Girl On The Run

Melissa Harris-Perry and Karen Finney (paraphrased), commenting on a recent New York Times editorial wherein black farmers were all but vilified as ‘lazy takers’ who gamed the system —for winning an historic discrimination lawsuit against the USDA: Pigford v. Glickman (via odinsblog)

So true. In fact, the entire capitalist system — all banking, all corporate operations, all military industry — is built on and based upon government assistance; or rather, much more than “assistance”, more like extreme government largesse by granting public funds from taxes and public resources to private interests.

Private banking relies entirely on credit, loans, underwriting, insurance, and political-military protection from the government. All corporate merchandise in the USA is moved and distributed on highways and roads built and maintained using public money. The telecom companies sell you mobile phone service using radio spectrum which belongs to the public and is granted to them by the government. Agribusiness is well-known to be subsidized. Big pharma relies on publicly funded research to isolate its private profit makers. There are no major areas of corporate America which are not entirely reliant on government assistance. And that’s not even getting into corporate tax breaks.

Yet god forbid Black people get any benefit from the government whatsoever, amounting in total to the tiniest trickle in relation to the government largesse extended to corporate America. Suddenly that is seen, within the prevailing racist US political discourse, as a burden upon society and sign of an imaginary racial pathology of laziness and dependency. Good one, white America.

(via zuky)

(Source: nbcnews.com, via thinkimkindagay)

(Source: sadandcruel, via therealspiderman)