Former President Clinton has been in the news a lot lately. Not only has he been in partnership with the former President Bush in The Bush Clinton Katrina Fund, but there are a few other Clinton-named organizations, which I now see are actually programs within his larger Clinton Foundation.
The Clinton Global Initiative seems to be a program to watch. As communicated on a recent Larry King Live program, the goals include:
So what we’re trying to do is to mobilize the energies of people without regard to their politics; to try to meet these big challenges; to help more people join the global economy by empowering them to work their way out of poverty; to help more people combat climate change in a way that grows the economy, not shrinks it; to deal with the major health challenges of our time; and then to explicitly confront these kind of religious, racial and ethnic conflicts that are exploited by people all around the world for their own gain.
And more recently in the news there is the more controversial agreement to limit the amount of junk food in our schools, which was the product of work by the Alliance for a Healthier Generation, a project of the William J. Clinton Foundation and the American Heart Association.
This follows a similar agreement reached with beverage industry leaders to sell only water, unsweetened juice and low-fat and nonfat milk in elementary and middle schools back in May.
Unfortunately, in my opinion, money seems to be the driver of both the problem and the solution especially as evidenced by the following quote about the problem itself:
“The problem the group is attacking is one that was born in the mid-1980s, when money-strapped schools across the country began opening their doors to private vendors, and offering a wider variety of foods — letting many millions of students sate their hunger and thirst with chips and soda, rather than what was on the school lunch menu.”
