Child Nutrition: anathema to the wingnuts

(Picture courtesy of henry….)

As Georgia Representative John Lewis aptly put it yesterday on the floor of the House, the right wing in its push to make poverty unsustainable, is “going after the babies”.

Proposed $47 million cuts in the program of nutrition for Women, Infants and Children will make it that more difficult for pregnant women and small children, literally, to survive.  These cuts are extended by Pentagon spending increases.

“Nutrition didn’t drive our economy into the ditch.  Nutrition didn’t keep banks from extending loans,” Lewis maintained.   “Now they’re going after the babies…They (the babies) didn’t overextend our credit card.”

With the usual failure to give value to essentials of life, or those under stress because of the long economic decline the right has imposed on the country, a House led by the right was ground zero for class warfare yesterday.

The armies of the right came out in force to keep the lion’s share of our country’s wealth walled off from the needy.

Essential programs on the chopping block include the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC) and Commodity Supplemental Food programs, which both help low-income people get nutritional food. Hundreds of thousands of people will be cut from the programs if House Republicans get their way. WIC “provides healthy foods like milk, eggs and infant formula to about 9 million poor mothers and pregnant women and their children,” and would absorb a $868 million cut under the GOP bill, which falls $1.3 billion short of what’s needed to adequately fund the program with food prices on the rise.

The GOP measure also calls for cuts to food safety programs, a childhood obesity initiative backed by First Lady Michele Obama, and food aid for senior citizens.

Led by Jack Kingston, (R-GA), the enemies of the people fought against the programs to keep funding in the Agriculture Department budget for nutrition needed by those unborn babies they want so badly to keep producing.   Instead of preventing abortion, their claimed goal, these warriors for greed would make it harder to carry and bring to term healthy babies.   Calling a country whose corporations hoard trillions of dollars in reserve rather than share it with the nation’s working population “broke”, the forces of evil were hell-bent to take more away from those already deprived.  Kingston chided the opposition party for its participation in impoverishing the country, blaming the Democrats for extending Bush tax cuts – the demand his party made for keeping the economy viable.

Rep.  Steve Womack (R-AR) wants to “take away the cloud of uncertainty from job creators”, in his noble quest to snatch food from the mouths of pregnant women, infants and children.  Rep. Lummis (R-WY) fought for the cuts to the needy with the claim that Democrats caused it when they “created TARP II without accounting for TARP I” – keeping the banks from going under from their excesses when the right deregulated them.  TARP II of course actually demanded repayment as TARP I under the right wing had not.

Kingston insisted that in his visit to Brazil, the president “was obviously more comfortable with Brazil than with Louisiana”, and that the price of oil is up because the supply is low.  Of course, the supplies of oil are outrunning demand at this time as the effect of recent obscenely overpriced gas has forced workers to cut back drastically on the use of their cars, and the gasoline to operate them.

The fattening up of industry at the cost of the nation’s health has become palpable as the harpies of the right take their attack directly to the victims of their excesses.

Blaming the Democrats’ failure to get back to economic health over their two years struggling against Republican impedimentia, those cynical powers of the right brought their attack to ‘the babies’, as well as the elderly and others in need.   With sacrifices demanded of them, the needy will suffer.  Under their program of deprivation, our national health will decline yet more.

The beneficiaries of the right’s cuts will continue to be bloated, nonproductive, corporate welfare, with its probable at least one trillion in reserve.