Thursday, July 10, 2008

A Fat Air Force and Starving Kids

What a contrast!!!

"the $35 billion contract... [could]...
grow to more than $100 billion"

"schools plan to charge more for full-price meals in addition to cutting staff.... 'We are struggling to make ends meet'"


"Air Force to reopen bidding on tanker contract" by Leslie Wayne, New York Times News Service | July 10, 2008

The Air Force will reopen the bidding for a multibillion-dollar contract for midair refueling tankers, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said yesterday.

The decision comes in the wake of a report by the Government Accountability Office that found flaws in the process that initially awarded the contract to a partnership of Northrop Grumman and the European parent of Airbus over a competing bid by Boeing, which filed a protest.

The action reignites the controversy surrounding the largest trans-Atlantic military contract. The Pentagon's decision will also enter the realm of presidential politics because Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, had long been a critic of Boeing's initial bid and as a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee held a series of hearings that opened the door to the bid made by Northrop and European Aeronautic Defense and Space.

As a result, critics have contended that he has favored a European supplier to an American company for a critical American military contract - an impression not helped by the fact that several of his top campaign advisers had worked as lobbyists for Airbus.

In strictly financial terms, with the $35 billion contract having the potential to grow to more than $100 billion, both the Northrop-EADS partnership and Boeing led prominent campaigns on both sides of the Atlantic to land the business. Both European and American politicians entered the fray with statements supporting their own side as part of an intense public relations effort.

When the Air Force decided to award the refueling contract to the Northrop-EADS team, the selection stunned the global military community and was taken as a sign that the Pentagon was opening its doors to European suppliers.

These companies had long complained that they had been shut out of American military business, even though their countries had long purchased American military goods."

"School lunch program hit hard by food prices" by Associated Press | July 10, 2008

WASHINGTON - Add schools to the list of those hit hard by rising food prices.

The school lunch program - long a reliable source of food for children - is having serious trouble making cheap, healthy meals.

Food prices have soared as fuel prices rise. It's not just the zooming cost of oil and gas; food prices are also driven by demand for corn-based ethanol, worldwide demand for food, and the weak dollar, among other things.

These far-flung factors have combined to put the squeeze on school kitchens, which provide free and reduced-price lunches, as well as full-price lunches, for more than half of the nation's 60 million school children.

"We are struggling to make ends meet," Katie Wilson, president-elect of the School Nutrition Association, told members of the House Education and Labor Committee yesterday. "We simply don't have the funds to continue on with this."

Next year, most schools plan to charge more for full-price meals in addition to cutting staff, according to preliminary results of a School Nutrition Association study.

Schools can't put just anything on a lunch tray. Because the government subsidizes lunches, schools are expected to follow federal guidelines for healthy eating by providing lots of fresh fruit and vegetables along with whole grains.

Those are the very foods hit hardest by the rising cost of food, as are milk and meat, two universal offerings in school lunch rooms.

It costs more to make fruits and veggies in part because they are processed less, if at all, which makes it harder to spread around the cost. And it costs more to produce milk and meat because they come from farm animals that eat mostly corn.

Even a penny increase in the cost of milk can cost US schools another $54 million, said Pavel N. Matustik, chief food services administrator of the Santa Clarita Valley School in California.

The government reimburses schools $2.57 per meal, but for many districts the cost of a lunch is over $3, Wilson said.

Overall, food prices are expected to rise as much as 5.5 percent this year, with a slightly bigger increase for food that people prepare at home and a smaller increase for food in restaurants, the Agriculture Department said."