There’s quite a few great things I didn’t get a chance to post about recently that shouldn’t be missed. For starters, here’s a testimonial about what the supermarket strike is really about from a guest writer at Calpundit :

With regard to health care, I?ve heard people say over and over again that ?everybody contributes something to their health plan ? so should grocery workers.? Well, did you know that over the years grocery workers have given up pay raises in exchange for the assurance of having good health insurance? The employer’s contribution toward healthcare has been a part of their compensation. The union could have negotiated it the other way. They could have agreed to higher wages and higher employee premiums…but the workers wanted a lower paycheck in exchange for fully paid health care.

OK, so that was then and health costs have been escalating. If this was about “contributing a little to their healthcare” there would be no strike. The employer proposal that led to this strike put so little money on the table that, in addition to the premium pickup of $5 to $15 a week, workers? health benefits under their insurance plan would have to be cut 50% (which means that health care costs would be shifted onto the workers outside their insurance plan, meaning out of their own pocket). If the workers want to get the same insurance plan, it would cost them $95 a week or nearly $5,000 a year. THAT IS 25% OF THE AVERAGE WORKER’S SALARY. Is that what “everybody ” pays out of pocket on a percentage basis? Hardly….

The fact is that most of these workers ? at an average annual gross income of $20,000 ? live paycheck to paycheck and earn their healthcare. If the cost to the worker is too high, experience has shown that workers “opt out” of insurance and roll the dice by becoming uninsured.

The bottom line regarding health care is that when a worker lives paycheck to paycheck she can only get her healthcare one of two ways: earn it or get it from the taxpayer. The answer as a taxpayer is clear to me: I would rather people earn their healthcare than get it from me as a taxpayer. What about you?

The companies have proposed to pay all new hires ? and the stores have about 1/3 turnover each year, which means that there are a lot of new hires ? $3 to $4 an hour less than the current employees. What does this mean? This means that new hires will be making Wal-Mart wages, which means that anybody with kids will be eligible for food stamps and taxpayer subsidized health care…

Ans speaking of health care, Matthew Yglesias over at Tapped showed that universal health care would be cheaper than our current system :

Take a look at the OECD’s numbers for public health care expenditures as a percent of GDP and you’ll see that the American government is spending a larger portion of its economy — 6.2 percent in 2001 — on health care than are many countries offering universal coverage. The Spanish government spent just 5.2 percent of GDP on health in 2001, while the Netherlands spent 5.7, Ireland spent 4.9, Greece spent 5.2 and Austria spent 5.3 percent. New Zealand and Britain were at the same level as the United States. Those countries cover a higher percentage of their populations, and the public sector takes on a much larger share of health spending (Greece takes on 56 percent; the others all come in higher) than it does in the United States, where the government picks up just 44.4 percent of the tab.

Unfortunately, the OECD doesn’t have data on the per capita public spending in dollar terms, but by combining this data with this data, I generated a table of 2001 per capita public health spending in purchasing-power-parity-adjusted U.S. dollars (I can email the Excel file to interested parties). The results are a bit surprising — the American government spends more per capita ($2169.828) than any other country with available data except for Iceland ($2191.047) and Norway ($2496.6). More than Sweden ($1934.04), more than Canada ($1976.736), more than France ($1946.36) and way more than Britain ($1637.424) or Spain ($1142.4).

Maybe the right dreams of a country in which the government does nothing to provide health care for the very poor, the elderly, veterans, the disabled and people who show up at emergency rooms without insurance — but if you need to choose between the status quo and Sweden, socialism wins hands down purely on the basis of delivering smaller government.

On a completely unrelated note, Ampersand posted these excerpts from the Massacusetts Supreme Court’s recent gay marriage ruling :

Our laws of civil marriage do not privilege procreative heterosexual intercourse between married people above every other form of adult intimacy and every other means of creating a family. General Laws c. 207 contains no requirement that the applicants for a marriage license attest to their ability or intention to conceive children by coitus. Fertility is not a condition of marriage, nor is it grounds for divorce. People who have never consummated their marriage, and never plan to, may be and stay married. See Franklin v. Franklin, 154 Mass. 515, 516 (1891) (”The consummation of a marriage by coition is not necessary to its validity”). People who cannot stir from their deathbed may marry. See G. L. c. 207, ? 28A. While it is certainly true that many, perhaps most, married couples have children together (assisted or unassisted), it is the exclusive and permanent commitment of the marriage partners to one another, not the begetting of children, that is the sine qua non of civil marriage.
Moreover, the Commonwealth affirmatively facilitates bringing children into a family regardless of whether the intended parent is married or unmarried, whether the child is adopted or born into a family, whether assistive technology was used to conceive the child, and whether the parent or her partner is heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual. If procreation were a necessary component of civil marriage, our statutes would draw a tighter circle around the permissible bounds of nonmarital child bearing and the creation of families by noncoital means. The attempt to isolate procreation as “the source of a fundamental right to marry,” post at (Cordy, J., dissenting), overlooks the integrated way in which courts have examined the complex and overlapping realms of personal autonomy, marriage, family life, and child rearing. Our jurisprudence recognizes that, in these nuanced and fundamentally private areas of life, such a narrow focus is inappropriate.

The “marriage is procreation” argument singles out the one unbridgeable difference between same-sex and opposite-sex couples, and transforms that difference into the essence of legal marriage. Like “Amendment 2″ to the Constitution of Colorado, which effectively denied homosexual persons equality under the law and full access to the political process, the marriage restriction impermissibly “identifies persons by a single trait and then denies them protection across the board.” Romer v. Evans, 517 U.S. 620, 633 (1996). In so doing, the State’s action confers an official stamp of approval on the destructive stereotype that same-sex relationships are inherently unstable and inferior to opposite-sex relationships and are not worthy of respect.

The department’s first stated rationale, equating marriage with unassisted heterosexual procreation, shades imperceptibly into its second: that confining marriage to opposite-sex couples ensures that children are raised in the “optimal” setting. Protecting the welfare of children is a paramount State policy. Restricting marriage to opposite-sex couples, however, cannot plausibly further this policy. “The demographic changes of the past century make it difficult to speak of an average American family. The composition of families varies greatly from household to household.” Troxel v. Granville, 530 U.S. 57, 63 (2000). Massachusetts has responded supportively to “the changing realities of the American family,” id. at 64, and has moved vigorously to strengthen the modern family in its many variations. See, e.g., G. L. c. 209C (paternity statute); G. L. c. 119, ? 39D (grandparent visitation statute); Blixt v. Blixt, 437 Mass. 649 (2002), cert. denied, 537 U.S. 1189 (2003) (same); E.N.O. v. L.M.M., 429 Mass. 824, cert. denied, 528 U.S. 1005 (1999) (de facto parent); Youmans v. Ramos, 429 Mass. 774, 782 (1999) (same); and Adoption of Tammy, 416 Mass. 205 (1993) (coparent adoption). Moreover, we have repudiated the common-law power of the State to provide varying levels of protection to children based on the circumstances of birth. See G. L. c. 209C (paternity statute); Powers v. Wilkinson, 399 Mass. 650, 661 (1987) (”Ours is an era in which logic and compassion have impelled the law toward unburdening children from the stigma and the disadvantages heretofore attendant upon the status of illegitimacy”). The “best interests of the child” standard does not turn on a parent’s sexual orientation or marital status. See e.g., Doe v. Doe, 16 Mass. App. Ct. 499, 503 (1983) (parent’s sexual orientation insufficient ground to deny custody of child in divorce action). See also E.N.O. v. L.M.M., supra at 829-830 (best interests of child determined by considering child’s relationship with biological and de facto same-sex parents); Silvia v. Silvia, 9 Mass. App. Ct. 339, 341 & n.3 (1980) (collecting support and custody statutes containing no gender distinction).

The department has offered no evidence that forbidding marriage to people of the same sex will increase the number of couples choosing to enter into opposite-sex marriages in order to have and raise children. There is thus no rational relationship between the marriage statute and the Commonwealth’s proffered goal of protecting the “optimal” child rearing unit. Moreover, the department readily concedes that people in same-sex couples may be “excellent” parents. These couples (including four of the plaintiff couples) have children for the reasons others do — to love them, to care for them, to nurture them. But the task of child rearing for same-sex couples is made infinitely harder by their status as outliers to the marriage laws. While establishing the parentage of children as soon as possible is crucial to the safety and welfare of children, see Culliton v. Beth Israel Deaconness Med. Ctr., 435 Mass. 285, 292 (2001), same-sex couples must undergo the sometimes lengthy and intrusive process of second-parent adoption to establish their joint parentage. While the enhanced income provided by marital benefits is an important source of security and stability for married couples and their children, those benefits are denied to families headed by same-sex couples. See, e.g., note 6, supra. While the laws of divorce provide clear and reasonably predictable guidelines for child support, child custody, and property division on dissolution of a marriage, same-sex couples who dissolve their relationships find themselves and their children in the highly unpredictable terrain of equity jurisdiction. See E.N.O. v. L.M.M., supra.

Given the wide range of public benefits reserved only for married couples, we do not credit the department’s contention that the absence of access to civil marriage amounts to little more than an inconvenience to same-sex couples and their children. Excluding same-sex couples from civil marriage will not make children of opposite-sex marriages more secure, but it does prevent children of same-sex couples from enjoying the immeasurable advantages that flow from the assurance of “a stable family structure in which children will be reared, educated, and socialized.” Post at (Cordy, J., dissenting).

No one disputes that the plaintiff couples are families, that many are parents, and that the children they are raising, like all children, need and should have the fullest opportunity to grow up in a secure, protected family unit. Similarly, no one disputes that, under the rubric of marriage, the State provides a cornucopia of substantial benefits to married parents and their children. The preferential treatment of civil marriage reflects the Legislature’s conclusion that marriage “is the foremost setting for the education and socialization of children” precisely because it “encourages parents to remain committed to each other and to their children as they grow.” Post at (Cordy, J., dissenting).

In this case, we are confronted with an entire, sizeable class of parents raising children who have absolutely no access to civil marriage and its protections because they are forbidden from procuring a marriage license. It cannot be rational under our laws, and indeed it is not permitted, to penalize children by depriving them of State benefits because the State disapproves of their parents’ sexual orientation.

…and to finish back at the supermarket strike, Calpundit pointed out this L.A. Times article about a secret pact between the grocery stores to help them take on the strikers :

A union-backed consumer lawsuit filed Thursday against the three supermarket chains in the 6-week-old strike and lockout alleges that the chains’ unusual mutual-aid pact violates California antitrust law.

The suit casts a spotlight on a key element of the labor dispute that has seldom been mentioned since the strike began Oct. 11 and that executives at the grocery stores ? Kroger Co.’s Ralphs, Albertsons Inc. and Safeway Inc.’s Vons and Pavilions ? refuse to discuss publicly in any detail.

The pact basically says that if one of the three chains reaps added business during the dispute, it will share some of that money, according to some Wall Street analysts who follow the companies closely.

Ralphs is seeing a windfall because the United Food and Commercial Workers removed its pickets there Oct. 31 to focus union efforts on the other two. And under the mutual-aid deal the chains quietly made before the strike, “Kroger is obligated to share any earnings gains with the other two retailers,” analyst Mark Husson of Merrill Lynch & Co. said in a report last week.
. . .
Under the chains’ pact, it isn’t clear exactly what would be shared ? part of Ralphs’ sales or part of its profit ? or how much. Also not known is whether payments would be made before the strike ends.

“I will acknowledge that there is an agreement, but we’re not going to say anything about it,” said Gary Rhodes, a spokesman for Cincinnati-based Kroger. “I’m not going to characterize it, nor provide any details about it.”

The lawsuit, filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court, claims the “arrangement by which each agrees to share revenues with the others” restrains competition, keeps prices at artificially high levels and thus violates the state’s antitrust Cartwright Act.

The suit seeks to have the arrangement nullified and asks for unspecified damages. It was filed on behalf of three Los Angeles County residents. Their attorney, Joe Whatley, was traveling and unavailable for comment.