"Transformative" health policy meets largest class-action suit ever: Wal-Mart today

One doesn't often associate Wal-Mart and concepts like "transformative," but today “Executives from Wal-Mart and three other major U.S. employers on Wednesday joined hands with union leaders in setting a goal of providing "quality, affordable" health care for every American by 2012.

However, they did not propose any specific policies to achieve this goal, or commit to spending any extra money in the near-term to provide health coverage to more workers.”

Sounds about right…

Author and blogger Sherry Chandler dubs the move: "If Wal-Mart wants it…we might actually get some stripe of universal health care."

The Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, writes on its blog about why it joined with Wal-Mart, punching bag of progressives:

To the Progressive Community:
Some of you may be wondering why two leading progressive groups like SEIU and CAP have joined in a coalition with Wal-Mart, AT&T, and Intel on health care. This is an important issue that deserves a direct response.
From all of our years in organizing and government, we have concluded that the primary obstacle to health reform is not the lack of ideas. What is needed to bring about fundamental reform is new pressure for change and genuine political will. This involves going beyond the traditional coalitions of associations and advocates and political players on both sides of the debate.
Given the failure of past efforts, we know that corporate America is critical to overcoming the forces of the status quo. Change of this magnitude can not occur without the largest payers and players in the system working together with the largest stakeholders to overcome barriers and create new opportunities for health reform.
So today, SEIU and CAP helped to launch what is potentially one of the most transformative coalitions on the field today–a network of business, labor and public policy thinkers dedicated to building a new American health care system with quality, affordable coverage for all by the year 2012.
For the first time, companies like Wal-Mart, AT&T, Intel and Kelly Services, unions like SEIU and the CWA, and public policy groups like CAP, the Howard Baker Public Policy Center, and the Committee for Economic Development have joined together to push for universal health care and a more rational and efficient health delivery system.

Wal-Mart had bad news today too- the largest ever class action suit based on alleged discriminatory hiring and employment practices. From the AP:

A federal appeals court ruled Tuesday that Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the world's largest private employer, must face a class-action lawsuit alleging as many as 1.5 million former and current female employees were discriminated against in pay and promotions.

In developmental psychology there is a concept called splitting, in which babies cannot comprehend one of the essential nuances of human behavior- e.g, that people are neither all-good, nor all-bad. Splitting is when one can only see all-good, or all-bad. It's a mark of successful adulthood that we can realize and accept the devils and angels within us all. Today, Wal-Mart seems to fit the devil and angels category...