from Talk to Action

Women all across the country continue to walk into pharmacies, present prescriptions for emergency contraception, common birth control pills, or even medications such as antibiotics, and find themselves at the mercy of a growing number of graduates of the Faith-Based School of Pharmacology.

In most states besides Illinois '

I want to know your opinions about Wal-Mart. The reason I'm posting this is because of an article I just read at the New York Times tonight, let me link to it:

Wal-Mart Memo Suggests Ways to Cut Employee Benefit Costs
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Go there and read the article but I'm sure you've heard it before or at least a variant. If you're a wage earning worker, this is bad news. And if you're a Wal-Mart worker, this is probably seriously bad news, especially if you're older or if you are in poorer health. We all know that as progressives we're never supposed to even set foot inside that store. BUT I've got a sneaking suspicion some of us have and that some of us do. Now, I just know I'm going to get into serious trouble for this post but my desire to know has just taken me over completely. Let me insert the break here and there will be...

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America's health care system has been under some pressure for some time, now. Starting in the early 1980's, the phrase "cost containment" came into being in health care. What does that mean? It means trying to set a price on things.

On the face of it, it comes across as a plan to cut wasteful spending. The reasoning went that the United States spent more per capita on health care than any other nation and this was pitched as being out of step with the rest of the world. Personally as someone who has traveled in the "rest of the world," ever look at the health care in those countries? Apart from a very few, what I saw was not so good. Germany, BENELUX, and Scandinavia were pretty good - and I am not speak of the quality of personnel - many fine physicians and health care workers everywhere - it was their budgets and distribution.

I am a so-called Second Wave Feminist and became conscious in the 1960's and active in the 1970's. By the late 1980's and certainly 1990's, women coming into the work force wondered, "what's all the fuss."

Some of the women who had been through the battles tried to mentor the younger ones, but many were intractable. They had it figured out and the dinosaurs around the office were just "bitter" and had simply not figured things out. As one recent graduate enlightened us, "well, if I have a problem, I just talk to my boss. What's the big deal?"

These women were very sharp and knew the rift between women who were passed over and the angst mangers had about this "class" of women who had been the early graduates of the top schools, but simply had not penetrated the power structure. So the younger women allied themselves with the men in power. "If I have a problem, I just talk to my boss," and these women moved rapidly into positions that women (a few years older) had demonstrated they could handle - while the male contemporaries of the older women had shot ahead.