No more carrots until you've finished your Mountain Dew, kid.
There's no point in even mocking this. It
speaks for itself.
A top lobbyist for food and beverage giant PepsiCo Inc. who was formerly a top aide to Senate Agriculture Chairman Pat Roberts is taking over as the Agriculture Committee's chief of staff as it prepares to rewrite federal child nutrition policy.
Joel Leftwich, a native of Wellington, Kansas, worked for Roberts, R-Kan., as deputy staff director for the committee before becoming senior director for PepsiCo's public policy and government affairs team in March 2013.
Expect the new guidelines to call for at least three cans of Pepsi every day to promote strong bones and iron stomachs.
One of the committee's main orders of business this year will be to reauthorize the law that sets standards for school meals and the Women, Infants and Children nutrition program. The programs have a broad impact on the food and beverage industry.
It's not even parody worthy. It's just how our government functions. All the same people shuffle between their noble task of protecting the public good and their "real" careers of making stacks of money by manipulating their thus-earned connections to secure governmental favors for specific private companies, and this is considered no big deal because, let's face it, the kind of people who array themselves around the Pat Robertses of the world are there for the connections and the cash, not because they give a flying damn about how America may or may not function ten years down the line.
You work as a deputy staff director on an important committee so that your resume will say you did, at which point you can collect money by openly bragging to companies that you have an inside line to the people on that committee and the decisions they might make, at which point you gain enough prominence to return to government work in a considerably elevated position, at which point you get to show the corporations that have invested in you that you are indeed influential and that continuing to curry your favor will now be even more worthwhile, at which point you get to leave government for a year or two and charge those companies much, much more for your services because you are a proven asset who not only continues to have the ear of national leaders, but who will in all likelihood be right back in government sometime soon again, at which point just imagine the favors you will be able to do for them the next time around.
And this is perfectly normal because anyone who objects to such a system is not a team player, will not get paid lots of money by those companies, and will be stuck working for the government from then on in, and working for the government long-term is one of those icky things that senators sneer at because then you are just a moocher and a petty functionary and the exact sort of government bureaucrat that your senator and the good people of PepsiCo have come to Washington to do battle against, because you are bad and money freedom is good and the Women, Infants and Children of this great nation will eat whatever the food companies of America damn well tell them to eat, you freedom-hating government nobody.