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Behind every seemingly good deed in the Obama White House, there’s a deep-pocketed, left-wing special interest. Take first lady Michelle Obama’s crusade against childhood obesity. Who really benefits from the ostensible push for improved nutrition in the schools? Think purple — as in the purple-shirted army of the Service Employees International Union. Big Labor bigwigs don’t care about slimming your kids’ waistlines. They care about beefing up their membership rolls and fattening their coffers.
Mrs. Obama earned a State of the Union address shout-out from her hubby for taking on the weighty public policy issue of students’ physical fitness. The East Wing is now in full campaign mode — leaning on the nation’s mayors, traveling with the surgeon general and meeting with Congress and cabinet members to reauthorize the Lyndon Johnson-era Child Nutrition Act, which provides government-subsidized meals to more than 30 million children. It’s part of the Obama administration’s self-proclaimed “cradle-to-career” agenda for America’s youth.
For decades, school administrators have criticized this Great Society relic for outgrowing its initial conception. The program was originally created to use up post-World War II food surpluses. In the late 1970s, New York principal Lewis Lyman skewered it as a federal “boondoggle” in a seminal essay for the education journal Phi Delta Kappan. But Democrats demagogued the GOP’s responsible attempts at financial reform during the Clinton years as “starving the children.” While spending on youth nutrition and wellness have ballooned, so have the kids. Nearly one-third of U.S. children are now overweight or obese. The feds spend $15 billion a year on nutrition in schools; the White House wants at least a $1 billion increase this coming fiscal year.
The well-intended program to feed poor kids has morphed into an untouchable universal entitlement with a powerful school-lunch lobbying coalition of Department of Agriculture bureaucrats, food-service industry executives and union bosses. Enter the SEIU. Headed by the White House’s most frequent visitor, Andy Stern, the powerful labor organization representing government and private service employees has an insatiable appetite for power and growth. Working alongside the first lady, the SEIU unveiled a major ad campaign this week demanding reauthorizing and funding increases in the Child Nutrition Act.
What’s in it for Big Labor? SEIU Executive Vice President Mitch Ackerman explains: “A more robust expansion of school lunch, breakfast, summer feeding, child care and WIC (the federal Women, Infants and Children nutrition program) is critical to reducing hunger, ending childhood obesity and providing fair wages and healthcare for front line food service workers (emphasis added).”
There are 400,000 workers who prepare and serve lunch to American schoolchildren.
SEIU represents tens of thousands of those workers and is trying to unionize many more. “More robust expansion” of the federal school-lunch law means a mandate for higher wages, increased benefits and government-guaranteed health insurance coverage (the more luxurious the better now that SEIU has negotiated its Cadillac Tax exemption from the Democrats’ health care takeover bill).
The SEIU’s front group, “Campaign for Quality Services,” is clamoring for “the right to sick days and training” for school food-services workers. Never ones to let a crisis go unexploited, SEIU sent its members to lobby in front of Chicago public schools last year and scare parents into supporting their labor agenda. They accused the school system of “putting our kids at risk” during flu season by resisting the SEIU’s sick day coverage demands. “Without sick days, I can’t take a day off, so I have to bring germs to school,” an SEIU janitor lamented.
Along the same lines, they are casting food-services workers as indispensable saviors. The union has rallied behind P.R. efforts casting them as superheroes “serving justice, and serving lunch.” Opposing the union means opposing children’s health. SEIU propaganda features New Jersey school cafeteria workers like Leslie Williams of Orange, N.J., lamenting: “I love my work, but it’s getting harder to prepare nutritious meals on the low budget we’re working with. … It breaks my heart to see a child who’s hungry. As I see it, part of my job is to make sure the kids are well-fed.”
Actually, that’s the primary job of parents. Mom? Dad? Remember them? But the more responsibility we demand of parents, the less power and influence SEIU bosses are able to grab. Unionized school dietician and nutrition jobs are booming. And in addition to school breakfast and lunch, the SEIU is now pushing subsidized dinner plans and summer food service to create a “stronger nutrition safety net.” Translation: Perpetual employment for big government and its public employee union au pairs.
Cede the children, feed the state.
[...] Malkin explains how. She writes: Behind every seemingly good deed in the Obama White House, there’s a deep-pocketed, left-wing [...]
More Higglytown Heros…. If you know what I am talking about, it was a Disney kid's show that made everyone a hero no matter how trivial their jobs were.
I guess parents are no longer able to make decisions about their children-good thing we have the government to do the thinking for us.
I live in Jersey where obesity is rampant among minority children. Oange soda and potato chips for breakfast at home and starvation portions at school, all thanks to the welfare mentality of parents, culture and the unions.
A retired Newark middle school teacher told me she had to buy lunch for students because cafeteria workers refused to serve proper meals. They were stealing food by the trunkful, leaving nothing for the kids. This went on for years and probably still does because city and state governments view those kids as interchangeable and disposable, their health and future be damned.
Jersey's a union state. It's also one of the most corrupt. Connect the dots and see what the disbarred Michelle (insurance fraud, Illinois, 1993) has planned for the rest of the country.
You probably just endangered the lives of every person named "Gary" in Jersey. BTW, I've been wondering why Michele's law license was suspended. Can you point me to anything?
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2154...
try this i found it pretty interesting
That was interesting–sure would like these slugs to come clean–bet it would make our hair stand up.
Yassah, we gits tah feed awl dah littawl niglets and white trashy chilluns on dah guberment dole.
[...] Read more at FrontPage Magazine. [...]
And here I thought Michelle Chewbama was going to oversee some kind of Government Fat Farm for kids.
Which came first… the SEIU purple or Hussein's lips? Any correlation? Hmmm, it makes one wonder.
We need to bring the nation back to a strict free market roots and an agrarian economy to support it. Also the horse is probably going to make a come back if the current decline lasts another ten years. I'm moving to Coos Bay.
Washington allows DEADLY ingredients in our food, including a drug BANNED in 160 nations:
HEALTH FREEDOM ALLIANCE
If You Liked Bovine Growth Hormone, You’ll love Beta Agonists
While researchers and scientists investigate the cause of our diabetes, obesity, asthma and ADHD epidemics, they should ask why the FDA approved a livestock drug banned in 160 nations and responsible for hyperactivity, muscle breakdown and 10 percent mortality in pigs, according to angry farmers who phoned the manufacturer. The beta agonist ractopamine, a repartitioning agent that increases protein synthesis, was recruited for livestock use when researchers found the drug, used in asthma, made mice more muscular says Beef magazine.
But unlike the growth promoting antibiotics and hormones used in livestock which are withdrawn as the animal nears slaughter, ractopamine is started as the animal nears slaughter.
As much as twenty percent of Paylean, given to pigs for their last 28 days, Optaflexx, given to cattle their last 28 to 42 days and Tomax, given to turkeys their last 7 to 14 days, remains in consumer meat says author and well known veterinarian Michael W. Fox.
Though banned in Europe, Taiwan and China–more than 1,700 people were “poisoned” from eating Paylean-fed pigs since 1998 says the Sichuan Pork Trade Chamber of Commerce– ractopamine is used in 45 percent of US pigs says Elanco Animal Health which manufactures all three products.
How does a drug marked, “Not for use in humans. Individuals with cardiovascular disease should exercise special caution to avoid exposure. Use protective clothing, impervious gloves, protective eye wear, and a NIOSH-approved dust mask” become “safe” in human food? With no washout period?
The same way Elanco’s other two blockbusters, Stilbosol (diethylstilbestrol or DES), now withdrawn, and Posilac or bovine growth hormone (rBST), bought from Monsanto in 2008, became part of the nation’s food supply: shameless corporate lobbying.
http://blogs.healthfreedomalliance.org/blog/2010/...
Sad to see how ignorance can bring down a great nation. This country was destroyed by the wolves.aka. republicans, yet when someone genuinely tries to do something to benefit the country and obese children who will be the "leaders" of the next generation all you ignorants can think about is discrediting them. Do not remove the log from the elephants eye before removing your own. You all make me feel sorry for you all!!!
She's such a lying phony – thank goodness that America is finally waking up to the Chicago thugs in Washington.
This blog was great. This site was very helpful.Thank you for this information.
About a TRILLION-dollars is spent on USA military to send the children of poor people to kill the children of poor people in other countries, to occupy, massacre, plunder and destroy, meanwhile creating more enemies so that the corporate killing machine continue transfer American taxpayers' money to big corporations. While obscene profits are made by the so-called Military Industrial Complex, here, our Zionist Warmongers are objecting to one billion dollar increase to feed malnourished American school kids.
I prefer having 400,000 Americans working to feed American children than each costing 1 million to kill innocent people abroad and create more enemies for us.
The cost of fascist Israel to the USA has been tremendous and those Zionists who play the tune of jingoism and fake patriotism are the biggest enemies of the American people and children. This article is one of the many example of the audacity of warmongers and torturers!
Peace
Thanks for clearing some things up, I’ve been confused about this for a while now.