City to ask voters for aspartame bailout

In Richmond, California, the Wall Street 1% operates with just as few limits as anywhere else in this fine land.

City Council has placed a referendumb on the ballot that would levy a special tax on soft drinks - but would exempt diet sodas that are laden with cancer-causing chemicals like aspartame.

One councilor criticized the proposal as "an elitist tax on poor people" and questioned officials' ongoing practice of calling schoolchildren "fat." But the fact that it is in effect a taxpayer-funded bailout of artificial sweeteners like aspartame is just as bad.

I can pay the penny-per-ounce tax as long as I opt to keep buying sugar-filled liquid candy that has already rotted my teeth. But bailing out makers of poisonous artificial sweeteners is completely unacceptable.

How do we stop this Big Business bailout? If the measure passes, we may have no choice but to destroy the product being bailed out. If it means we have to go to supermarkets and dump it, so be it.