You wrote, “Prepare yourself for the Greenshirts busting into your house in search of plastic bags, or forcing your corporation to drop its theft-resistant packaging for something more easy to steal. OK, they’re not yet breaking down doors in Scotland, but they are attacking plastic bags as heinous, anti-social tools of destruction, only slightly more acceptable than the dreaded product packaging.”

Did you know that California has its own plastic bag laws? The city council of my Inland Empire city of Redlands has already voted to support it.  AB 87 and AB 68 (I don’t know why there are two, they seem very similar) take effect on July 1, 2010 and say (in part), “…On and after July 1, 2010, a store shall not provide a single-use carryout bag, including a green carryout bag, to a customer at the point of sale, unless the store charges the customer not less than twenty-five cents ($0.25) per bag.” Of course the bill says lots more–there’s a whole bureaucracy to support and enforce this and of course, collect fees. Bottom line, it is a new tax for all Californians at the grocery store–25 cents per bag. But of course, if you are on welfare or use food stamps, you are exempt.
 
The Wall Street Journal had a good article in June of this year about this worldwide bag scourge: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124473522987806581.html
 
I’ll be back!