No Capitalist Left Behind in Louisiana

The Louisiana Senate recently voted 22-16 to allow corporations to sponsor charter schools in exchange for half of the enrollment slots and half the governing board seats, according to the Times Picayune. The House is expected to approve the bill and Governor Bobby Jindal is expected to sign it.

As is typical, business lobbies pitched the bill as an incentive to attract business to Louisiana (which it is), as if more business is equated with a better life for the masses. As we have seen repeatedly, subsidies, bailouts and tax cuts do not lead businesses to hire more people and they certainly do not lead to better pay and benefits for employees. However, in this case, it is not just teachers who will get screwed by having to work at union-free shops for lower pay and longer hours. With up to half the enrollment slots in the hands of corporate funders, the new schools could easily wind up as elite schools for the children of the rich, worsening the already extreme segregation of students based on their socioeconomic status. Furthermore, the schools’ boards could wind up under the control of single corporations, thus weakening parental and teacher influence over the operations and objectives of the schools, and increasing the chances that curriculum is biased in favor of that corporation’s interests.

Dairy Industry Lies to Fatten Profits (and Children)

"Bubbles" by John Isaac, 2003 (photographed by Grahamc99)

A report by the Associated Press last week said that a number of professional and medical groups, including the American Heart Association (AHA) and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), had issued a “joint statement” favoring flavored milk in the schools. Their statement supposedly asserted that “the nutritional value of flavored low-fat or skim milk outweighs the harm of the added sugar.” (See OB Rag)

In reality, no such “joint statement” was ever made. The AP was scammed by dairy industry propaganda designed to keep chocolate milk in the schools. In fact, many medical groups have come out against the practice of feeding kids sugared milk drinks precisely because the added sugar contributes to obesity and tooth decay. AHA and AAP both denied signing the joint statement.

Two of the organizations cited in the AP story (the School Nutrition Association and the American Dietetic Association) have financial links to the dairy industry and have been key players in the effort to keep chocolate milk in the schools. The School Nutrition Association includes dues-paying members from the dairy lobby, including The National Dairy Council and the Milk Processors Education Program, according to the OB Rag story.

The School Nutrition Association worked with the dairy lobby to promote a biased “study” that supposedly showed that kids would not drink milk if it wasn’t flavored. This tactic is highly reminiscent of attempts by the Tobacco industry to sow doubt about the dangers of cigarettes by co-opting scientists and producing their own “scientific” studies to counter the legitimate ones linking smoking to cancer and heart disease. Petroleum and coal companies have done the same to sow doubt about climate change. (See Merchants of Doubt, numerous articles by Robert Procter, The Republican War on Science, among other sources).