Upper Snake river diminutive salmon population love fest diminishing farmers and ushering in a thermodynamic crises, still prefers the high altitude jetways in a contrails of hypocrisy. And there are the preferred government vendors, which indicates that no conflict of interest exists.
Shoppers will be forced to wrestle with the choice of providing their own bags, face the wrath an .8 cent charge for each “reusable” plastic or paper bag, or participate in a hack of juggling Jenga and incorporating all parts of the upper body in a “bagless” performance stumbling into the parking lot. The retailer will apparently pocket the entire .8 per bag, which the Washington Department of Ecology believes will “recover some of the costs of providing the bags”, most notably the agency is pushing the agenda that “incentivizing” consumers, by forceful mandates is a reasonable approach to the societal engineering of a nanny state.
The language contained in Senate Bill 5323 stipulates that while certain plastic bag varieties will not be allowed in the retail sector, other types are still permitted, including produce bags (which must be dyed), miscellaneous sacks to hold “greeting cards, bulk foods, etc.”, and bags to separate meats from other products. While this specific requirement pertaining to the measure makes absolutely no sense, it is also contradicted by the prevalence of the virtue signaling adherence to the farce of climate change and junk science. Ethylene plastic bags have only been available to consumers for five decades, yet the fearmongering claims by certain “researchers”, resonate with a certain political base. The idea that the finished product, derived from either oil or methane breaks down in nature in a manner detrimental to the climate over time by ultimately contaminating the water supply, is a reckless theory, and absent of any shred of proven evidence. However, the conjecture, sandwiched around terms such as “could” or “likely” becomes dogma in wishing a narrative upon society by banishing critical thinking. These are the same folks who champion globalism, “one world”, and interconnectivity, yet are oblivious that the squeaky clean iron clad rules influenced by the EPA, are not being practiced in other heavy industrialized regimes such as China and Russia, or a vast pockets of developing manufacturing infrastructure in India, Brazil, and Southeast Asia. It is at this juncture where logic succumbs to emotionally driven rhetoric, as the sanctimonious and inane exploits of rolling out the recycling can to the street every week, or pocket mulching somehow make a difference in the grant scheme of things, as the individual experiences a prolonged blackout to the mawkish “It’s A Small World” Disneyland ride.
SB 5253 states that the .8 cent per pop carriers are to contain at least 40% recycled material, and graded to withstand the constant barrage of the governor’s propaganda, which over time, takes a Uranium half-life magnitude to decay, a sobering thought experiment that bureaucracy outlasts humanity, and only the essence of mankind will exist when the earth finally implodes in a blazing inferno of explosion and forces that test the limits of the physical universe. This harkens back to the earlier point of who sets to profit, both ideologically, and financially from the creation of a lucrative cottage industry through redundant procedural sanctions?
While the independently owned grocer sets to suffer in the anti-climactic and suppressive small business environment in Washington, the questionable quality of the bags will surely result in a increased percentage of preventable mishaps, and the metaphor of Inslee or Newsom drafting legislation banning of certain prophylactics, while invoking the recycling paradigm, is not a far-fetched plausibility, considering the level of functional insanity embraced on a local, state, and national level.
As plastics are a product of the liquid or gas gold far beneath the earth’s crust representing the time machine spanning geological eras, certain Democratic lawmakers have a reached a stunning point of aloofness in basically taxing history. The disturbing collaborative performance of the two governors is only culminated by the fact they are wearing “approved” plastic bags over their heads and at a cost of .16 cents, the rest of the nation should be wary that similar blind policy is well on its way to bubblewrapping the future as padding for a nanny state.