Assemblyman Bill Monning Tries to Wean Kids from Soft Drinks and Food Trucks

California State Assemblyman Bill Monning brought a prop to Java Junction last Saturday where he met with constituents:  a 50 ounce soda container he bought in King City that can be refilled for free. The AM/PM store employee assured him that this promotion was very popular and had people coming in all day for refills.

“50 fluid ounces of soda contains 40 teaspoons of sugar and zero nutrition," he said at a community meeting in Santa Cruz Saturday.  "These beverages are the leading source of caloric intake in children, and the leading public health threat in our state today is childhood obesity, leading to preventable diabetes, stroke, tooth decay and more. The purveyors of these soda drinks, who are targeting teenagers, are doing the same thing the tobacco industry did.”

According to Monning, the CEO of Coca-Cola said that they will double revenues by 2020.  The executive reported that the way that they are going to do that is to target kids because every six years the company has a new cohort of teenagers to sell to.  

How will Coca-Cola do that? The CEO said they would get to teens through music.

"They paid all the costs for Maroon 5 to go into a studio and the song had to promote the consumption of Coca-Cola," the Carmel Democrat said with contempt. "If you want to talk about social engineering, they are spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year and we’re going to be shouldered with the medical costs.”

Monning added that the youths most marketed to were minorities.

“The most at risk population is Latino kids. Thirty percent of Latino kids will have preventable diabetes by the time they’re 30 and 50 percent by the age of 50.”

The Assemblyman said that he had proposed a bill to put a one cent excise tax on sugar-sweetened beverages, but it failed because of the inability to get a two-thirds vote.

“It would have gone into a children’s health promotion fund which would have generated $1.7 billion, going to schools to promote health and wellness and physical education.”

Monning was derided and called a part of “nanny government”
by Republicans in the Assembly. His bill is in “suspended animation” now.

Up against multinational conglomerates, he predicts that “when we see this stuff being peddled and they give the soda for free and people refill them in this AM/PM, you can take that transaction and multiply forward 15 years and those people will be fully dependent on medical management for their adult life.”

Last week the Assemblyman introduced another controversial bill that seeks to keep vending trucks, which he says sell high-sugar drinks and fatty foods, away from California elementary and secondary schools.

The sponsor of the bill, California Food Policy Advocates (http://cfpa.net/), believes the legislation will “help create environments that foster student wellness and, by extension, academic success.”

Monning wants the trucks to be at least 1,500 feet away from school grounds.

Monning quotes on other topics:

The Budget Crisis:

“We’re one of the few states that require a two-thirds vote. If you look up democracy in the dictionary, it says majority rules. We’ve ceded enormous power to the minority party. You can’t negotiate
compromise if a party won’t negotiate. My proposal is that we give Republicans some electrical tape, so they can tape down their “No” buttons at their desks and they could stay home and we wouldn’t have to pay them because the vote would already be recorded.”

Citizens United (PAC funding):

“It tells us that the more money you have, the louder your voice will be. That suppresses the true implementation of the First Amendment. Someone said, perhaps it was Colbert, that he would believe in corporate personhood when Texas executes a corporation.”

High Speed Rail:

“The Governor cites the consequences of the alternative: If we don’t pursue high-speed rail, we will have to widen highways,
extend airport runways, and we’ll become more dependent on fossil fuels which will cost our state more. I think those ideas warrant a good look. The voters voted on it in 2008 before we knew how the financial collapse would affect California. We can resend it to the legislature but we will need a two-thirds vote and I don’t think there would be the votes to pass it.”

California health care:

“Our health care system is broken. We don’t have a healthcare system; it’s an insurance system.”