Michelle Obama Follows Center for American Progress' Guidelines on Food
Michelle Obama's campaign to transform school food guidelines is not your typical first lady literacy or "just say no to drugs" project. No, hers is an all-out insidious plan to use food, a basic biological need and foundation of the mother-child relationship, to nudge parents out of the way at the ground level.
The first lady's deceptive initiative has closely followed the Center for American Progress' policies set out in their 2008 report Change for America: A Progressive Blueprint for the 44th President.
Led by John Podesta and funded by George Soros, CAP began working on the plan for President Obama's administration in mid-2007. The blueprint compiled a "charisma of ideas" that would carry the President to "2016."
Included in the blueprint are authors' entries which offer specific recommendations to government agencies from Homeland Security to Health and Human Services to the Environmental Protection Agency.
The Department of Agriculture chapter entitled "Tackling Food and Energy Crises Amid Global Warming" prefigures Michelle Obama's pet project, Let's Move launched in February, 2010.
Former Clinton USDA undersecretary James Lyons begins his essay with the stark realization that the USDA's "programs and policies affect nearly every American." The agency oversees food safety, nutritional guidance, international food assistance, agricultural trade, farms, food stamps and federal school lunch and breakfast programs.
Mr. Lyons states revised nutritional standards must be incorporated into legislation directly related to school food programs. Two years later in her national anti-obesity initiative, Mrs. Obama as well as White House policy experts use the same rhetoric as Lyons.
From the blueprint:
Obesity has become an epidemic in the United States. The percentage of Americans who are overweight - 60 percent according to the Centers for Disease Control - exceeds that of most developed nations. Obesity in children and young Americans is linked to an increase in the rate of Type II diabetes, and Type II diabetes can result in health problems and rising health care costs when left untreated.
From Let's Move, February 2010:
Over the past three decades, childhood obesity rates in America have tripled, and today, nearly one in three children in America are overweight or obese. A recent study put the health care costs of obesity-related diseases at $147 billion per year. This epidemic also impacts the nation's security, as obesity is now one of the most common disqualifiers for military service.
"The physical and emotional health of an entire generation and the economic health and security of our nation is at stake," said Mrs. Obama
The First Lady then talked about the comprehensive collaborative strategy needed to combat childhood obesity.
It's going to require us working together ... not just the administration, but Congress, governors, mayors, parents, teachers. Anyone who has access to children in their lives is going to have to work together. This is going to require national action.
In the blueprint, Lyons writes "the department should work with independent experts from the nutrition, health and health professions."
In 2010 when President Barack Obama kicked off his wife's program by signing a Presidential Memorandum creating the first ever Task Force on Childhood Obesity he rallied other government agencies like HHS, private far left foundations like Robert Wood Johnson, the Office of the First Lady and various experts to conduct a "review of every single program and policy relating to child nutrition and physical activity and develop a national action plan that maximizes federal resources and sets concrete benchmarks toward the First Lady's national goal."
In the blueprint, Lyons writes the Department of Agriculture "should also help improve opportunities for exercise and access to outdoors." Michelle Obama followed suit with her much-hyped dance moves in May 2011 and her teaming up with Beyonce to produce the "Move Your Body" workout video.
In 2010 Michelle Obama parroted Lyons by telling a National Restaurant audience "our children are spending less time outside and more time on the couch in front of the TV."
As the poet William Blake so correctly wrote, "A single truth" (like children need good food and exercise) told with "bad intent beats all the lies you can invent."
Michelle Obama's pet project has been in the works for many years. The Center for American Progress created the guidelines well before Obama's election. What's their intent? As progressive socialists, they want nothing less than to "reign over a human kindergarten" where they tell us all what to do.
Read more M. Catharine Evans at Potter Williams Report