Dems: Hey, let’s raid the food stamp program again for Big Labor!
I spotlighted the $26 billion BigGovJobs’ union payoff bill that President Obama signed into law last week — a payoff that was achieved through elaborate money-shuffling, including taking $12 billion from the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
Now comes word via The Hill that the Dems are going to double-dip into the food stamp program again — this time to pay for the massive expansion of the Child Nutrition Bill pushed by First Lady Michelle Obama.
The House will soon consider an $8 billion child nutrition bill that’s at the center of the first lady’s “Let’s Move” initiative. Before leaving for the summer recess, the Senate passed a smaller version of the legislation that is paid for by trimming the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly known as food stamps.
The proposed cuts would come on top of a 13.6 percent food stamp reduction in the $26 billion Medicaid and education state funding bill that President Obama signed this week.
Food stamps have made multiple appearances on the fiscal chopping block because Democrats have few other places to turn to offset the cost of legislation.
Party leaders raided the budget to find off-setting tax increases and spending cuts to pay for their top legislative priorities, including the roughly $900 billion healthcare law. Congressional pay-as-you-go rules require lawmakers to offset all non-emergency spending.
Democrats have turned to the food stamp program because funding increases enacted in the stimulus package last year were already scheduled to phase out over time. The changes proposed in the state aid and nutrition bills would simply cut off that increase early, in March 2014. Because the cuts would not take effect for more than three years, Democratic leaders have voiced the hope that they will be able to stop them in future legislation.
The bill previously passed by the House is HR 5044 and it includes such goodies as $5 million for a “Food Service Management Institute” and an open-ended “green cafeterias pilot program.”
I’ve reported many times on the SEIU agenda behind Mrs. Obama’s anti-childhood obesity crusade. It’s spotlighted in the paperback edition of Culture of Corruption for handy reference, and I’m reprinting my February 2010 column on the subject in full below.
Remember: Big Government programs “for the children” are never about the children.
SEIU fatcats behind First Lady’s anti-obesity campaign
By Michelle Malkin • February 3, 2010 10:04 AM
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2010
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, this Great Society relic has been criticized by school administrators 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 up 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.
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You want the fat little mewling spawn to lose weight? let them play tag during recess. It’s called running! Worked for us when were in school and we ate everything!
This actually makes a lot of sense. Food stamps pay private business owners to sell their food to the poor. This is of little use to the unions. The school lunch expansion makes perfect sense. I would also change the food stamps program so that they can only be used in union run stores and buy only foods that are made in union run factories. Really, isn’t it about time that we run these kulaks out of their private farms.
BTW, we also need blur the line between union workers and federal government workers. The whole system needs to be centralized.
It’s going to come to an end soon. It is obvious that the government is purposely limited concerning what it can do to help the economy. I can’t figure out why the media don’t state this over and over again and see the better part of valor is to STOP SPENDING.
They need to cut stuff. They always say ‘well what should we cut?’ Um, that’s why you were elected to make the tough decisions. I could find stuff to cut, but you’d demagogue me.
But absent the ability to cut, these people need to just stop spending. Their spending is not doing anything any good.
The Fed is hoping their inflationary moves will work soon enough to counteract the deflationary state of the economy. It’s a race to catastrophe either way. I don’t know what the catalyst will be. . . I suspect something in the Middle East or states and local governments defaulting at an alarmingly rapid rate. . . But when it happens, the government will realize that spending is the cause of the problem, not the solution.
Maybe the election of Republicans this November will stop the spending. But none of the R’s are interested in cutting the huge defense expenditures it takes to fight wars for no reason (other than to try to make people like us).
Seriously, we are fighting a war with our military to make people like us. Of all the dumb reasons to get yourself killed, that’s got to be the dumbest.
But anyway, food stamps should be the safety net that people in need will need. If you are taking money from food stamps, you should reconsider if you are funding another safety net, or raiding the main one.
I am starting my own “Let’s Move” initative. It culminates with the moving van backing up to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. That will be movemment that will benefit the entire country.
Thacker, your second to the last paragraph makes no sense. Can you please clarify what you are trying to say. BTW, there is a safety net that remains when food stamps are cut. It’s called charity.
Flyoverman, you realize that all moving companies in DC are strictly unionized? You better check with the local 666, to see if you can bring a new truck onto the scene.
vinny, the point is that every single justification for more government spending is that the federal government is necessary to protect and used as a safety net.
The point is, the only safety net people need is food. I think the feds need to get out of a lot of stuff. But their premise is that they are providing the safety net.
Most of their spending isn’t ‘safety net’. But food stamps are (theoretically it is money that can only be used for food and not lottery tickets). If you are cutting food stamps because you have another ‘better safety net’ use for the money, you really should reconsider.
the 2nd to last paragraph was about military spending.
No, we shouldn’t STILL be in Afghanistan. The war was a good idea, but we should have finished it in 2 years without any international help. With Pakistan’s ‘help’, our price in lives and dollars have increased 10 fold.
We shouldn’t still be in Iraq either. That’s a lot of money that could be used for food stamps. Do I think we need to win wars? yes. Do I think our military is the greatest in the world? yes. Do I think it should take them 10 years to conquer Afghanstan? NO.
We lost the Afghan war when we declared Pakistan our ‘friend’. These wars are 500B dollars every year. It’s great if we have the money. But we can accomplish the same goal through the state department offending the people of Afghanistan and Pakistan by saying people can not come here if you have been to Pakistan or Afghanistan in the past 10 years.
Threat is over if we do that and we don’t waste American lives or money. But as I said before. If I say we should cut military expenses, the ‘fiscal conservative’ R’s will demagogue me.
We have to CUT but nobody will until we go bankrupt. . . like the Soviet Union.
It should be noted that the Progressives in the press in the 1930′s praised Stalin’s plan for accomplishing that goal in the CCCP.
Stalin starved seven million of Kulaks to death. The mere thought of it must make the current administration giddy.
Not possible.
Let me tell you something about possible. We would have killed Bin Laden in Tora Bora the first month if Pakistan hadn’t been ‘guarding’ the back door.
I wouldn’t be dealing with Iran now either because I would have detonated a nuclear bomb in their country years ago, televised it and said afterward, ‘let me know when you want to negotiate’ from the oval office.
It wouldn’t kill anyone as it would be detonated in the desert like we used to do in Las Vegas. But that’s how you negotiate from a position of strength. We have no idea how to use our power. We are actually pretty pathetic.
First, they’re taking the money from the 2014 funding of the food stamps program. They know they’re out in 2012 and that way, they can whine about how the GOP is trying to starve poor people.
Second, why are they funding an initiative on the part of the first lady? She’s not elected to serve in any capacity, yet she gets Congress to put up $8 billion of our money?
Speaks volumes regarding your knowledge of the topic.
Amazing.
Are they going to include boys’ favorite gun substitute bananas in these lunches? They’ll need more money for cops to police that problem and new jails to house our child-criminals.
Until Madame Big Booty walks farther than the length of a mall she can STFU, leave our kids alone and pack her fat ass elsewhere.
BTW, I’ve been getting a dozen e-mails a day pitching access to new government money give-away programs from work at home schemes, back to college funding, subsidies for solar panels and so on. Not a good sign for our economy.
Thanks Phil. I’ll have the coffee cleaned off my monitor here shortly.
Hysterical.
Hey Michelle, why don’t you get off that wide butt of yours and do something REALLY productive like helping the hungry and homeless kids in Darfur.
Because what we have been doing with regard to Iran by the big people who know-it-all is working out oh so well. As though it is keeping Russia from helping Iran build a nuclear power plant say um TODAY. And how our presence in (Afghanistan) a neighboring country to Iran who we are publicly humiliating with sanctions is putting our soldiers closer for Iran to kill in a proxy war. Let’s just make our soldiers human targets on the other side of the war to show our patriotism.
You are right, I’m an idiot. I should be a smart person and figure out a way to put soldiers in harms way and spend all our money to help a government that outlaws telling anyone ‘Jesus loves you’.
Detonating a nuclear bomb would be really stupid. I mean it wouldn’t make China or Russia or any other nation on the planet respect what we say.
Let’s wait until China invades us here before we worry about actually defending ourselves with our money and soldiers. We MUST be in Afghanistan and MUST NEVER use nuclear weapons. . . right flyover genius?
By the way, have you been to Nagasaki or Hiroshima lately? To have been completely destroyed within the century, they sure seem to be thriving pretty well today.
But wait I thought Michelle O was not open to criticism for her extravegant trips because she was just a mom not a polictician, so how come she has her own political iniative…./sarc
I think it has something to do with lying constantly and not being able to keep all of the countless lies straight.
Collard-green eatin’ beotch! What better place to start your slimmin’ campaign?
This is just a SHELL GAME!
The Democrats KNOW they are going to lose the House and the Senate this fall.
Their plan is to completely gut the entire food stamp program for whatever program they want money for today. This will leave the new Republican House and Senate to find a way to pay for the food stamps that should have already been budgeted.
I can already see Obama proclaiming the Republicans as MURDERS of CHILDREN from the Oval Office!
If by some miracle the Dem’s buy enough votes this election, then they will blame the Republicans for gutting the food stamp program.
On August 16th, 2010 at 11:44 am, cicerokid said:
Dude, thats all they ever do…other than spending everyone eles’s money, legislate nannystate laws and raise taxes.
No, but I think you need a better understanding about nuclear weapons effects. They are weapons that one should not be cavalier with. They are not gas and they aren’t bugs.
No, I am not a genious, but I had the privilige of serving for two years with the best nuclear war gamers on the planet for two years and later spent four more years as a school qualified specialist on those systems. As a combat arms commander, I had to tactically plan to use them.
I have no problem using them to include a first strike; but at the right time, in the right way, against the appropriate threat.
No, I have to been to either city. But you might read the book, “Hiroshima” and you might want to read about the cast of the movie “The Conquerer” made in 1960 or 1961 starring John Wayne.
Flyoverman said:
I seem to remember what happened to the cast and crew of “McLintock”. It was not pretty.
The “Bust a Move” campaign…it may seem like a stretch, but the “girl from the ‘hood” even has to allude to ghettospeak in the naming of her silly program…
everythingthis angry FLOTUS does is tied to her bitterness about being born black and her continuous perceived Whitey slightings…
there is a whitey tape people, believe it… probably in Shrillary’s wrinkled digits
I haven’t read the comments – someone probably mentioned this – but they want to stop helping poor people buy food so that they can afford to lecture people about nutrition? Only a dem would think this was an improvement. idiots.
This is unfair to those who end up “it” – their little psyches may be too damaged by competition to mindlessly vote dem all their lives.
BTW, the photo makes me wonder – did Obama get a “tickle me elmo” for his birthday?
I dunno, but I don’t like the idea of the lefties personifying fruit and vegetables. Before you know it, somebody gets People for the Ethical Treatment of Produce going and villifying the consuming of such, and all we’re left to eat is soylent green.
It might help if mo was not seen in numerous pictures sucking down ice cream to make a point about ‘keeping the kiddies skinny’!
L
Let’s just starve everyone. That will reduce the strain on the farmers and reduce all those fat asses all over the country, SEIU included. Lets have a ban on growing all kinds of stuff. We can save on that nasty fertilized which pollutes streams and then we can conserve water to save all those endangered fish. Finally, we can conserve the fuel needed to plow the fields. It’s a plan MHo can be proud of.
Hey! Let’s raid Moochelle Obama’s household budget and vacation nest egg to pay for the next program.
I always thought the food stamp program was like another third rail of politics. There will be a lot of upset “former” democrat voters, come November, when they see their allotment reduced to help unions. And, these people won’t forget either. The ones who stay loyal would vote for Pol Pot, if he was running, so forget them.
For a “private citizen”, Michelle Obama sure has a big, fat wallet filled with our taxpayer dollars at her disposal.
Here is yet another example of how money is being taken away from young people to fund Union Programs.
http://www.calwatchdog.com/2010/08/16/uc-still-funds-pro-union-think-tank/
If you are a University of Califorinia student or alum, let the University administration know what you think of this expense.
Let them eat
cakearugula!