There's Money to be Made in Obesity--It's Market Driven

The Obama administration is concerned about the health of U.S. children and Mrs Obama is leading an anti-obesity campaign. Nearly one in three US children between the ages of two and 19 are obese, not just chubby, but obese. So a White House released a report last week with some suggestions that can help our kids become more healthy.

The government wants  "more restraint" in marketing foods to children.  We all see how they use cartoon characters and toys to get kids in to the fast food places like Burger King, Jack in the Box and McDonalds. Food (if you can call it that) manufacturers spend hundreds of millions of dollars annually convincing children to eat their junk.  In the book Fast Food Nation the process is referred to as "pester power".  Ensure that the marketing has the ability to make the child "pester" the parent enough so that they will succumb out of sheer exhaustion.  This applies to food toys and other crap they want people to buy; and the Tea Party folks are worried about government telling us what to do; corporations, the private sector already lead that race.

So the government is pleading with the food manufacturers and their media to show some restraint to give the impression that it cares. "White House officials said they aren't trying to dictate Americans' diets but want to make it easier for people to make healthier choices" the Wall Street Journal informs us, or more accurately, assures the capitalists that own food production and distribution. * More than 300 food producers support the White House recommendations which is an indication of how ineffective they will be. "Make regulation the act of last resort" says one representative of the Grocery Manufacturers Association. Capitalists regulating themselves, through their government,  is hardly regulation at all but any hint of public as opposed to private policy, anything that undermines the private sector and market forces is a threat to them ideologically.

The government could make it much easier to eat healthy, we pointed this out with regard to the levels of state subsidies different sections of the food industry gets in a previous blog posting.
Food production, like health care is a business; it is about making profit not producing healthy food.  The response to the report's recommendation that nutritional information be moved to the front of food packages caused an uproar, "It could cost millions of dollars to change labels" says one manufacturer; they all think the same way. I guess they'll back down though when Jon Lieibowitz, chairman of the Federal Trade Commission brings out his doomsday weapon if the "restraint" isn't forthcoming. The agency will "Shame companies that aren't doing enough" he tells the WSJ.

The government wants the schools to do more also; you know, the institutions that they are dismantling every day.  The report suggests more physical activity and better nutrition.  It suggests that schools should upgrade their cafeteria equipment and is "encouraging cities to make it easier to walk or bike to school."   It is almost bizarre that the folks who have squandered trillions of dollars of taxpayers money and handed trillions more to bankers and other parasites can even suggest this in a serious way.  Taxpayers money was used to create this useless study.  It shows what contempt these people have for ordinary working class people to think we might take it seriously.

Most Americans have become numbed by the crap we hear or read in their media day in day out.  To suggest cities can create a situation where communities become more humane by a simple thing like making access to school easier or that schools should improve their cafeteria facilities in this climate is a joke.  In all communities, transportation, education, social services are all being savaged.  Millions are losing their homes and their jobs. And it is going to get worse as they slash spending and increase taxes to pay for their crisis.

The capitalist class has, as we have said many times on this blog, has forfeited its right to govern.  Capitalism is rotten and destructive.  The catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico, the endless wars, the slums of Bombay, Katrina, these are all market driven disasters, they are not natural disasters as they would have us believe. They will not regulate the system to be people friendly.  They are driven by the laws of the system, the quest for profit, to attack the working class, to wage endless wars, no matter what they say to the contrary.

The administration, owned in total by Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and a few thousand other wasters wants our schools to have our kids eat healthier.  But capitalism can't afford that.  Profit comes first.  "Many schools don't have the money to buy fresh vegetables", says Helen Phillips, director of child nutrition services for public schools in Norfolk Virginia.   Her own school district has stopped serving fresh tomatoes, "We couldn't afford them" she says.

This is in a country that has more billionaires than anywhere on earth, that spends $10 billion a month on a couple of predatory wars in the former colonial world.  A country where an individual can earn a billion dollars in one year. A school cannot afford fresh tomatoes for its pupils.

The protests in Greece against the banker's austerity measures are a glimpse of what is to come in a more generalized way.  We have a rich and militant history in the US, the struggle against racism and for civil rights, the struggle to build Unions and the struggle for gender equality; the US working class will also enter this stage.  We have had the most ruthless capitalist class in history and won concessions from them.  This crisis has opened up a new era and while the militant traditions of the US working class have been weakened and suppressed with the help of the leaders of the worker's organizations, they have not been lost entirely.

We'll get our fresh tomatoes if we fight for them.
* Wall Street Journal: 5-12-10