Blanche Lincoln's Back In Action-- Working With Jon Kyl To Make Sure The Wealthiest Americans Become Much, Much Wealthier

Yesterday one of Blanche Lincoln's staffers penned a press release kind of thing for HuffPo under her name, Saving Our Children. She sounds very concerned:

Hunger and obesity. It might seem odd to find these epidemics mentioned together, but they are two of the greatest threats to the health of America's children and the future of our nation... Childhood hunger and obesity are problems known all too well in my home state of Arkansas. A recent Feeding America report found our state to have the highest rate of childhood hunger in the country at nearly 25 percent. That's one in four children living in hunger.

Another report found 20 percent of Arkansas children to be obese, the seventh highest rate in the country.

As Chairman of the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry, I have authored the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, which addresses these two threats by making strong improvements to our federal child nutrition programs. Funding authorization for these programs expires in 78 days.

Children who are hungry or obese will face learning challenges and lifelong health problems. And their poor health will add significant cost to our health care system and a significant cost to our nation's future economic security.

Fortunately, hunger is a disease for which we have the cure. And we know healthier meals are part of the solution to reverse the growing epidemic of childhood obesity.

Jill Richardson, one of the country's foremost progressive food policy experts-- and author of Recipe For America: Why Our Food System Is Broken And What We Can Do To Fix It-- doesn't see the problem quite the same way Lincoln does. Jill is delighted that Lincoln pressed forward with the bill that her progressive predecessor as Agriculture Committee chair worked on for so long but points out that "both the Senate and House bills drastically underfund child nutrition programs like school lunch (by tens of billions of dollars), but the Senate bill is FAR worse than the House bill, giving only a tad over half as much money as the House bill does ($4.5 billion over 10 years compared with $8 billion over 10 years). Last, under PAYGO rules, both the Senate and the House committees need to pay for the extra money they spend on school lunch. The House is still exploring options for where this money will come from. Dennis Kucinich, for example, has offered a measure that would remove a subsidy for marketing junk foods to kids and use that money to pay for school lunch. But Lincoln, lovely lady that she is, looked around for a program she thought had some money to cut and took it out of a perennially underfunded agriculture conservation program... The school lunch bill is actually great in terms of expanding the number of kids who get fed. But it does nothing to improve the food. So, in essence, the bill says 'Here kids, we care enough to keep you from starving, but not enough to keep you from getting diabetes, heart disease, or cancer'."

She may not be writing self-promoting pieces for HuffPo about it-- I wonder why-- but Blanche's real priority has nothing to do with poor people, children or otherwise. Her actual raison d'être, and what keeps her from any serious action of behalf of the impoverished Arkansas children she wants to appear concerned about, is her work with Jon Kyl on behalf of a few hundred of the wealthiest families in America, i.e., their campaign donors. As Digby mentioned Monday taxes on the rich are un-American. Blanche to the rescue... since it's clear that a few families once paid too much in estate taxes-- at least in their own minds (and hers)-- is what ails America. Blanche and Kyl are working together to pass a "less onerous estate tax" for multimillionaires.

Sens. Blanche Lincoln , D-Ark., and Jon Kyl , R-Ariz., have laid down an important marker in the continued fight over the tax, which expired Dec. 31 but will kick in again next year. Although Republicans and some moderate Democrats [translation: corrupt corporate shills and far right Democrats like Ben Nelson and Mary Landrieu] are likely to support their plan, the issue is highly contentious and Democratic leaders have not signaled whether they intend to allow a vote on it.

The Lincoln-Kyl proposal, backed by many business groups, would be more generous to heirs and estate owners than the version favored by the White House and most Democrats.

The House passed a bill last December that would set the estate tax at the parameters in effect in 2009-- a 45 percent top rate, with a $3.5 million per-person exemption.

The Lincoln-Kyl proposal would gradually drop the top estate tax rate to 35 percent, set the per-person exemption at $5 million and index it to inflation.

Under the 2001 tax cut law, which phased out the estate tax over the past decade, the levy will return on Jan. 1, 2011, if Congress does not act by then. The top rate will jump to 55 percent and the per-person exemption will be set at $1 million.

That would be super! And Durbin, Sanders, Merkeley, Franken and other tribunes of working families should filibuster anything that prevents just that from happening. I wonder if Sherrod ever talks to Blanche. He's right in his analysis of what Republicans want to do in this interview last night with Rachel Maddow, but Blanche Lincoln in his own party, has the same mindset as the anti-family GOP zombies.

Do Conservatives Like Ken Buck Want To Destroy America? Who Knows, But The Sick Policies They Espouse Will Do Just That

After Amato bet me that Obama would fire McCrystal-- I took the position Obama didn't have the intestinal stamina to do it-- I'm a little wary of these pool sharks taking advantage of me. So when one of my friends wanted to bet that he could name someone running for the Senate even more bizarre, extreme and perhaps even more psychotic than Sharron Angle or even Rand Paul, I hesitated. A case could certainly be made about that creepy bribery and coercion guy in Wisconsin. And Vitter's up for re-election. Of course, there's the former Wall Street derivatives trader, Pat Toomey, who's stark raving mad, and that pasty, pudgy guy who hasn't been able to stop eating cane-glazed pork chops with apple chutney since being caught embezzling Republican Party funds with his magic credit card. But then I remembered-- just in time... Ken Buck, the nutroots candidate, straight from Teabaggerville in Colorado.

What I remembered about Buck, another fringy DeMint candidate, wasn't just the ordinary far right claptrap he's been screeching about getting rid of Social Security and ending the whole separation of church and state thing. (These super Constitutionalists actually hate everything about the Constitution except the their interpretation of the Second Amendment.) It's his despicable comments about student loans and the mindset behind that.

Yammering on to a bunch of selfish wingnuts about the evils of Social Security, he recited usually carefully disguised GOP dogma: “I don’t know whether it’s constitutional or not; it is certainly a horrible policy. The idea that the federal government should be running health care or retirement or any of those programs is fundamentally against what I believe. And that is that the private sector runs programs like that far better.” And he threw in government backed student loans in to boot, adding, "over time, we have to wean the American public off those." Like Rand Paul and Sharron Angle, he would like to abolish the Department of Education (but then so would the Republican Party hack he's running against in the primary, Jane Norton).

I want to say something about these Republican greed-mongers, many of whom-- like both Buck and Norton-- have been sucking at the government teat all their lives. Basically they're nihilists and law-of-the jungle, anti-social suck-ups to the ruling elite. Before I retired I was paying nearly a million dollars a year in taxes. I didn't love writing those big checks but I love my country and when you pay that kind of money in taxes, it means you're doing pretty damn well. America did a great deal for me and I was proud I could give back. I couldn't have gone to college at all if not for the state university system-- opposed by conservatives, as too costly from the day they were proposed-- and I still wouldn't have been able to go without grants and loans. And then there was a time in my life when I couldn't quite make the ends meet and I don't know what would have happened to me with food stamps. I don't quite know what the government investment in me was. But I bet it worked out really well, considering I started a business, employed people, paid taxes and eventually generated many millions of dollars in income for American companies. And my taxes in any single month more than paid back the year of food stamps. And the student loans Buck and shortsighted conservatives like him want to do away with! What a bleak vision for our country these blinkered, greed-obsessed conservatives have!

Sunday you may have read Paul Krugman's harrowing column, The Third Depression, something the economics Nobel laureate thinks is descending on us because of a repeat of adopting as policy the same kind of conservative ideology that have caused past depressions.

Neither the Long Depression of the 19th century nor the Great Depression of the 20th was an era of nonstop decline-- on the contrary, both included periods when the economy grew. But these episodes of improvement were never enough to undo the damage from the initial slump, and were followed by relapses.

We are now, I fear, in the early stages of a third depression. It will probably look more like the Long Depression than the much more severe Great Depression. But the cost-- to the world economy and, above all, to the millions of lives blighted by the absence of jobs-- will nonetheless be immense.

And this third depression will be primarily a failure of policy. Around the world-- most recently at last weekend’s deeply discouraging G-20 meeting-- governments are obsessing about inflation when the real threat is deflation, preaching the need for belt-tightening when the real problem is inadequate spending.

In 2008 and 2009, it seemed as if we might have learned from history. Unlike their predecessors, who raised interest rates in the face of financial crisis, the current leaders of the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank slashed rates and moved to support credit markets. Unlike governments of the past, which tried to balance budgets in the face of a plunging economy, today’s governments allowed deficits to rise. And better policies helped the world avoid complete collapse: the recession brought on by the financial crisis arguably ended last summer.

But future historians will tell us that this wasn’t the end of the third depression, just as the business upturn that began in 1933 wasn’t the end of the Great Depression. After all, unemployment-- especially long-term unemployment-- remains at levels that would have been considered catastrophic not long ago, and shows no sign of coming down rapidly. And both the United States and Europe are well on their way toward Japan-style deflationary traps.

In the face of this grim picture, you might have expected policy makers to realize that they haven’t yet done enough to promote recovery. But no: over the last few months there has been a stunning resurgence of hard-money and balanced-budget orthodoxy.

And his conclusion as to why the ruling elites are headed down this road again? Even more chilling: "the victory of an orthodoxy that has little to do with rational analysis, whose main tenet is that imposing suffering on other people is how you show leadership in tough times. And who will pay the price for this triumph of orthodoxy? The answer is, tens of millions of unemployed workers, many of whom will go jobless for years, and some of whom will never work again." If you're a regular DWT reader you're certainly aware that we don't want to single out Ken Buck-- or even a raving sociopath like Sharron Angle-- as if the real toxicity were coming from anyplace else other than the very nature of conservatism itself. And since the fish rots from the head, let's take a look at the most recent random sociopathic utterances of the little orange man who would be Speaker, John Boehner. There's a wealth of information about the conservative mindset in those videos but the two most astonishing takeaways is that Boehner thinks she should cut back on Social Security-- in fact, keep Americans from retiring until they're 70 so that we can afford to pay for the foolish wars the ruling elites want to fight-- and that Financial Regulation is an overreaction, like killing an ant with a nuclear weapon.

The actual Speaker didn't seem especially amused by Boehner's boneheaded remarks. "An ant, Mr. Boehner? It was the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression-- Americans lost 8 million jobs and $17 trillion in retirement savings and net worth. The irresponsible fiscal policies of George W. Bush and Congressional Republicans were much bigger than an ant to American workers, their families and small businesses."

Justin Coussoule is the Democrat running for the seat Boehner is occupying. Earlier today he told us that this kind of shameless grandstanding is par for the course for Boehner. "While protecting bankers and careless polluters he blocks desperate unemployed workers from receiving essential compensation and now suggests that to pay for corporate giveaways and endless war that we balance the books by doing a bait and switch on Social Security recipients. Once again Boehner defends the powerful and tells the most needy in our society that it is time for them to suffer so that his benefactors can continue to wade in shallow water while those who have suffered from his trickle on economics gasp and drown in the deep and treacherous economic waters." Contributing to Coussoule's campaign seems like an exceptionally good idea-- unless you approve of Boehnerism.

Meanwhile, my friend Jill Richardson, author of Recipe For America: Why Our Food System Is Broken And What We Can Do To Fix It, put a very human face on this looming macro-economic crisis, asking a simple question about how, as a society, we treat our own children: Tate Tots Aren't Vegetables: Why Do We Feed Our Kids Crap?

Those who say the deficit must be addressed now via PAYGO ignore the basic principles of Keynesian economics. John Maynard Keynes, the economist most credited with bringing the U.S. out of the Great Depression, encouraged increased government spending-- even deficit spending-- during economic downturns. Recall that GDP is calculated as consumer spending plus investment by businesses plus government spending plus net exports. When consumers and businesses tighten their belts and spend less, the government can increase spending to jumpstart the economy once again. That was the very idea behind last year's stimulus package, which provided for targeted spending on infrastructure, food stamps and other programs that would most create jobs and result in immediate spending to help the economy recover.

Keynes knew that in a downturn, people are earning less so they also pay less in taxes. Simultaneously, more people qualify for entitlements (like food stamps or Medicaid), pushing up government spending. An austerity budget to fix the deficit now will prevent the government from spending what is necessary to bring back our economy. Once the economy recovers, the opposite will be true, and we will be more able to fix the deficit then.

In the specific case of school lunches, an austerity budget (and unhealthy food) now will result in massive increases in spending in the future when a generation of children raised on unhealthy food becomes a generation of unhealthy adults with costly, chronic illnesses. Some say they don't want to pass the deficit onto their children. But what child, when they are diagnosed with diabetes at age 25, would say "Thank you for balancing the budget by saving money on my school meals"?

I don't mean to single out John Boehner but his scary little world, is the conservative mind:

I Guess We Should Consider It A Blessing That Conservatives Don't Just Kill Poor Children Outright And Have Done With It

I hope you remember-- and remember as fondly as I do-- my favorite recent video on the nature of conservatism. It looks like they've gone and done a part two:



Oh, but it's just about those damn oil spilling Brits, you say? No, the nature of conservatism spans all eras and all geographic space. Conservatives are selfish, greedy sociopaths. Didn't you watch the video? It doesn't matter where they live or at what point in history they lived. It's like a cockroach; they never change-- and you can never get rid of them. After the Civil War they started the KKK and were back in power relatively quickly. After WWII, how long did it take for conservatives to regain the reins of power all across Europe and even the U.S.? Money talks... loudly.

Yesterday my friend Jill Richardson, author of Recipe For America, as well as of the best food policy blog in the country, LaVidaLocavore.org alerted me to the latest action on the school lunches legislation. Hopefully you'll recall the Blue America chat last month with Rep. Jared Polis (D-CO) about the importance of healthy, nutritional school lunches. Jill was just in DC when the Child Nutrition Bill was introduced. She's far more elegant in her phrasing but, as she pointed out, it just sucks. There are good things in the bill, of course, but, in the end, conservatives are making school lunches about... what else? Their money. They don't want to educate or medicate or feed children born into impoverished circumstances. They don't see children as national resources for making out country richer and stronger, just as burdens on their ability to buy that third SUV they must have in the 6-car garage. End of story. That's what conservatism is. The hell with the well-being or the future of the country; I've got mine/screw the rest of you. Didn't you ever watch Cartman on South Park?

For those not obsessed with the difference between being a billionaire and a mere multimillionaire-- and, I'll admit I think billionairism should carry an automatic death penalty-- it is clearly understood that a refusal to fund school lunches means poor nutrition and no chance of an adequate education. The makes the country's future very bleak indeed. Jill blames the predicament on the conservative triumph called PAYGO, something they selectively use to keep rich people's taxes low and poor people's ability to break out of the chains of poverty even lower.

Somebody in DC decided that the deficit is a huge problem. And somebody also decided that we will deal with it by spending very little on government. If we increase spending somewhere, we have to offset it with cuts somewhere else. Within a committee like the House Education and Labor Committee or the Senate Agriculture Committee-- the two committees responsible for the child nutrition bill-- they can only take from certain programs to give money to school lunch. The Senate took money from agriculture conservation programs. The House hasn't told us yet (to my knowledge) where they will find the money, but it could be farm subsidies, conservation, or something else agriculture-related like that. It won't be (and CAN'T be if I understand things correctly) things outside of the committee's jurisdiction-- like taxing rich people or cutting outdated Cold War weapons programs from the bloated Pentagon budget.

The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine put on a happy face, calling the bill a "first historic step," while recognizing "much more needs to follow in order to deal with the childhood obesity epidemic by enabling schools to have equal access to and the ability to serve more vegetables, fruits, and low-fat, cholesterol-free meals."

Senior clinicians called for amendments that would bring forward the introduction of healthier plant-based meal options in accordance with recommendations made by the American Medical Association and the American Public Health Association.

The bill, in its current form, does little to encourage the substitution of high fat content foods (such as meat and cheese) with low-fat fruit and vegetables. Such substitutions are crucial in fighting childhood obesity and have been endorsed by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) and 66 members of the House of Representatives... Clinicians at PCRM have suggested that the Improving Nutrition for America’s Children Act could easily be improved by including provisions from the Healthy School Meals Act, H.R. 4870, legislation introduced by Rep. Jared Polis of Colorado and co-sponsored by 65 additional Members of Congress.

From what I can gather, school lunches currently cost $2.68 per child per day. Conservatives would like to reduce this-- or cut it out entirely-- and Democrats, mighty defenders of progressivism, are willing, many just grudgingly, to increase it by a whopping six cents. Last year chef and nutrition expert Alice Waters did an OpEd in the NY Times insisting that Congress address the nutritional quality of the lunches and allocating $5.00 per child per day.

Many nutrition experts believe that it is possible to fix the National School Lunch Program by throwing a little more money at it. But without healthy food (and cooks and kitchens to prepare it), increased financing will only create a larger junk-food distribution system. We need to scrap the current system and start from scratch. Washington needs to give schools enough money to cook and serve unprocessed foods that are produced without pesticides or chemical fertilizers. When possible, these foods should be locally grown.

How much would it cost to feed 30 million American schoolchildren a wholesome meal? It could be done for about $5 per child, or roughly $27 billion a year, plus a one-time investment in real kitchens. Yes, that sounds expensive. But a healthy school lunch program would bring long-term savings and benefits in the areas of hunger, children’s health and dietary habits, food safety (contaminated peanuts have recently found their way into school lunches), environmental preservation and energy conservation.

The Agriculture Department will have to do its part, by making good on its fledgling commitment to back environmentally sound farming practices and by realizing a separate program to deliver food, especially fresh fruits and vegetables, from farms to schools. It will also need to provide adequate support for kitchens and healthy meal planning. Congress has an opportunity to accomplish some of these goals when it takes up the Child Nutrition and Women Infants and Children Reauthorization Act, which is set to expire in September.

Ann Cooper, the "Renegade Lunch Lady," and the nutrition director for the Boulder Valley, Colorado public school system, describes her life's work as transforming "how we feed our children in school each day, from highly processed to highly nourishing food-- one school lunch at a time." She thinks it can be done for about $1.00 more per child per day. All experts agree that replacing junk food with real food is what has to happen. Junk food manufacturers, of course, have another perspective. And they somehow figured out that teaming up with conservatives would go a long way towards maintaining the status quo, regardless of the original intent of the legislation meant to serve as a health safety net for poor children.