It’s all about reversing the progress made
Make America great again: make sure our precious children have access to all the sugar and fat they want. That’ll show that uppity Michelle Obama for trying to make school food healthy.
The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010 centered on cleaning up school food. Getting the act passed became a key focus of Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move campaign to fight childhood obesity.
Now, the new USDA Chief, Sonny Perdue, is expected to put forward a new rule on Monday that will give schools “more flexibility in meeting federal nutrition standards for school lunches,” according to a new report in The Hill.
The law required the federal government to use recommendations from the Institute of Medicine to make the National School Lunch Program more nutritious, with more whole grains, a wider variety of fruits and vegetables, and less sodium and meat.
Well we can’t have that. This is America. Eating more fruits and vegetables is for those faggoty Europeans. Pass me the fried chicken.
Justin Rosario at the Daily Banter is struck by the sheer spite:
On Monday, former Republican governor Sonny Perdue was confirmed to be Secretary of Agriculture. By Friday, he had already announced he would be gutting Michelle Obama’s work in fighting childhood obesity:
On Friday, the department announced its secretary, former Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue, will introduce an interim rule to provide “regulatory flexibility” for the National School Lunch Program at a Virginia elementary school on Monday, alongside Pat Roberts, R-Kansas, chair of the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry.
“Regulatory flexibility” translates into “ignoring regulations we don’t like.” Ostensibly, this is about the “cost” of the program. In reality, this is just the latest attempt to erase the Obamas from the history books with the added bonus of hurting America’s children. Because if you’re going to be a sociopath, why not go all the way?
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People whose job it is to care about the well-being of other humans are baffled by the seemingly pointless move:
American Heart Association CEO Nancy Brown said much progress had been made and 99 percent of schools were complying with the program.”
Improving children’s health should be a top priority for the USDA, and serving more nutritious foods in schools is a clear-cut way to accomplish this goal,” Brown said. “Rather than altering the current path forward, we hope the agency focuses more on providing technical assistance that can help schools get across the finish line, if they haven’t done so already.”Sadly, the top priority for every Republican has nothing to improving anything; it’s all about reversing the progress made and doing so out of sheer spite. It’s hard to wrap your head around it: What kind of person would deliberately make children less healthy just to get back at someone who did nothing but work to improve the live of America’s youth?
The kind who are with Donald Trump.
Are folks noticing the pattern? Just about every new story mentions that Trump is reversing this or that “Obama-era” regulation.
There seems to be lots of speculation about his motives, and it seems to center on Trump’s dislike of clean air, clean water, or well fed school kids. I don’t think that’s his primary motivation; he gives zero fucks for or against those things. Nor do I think his primary motivation is to pander to corporate interests, though that’s part of it. I think the critical clue is the “Obama” part. Obama once insulted Trump, and now Trump is determined to erase Obama’s legacy in every particular.
That’s why we don’t hear about rolling back Clinton-era regulations, or Carter-era. Obama is the actual target here. Kids and the environment are collateral damage.
Many have suggested that Obama’s scorching mockery of Trump is what actually decided him to run. I thought that was silly, but now I believe it. The only consistent theme in Trump’s administration is the reversal of every action Obama has ever taken.
While this is clearly gross and spiteful and stupid, it has never been the USDA’s mission to improve people’s health. The USDA’s mandate is to push US agricultural products, mostly meat and dairy.
Whatever the mission statement of the USDA may be, whatever Purdue’s personal take on it, none of this sits with the promise (sic) to bring more and better paying jobs to the US. Where does your sugar come from? Where does your fat come from? No, I don’t know but then I’m not trying to run the Department. It’s a reasonable guess, though, that it mainly involves low-paid jobs with few prospects, either outside the US or using immigrant labour within it. So does growing carrots but they are, at least, some use to the kids eating them.
Anyone who had ever worked at trying to get people back into work after Thatcher’s second recession who were suffering from long-term malnutrition would know that and my lot were highly educated, well experienced with a good C.V. Sure, they could stand up and walk about but they did not interview well, they found keeping up with their subject difficult, learning something new almost impossible.
Why? Because they were lacking and had been for a couple of years all those elements in a good diet which are necessary to ensure alertness, swift responses, a brain in full working order. Feeding them more meat and more American cheese might have improved someone’s profits – not theirs – but would eventually have begun to harm their bodies too.
Such a plan will do nothing to keep kids on in school, enhance their performance or enable them to compete with people who, perhaps, had a more fortunate start in life. And that’s before we get into the morality of deliberately creating whole generations of children hamstrung before they started just as many of their parents and grandparents were.
It really does stick out, doesn’t it, a bit beyond the usual new administration, new policies thing…
I can’t help thinking: it used to be a pattern for any number of illegitimate, autocratic thugs, who’d taken power through whichever murder or intrigue, to attempt to erase entirely their predecessor. Pull down their statues, erase them from the history books. In the old soviet union, infamously, they might even airbrush them out of photos, the 20th century version of a much older trend.
I doubt, of course, Donnie is particularly aware of this, nor, necessarily, the many others who did much the same, over centuries. It’s seems more likely to me it’s just the natural instinct of the oddly brittle, strutting, self-regarding man-children most likely to wind up in such a situation. And I wonder if it’s about not _wanting_ people to remember, to compare, worse, possibly to look back and realize, damn, how far have we fallen. So it’s erase it all, declare loudly, at every opportunity what a disaster was your predecessor, seek even to rewrite memory, even your own.
And never mind if a program is widely helpful, makes vulnerable children’s lives better. The strutting simpleton is fearful, so out it goes. Who cares who suffers.
Note also: it’s so oddly in harmony with the right wing culture war stategy in general. The hatred of ‘elites’ stirred and then used as fuel by ‘movements’ like this is always bent toward hatred, also, of, simply professionals, the educated, the thoughtful, for obvious reasons. What they earn isn’t really material, except that the hazy slander attempts to lump them in with the privileged and wealthy, accurately or no. And naturally enough: analysis of the policies endorsed will point nowhere good, so the messengers must be derided… Donnie and his supporters repeat like a mantra until they hypnotize even themselves: don’t let _anyone_ give you good, informed advice, that way lies trouble…
So you get this odd, spiteful destructiveness, even self-destructiveness, top to bottom. You get the impression the lot of them, from Donnie to some poor bastard on food stamps who voted for him because he figured there was someone, somewhere, with a PhD this would annoy, might just cut off their own dicks with a rusty kitchen knife, were there an Obama era press advisory recommending against the same.
@AJ Milne #4
Now I’m wondering how hard would it be to forge an Obama era press advisory…
But think of the future financial implications for business if America’s kids get into healthier eating habits. Future adults will be less inclined to be obese, so the market for mobility scooters* will be greatly reduced to only the disabled. A totally scientific guess tells me that demand for scooters will drop by 80%. Won’t somebody think of the profits, for crying out loud?
* It was Jimmy Carr (if memory serves) who said we should re-name them ‘fatty chariots’.
Let lead take the lead in plumbing again. It was good enough for the glorious Romans. Besides, the leaders are leaded already.