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There are not a lot of positive things we can say about Wal-mart. The giant retailer is known for building huge stores that sell everything from groceries to garden supplies, from tools to electronics, all under one roof and at low prices. They have now extended their low prices to a select number of generic drugs that insurance companies and the uninsured alike can purchase for just $4 for a 30-day supply.

Those low prices to the consumer come at a cost. Wal-mart buys in such huge quantities that they can pressure suppliers to sell at lower prices. The suppliers in turn pressure manufacturers, who some how must find a way to make products cheaper.
The result is lower wages. Wal-mart offers health insurance to full-time employees yet has a disproportionately high number of part time employees. Their quest for lower wholesale prices force manufacturers to keep wages down and even build factories overseas to meet Wal-mart’s demands.
Their model is so successful that a suburban mega-store has been the death knell for many downtown-shopping areas. Small, traditional retailers find it impossible to compete on price. While some are able to sell service, personality and/or unique items, the demise of average shops next door decrease the amount of foot traffic and turn a thriving collection of shops into a wasteland of empty buildings.
The company is a paragon of capitalism – there is little humanity in their calculations save for the occasional gesture that plays well in the press. We as a nation are grateful for these gestures.
Their mobilization of supplies to relieve the suffering of Hurricane Katrina refugees is a good illustration. They responded with critical supplies much faster than our government agencies; bringing food, water and medical supplies quickly to thousands of suddenly homeless people.
Their $4 prescription program is another necessary, much less altruistic gesture that will help the disadvantaged, the uninsured and the sick.
Wal-Mart last month announced that some company pharmacies would sell 30-day prescriptions of certain generic medications for $4 in 65 Wal-Mart, Sam’s Club and Neighborhood Market pharmacies around Tampa, Fla., with plans to expand statewide in early 2007. They held open the possibility of expanding to other states in the future.
The program must have had a ring of marketing genius because Wal-mart announced Oct. 19 they would expand the generic prescription drug discount program to 14 additional states, including Vermont.
Like the owners of other small businesses crushed by the power of Wal-mart, Vermont pharmacists are apoplectic over the announcement. They can see the writing on the wall, yet another huge competitor is going to cut into their share of customers.
Analysts said the main benefit for Wal-Mart is in drawing more shoppers into its stores who may come for prescriptions and then stay to buy in other departments, a public relations stunt meant to drive foot traffic.
Most people will find their prescriptions do not fall under the $4 plan because only 1 percent of the drugs Wal-mart sells are covered.
That’s not Wal-mart’s fault. When a prescription sells for $250 for a thirty-day supply the pharmacists aren’t going out to buy Rolexes and luxury cars. The pharmaceutical companies are collecting the lion’s share of the money, leaving pharmacies to survive on slim (and shrinking) profit margins.
This again is the capitalist system at work. Pharmaceutical companies are beholden only to their shareholders by law and they must turn a profit to satisfy those investors, in addition to recovering their costs for drug development and an increasing propensity of slick advertising.
All of this supports the fact that Wal-mart is doing exactly as they should in our profit-derived, expansionist society – increasing their market share by taking advantage of the free press that comes from making news.
The fact that they stumbled on to a plan that helps both insurance companies and the uninsured by lowering the cost of some drugs is beside the point.
Our question is why, at a time of increasing health care costs that inflate taxes and allegedly burden business beyond the ability to compete, is the federal government prohibited from negotiating a lower price for these same drugs for veterans and people on Medicare and Medicaid?
For as long as our long memories can recall, people who rail against big government have cried that if only our government were run like a business, then the waste would whither away.
A result of the prescription drug plan passed last year is that we, the people, are prohibited from being like Wal-mart. Instead, we have to wait until Wal-mart finds it in their best interest to throw us a crumb.
At least they have demonstrated what is possible in negotiating  a quantity price for generic drugs.

[This is my second column for the Vermont Journal that appeared last week. I’m still getting the hang of this print medium thing, frankly, and this one kinda blew. The one coming out this Wednesday is a bit better… I’m working on it.]

Two years ago, Democratic Gubernatorial candidate Peter Clavelle was taken to task by the media for attempting to draw connections between Governor Jim Douglas and the already widely unpopular (in Vermont, anyway) administration of President Bush. Burlington’s True Majority organization crystallized the argument with the “Jim=George” lawn signs that popped up here and there across central Vermont.

Many considered this line of attack to be part of the reason for Clavelle’s electoral pummeling, but when you hear current Democratic candidate Scudder Parker making the same connections, you aren’t hearing the same dismissive response from Vermont’s fourth estate.

To an extent, it’s because many in the state approach elections this year as one big circus show with several rings. There’s Bernie vs. Tarrant over in that corner, Dubie vs. Dunne across the way, and our local state House and Senate candidates scattered about – but all still under one big top. It was inevitable, therefore, that with the high profile race for US Representative, the Bush factor would be brought into the general arena in a way that it wasn’t two years ago.

But it’s more than that. If it weren’t, Parker’s criticisms of Douglas’s Bush connections (he was Bush’s Vermont re-election campaign chairman in 2004) wouldn’t be resonating at all.

The fact is that national politics are on everyone’s mind in a way that they weren’t two years ago. With Iraq falling into Civil War, terrorism a greater threat than it was on 9/11, and corruption and moral hypocrisy reaching never before seen levels in Washington, it’s hard not to be thinking about the state of our union.

Iraq in particular has become an electoral catalyst. With 64% of Americans firmly against it now (and no doubt even more dramatic numbers in Vermont), the war is effecting people’s local electoral decision making in two ways.

First, it is causing eyebrows to rise at any direct connection to Bush and the Washington Republicans. Martha Rainville’s campaign has been one steady defensive attempt to create distance from this crowd, but her financial and institutional connections run too deep for her to convincingly cast herself as an independent operator.

It’s also no coincidence that the battle for Governor only caught fire when Douglas foolishly used his connections to the Washington GOP in a very public way to kill the Wilderness bill, and in doing so cast himself in opposition to Senator Leahy, Senator Jeffords, and Congressman Sanders – the virtual Holy Trinity of national anti-Bush sentiment.

Most significantly, it is feeding the anger and cynicism of self-identified independent voters as they look at the political parties as a group from the outside. Independents have abandoned Democrats in the past because of a judgment that they don’t stand for anything. While hard-pressed to shake that impression, shifting poll numbers suggest that independents are now forming a collective impression of those who willingly self-identify as candidates of this President’s party as well; that they stand for something both dangerous and foolish.

This could put anyone with an R alongside their name at any level at risk, as a vote for a Republican becomes seen as a vote to institutionally enable those whose disastrous policies have put our nation at greater risk.

This election and its unique climate will test the axiom that Vermonters vote the candidate rather than the party, like never before. Whether it makes sense or not, many voters cast their ballot based on what’s on their mind and what’s in their gut. The Governor knows this well, which is why he has tried to loudly shift the conversation towards taxes in these waning weeks.

Tip O’Neill is famously quoted as saying “all politics is local.” One has to wonder, looking at the world and the issues on everyone’s mind, if the reciprocal hasn’t become the case this year – that all local politics have become national.