The Right Wing's Program to Solve Childhood Obesity

This plotline could have come from one of Charles Dickens' novels about upper-class depravity: "Miserly governors refuse to provide gruel for poverty-stricken ragamuffins."

Unfortunately, this is not a novel, but modern-day reality taking place in 15 states, where right-wing officeholders have scorned a federal program to provide food this summer for millions of children mired in poverty.

"No!" bark these political ideologues. Seeking to punish poverty, they piously demonize public aid ... even for hungry children! This program hardly lavishes luxury dining on anyone, offering only $40 per child in groceries. Not for one meal or even a week, but $40 a month -- about a buck-thirty a day. Feast on that!

Yet, the politicos in such deeply impoverished states as Mississippi and Louisiana have arrogantly shunned this minimal assistance their people so desperately need. Worse, so have the mingy governors of super-rich states like Florida and Texas, where millions of children need this food. Also, note that these elitist governors are personally wealthy, yet they have no ethical qualms about taxpayers picking up the tab for their pricey meals.

Then there's the pathetic duplicity of Iowa governor Kim Reynolds. She rejected the grocery benefit for her state's children, asserting that it "does nothing to promote nutrition" and could contribute to childhood obesity. Well, gosh, Gov, providing food has actually proven to be nutritionally beneficial for children. On the other hand, she's right that denying food to children definitely can cause them to lose weight! Thanks, Kim.

Turning down food assistance for poor children is shockingly callous, just plain mean ... and politically stupid, even for right-wing puritanical ideologues. The good news is that 35 states, five U.S. territories and four Native American tribes have welcomed the summer program. Learn more at FeedingAmerica.org.

THE SUPREME COURT'S SIX CORPORATE SUPREMACISTS RIDE AGAIN

Heeere they come again: The wrecking crew of Alito, Barrett, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Roberts and Thomas -- the six plutocratic judicial supremacists determined to force their personal political biases on all of us.

The latest ploy of this right-wing cabal is to gut the ability of public agencies to issue regulations protecting people from health care rip-offs, consumer price gougers, labor abusers, toxic polluters, and other corporate profiteers. The six-person Republican majority controlling the court is about to decree that when reigning in corporate abuses, public agencies can only take specific regulatory actions that Congress puts into law.

Sounds good in theory, but in real life, Congress has no ability to itemize the ever-changing list of actions needed to stop the abuses. Thus Congress (and "We the People") rely on the diligence and expertise of agencies to make the law work. So, the court's sneaky maneuver is just judicial smoke and mirrors, benefitting ... well, who?

"Overregulated small businesses," wailed the court's six laissez-faire ideologues. Indeed, to make their legal ruling, the six had handpicked a case involving a couple of small fishing companies complaining about federal rules to prevent the overfishing of herring. But wait -- look who's steering those little fishermen's legal boat: Charles Koch, the ultra-billionaire, anti-regulation extremist! His secretive political operation recruited the herring fishermen to be his corporate pawns and is orchestrating this judicial flimflam.

Moreover, Koch's surreptitious network also funded and orchestrated the political placement of today's corporate majority on the Supreme Court.

Yet, America's corporate media establishment papers over this judicial coup. A recent AP headline, for example, meekly reports that "Conservative Interests Take Aim at Regulations." No -- Koch forces are not conservative, they're corporate supremacists. And they're not aiming at "regulations" -- but at you and me.

To find out more about Jim Hightower and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators webpage at www.creators.com.

----