Trump wants to pay farmers $12Billion to watch their crops rot.
Trump is creating welfare for farmers.
Let me make this very clear: the people who will benefit from this are not the nice family that sells beets and greens at the Wednesday afternoon farmer’s market. These are not small family operations, these are not local area or subsistence farms.
These are corporate monstrosities.
Until you’ve seen a field that stretches on for twenty minutes down the highway of dead, unharvested corn that takes until almost the new year to finally rot off, it can be hard to separate the concept of corporate farming from the notion of the down-home American farmer. If you, like me, grew up in a rural area where you and everyone you knew was a subsistence farmer, it can be hard to recognize the scale, damage, and genuine monstrousness of corporate farming.
And indeed, even the people who plant corporate crops and till corporate fields- the actual farmers– will not be the ones who see benefit from this.
The companies that own those people will be the ones to see these benefits, and they will no more share them with the folks doing the tilling than they will with you or me.
The use of “farmer aid” and the idea of the farmer is a blatant political ploy to present an already generally poor and financially unstable group of people as being “rightfully” helped by these expenditures, while straight up pouring money into some of the largest corporations in the country.
Let me also clarify, because someone will point this out, yes, the vast bulk (around 90%) of farm land in the US is “family owned.” However, only corporations tend to see this aid, and most of the reason farms aren’t directly owned by corporations (rather they are “organized” by coroporations), is so that if there’s a horrible price flip- such as say by the fucking President completely screwing international trade in farm commodities like soy- the farmers get fucked and the Ag Corps have no risk or losses to speak of.
Reblogging because this last comment really nails it. I grew up in an agriculture city (a small city but definitely a city). Farmers and orchardists owned thd land but got the bulk of their income from the corporations they sell to. Its the corporations that sell to other countries. Wit the tariffs so high, those countries aren’t buying, which means the corporations aren’t going to buy. Which means the farmers lose their income, and so do the people who work the fields and orchards. And so do the people that work in the processing plants (where fresh corps are sorted and packaged for selling) of those corporations because not buying crops means not processing them either, and they won’t see a dime of that.subsidy money either because it will al go to paying the salaries of the top tier of those corporations.
For those of you playing at home, this is yet another way in which Trump is taking money from the poor and middle class to give to his friends in the 1%. Straight up.
Help a sister out if you can! Tschan Andrews is a black british trans model/activist who just lost her job because a hating ass cisgender girl outed her in public. It’s very convenient to label transphobia as just a cisgender male problem when cisgender women are never held accountable for violence against trans women. Please donate if you can!
In 1969, a group of children sat down to a free breakfast
before school. On the menu: chocolate milk, eggs, meat, cereal and fresh
oranges. The scene wouldn’t be out of place in a school cafeteria these
days—but the federal government wasn’t providing the food. Instead,
breakfast was served thanks to the Black Panther Party.
At the time, the militant black nationalist party was
vilified in the news media and feared by those intimidated by its
message of black power and its commitment to ending police brutality and
the subjugation of black Americans. But for students eating breakfast,
the Black Panthers’ politics were less interesting than the meals they
were providing.
“The children, many of whom had never eaten breakfast before the Panthers started their program,” the Sun Reporterwrote, “think the Panthers are ‘groovy’ and ‘very nice’ for doing this for them.”
The program may have been groovy, but its purpose was to
fuel revolution by encouraging black people’s survival. From 1969
through the early 1970s, the Black Panthers’ Free Breakfast for School
Children Program fed tens of thousands of hungry kids. It was just one
facet of a wealth of social programs created by the party—and it helped
contribute to the existence of federal free breakfast programs today.
When Black Panther Party founders Huey P. Newton and Bobby
Seale founded the party in 1966, their goal was to end police brutality
in Oakland. But a faction of the Civil Rights Movement led by SNCC
member Stokeley Carmichael began calling for the uplift and
self-determination of African-Americans, and soon black power was part
of their platform.
At first, the Black Panther Party primarily organized
neighborhood police patrols that took advantage of open-carry laws, but
over time its mandate expanded to include social programs, too.
Free Breakfast For School Children was one of the most
effective. It began in January 1969 at an Episcopal church in Oakland,
and within weeks it went from feeding a handful of kids to hundreds. The
program was simple: party members and volunteers went to local grocery
stores to solicit donations, consulted with nutritionists on healthful
breakfast options for children, and prepared and served the food free of
charge.
School officials immediately reported results in kids who
had free breakfast before school. “The school principal came down and
told us how different the children were,” Ruth Beckford, a parishioner
who helped with the program, said later. “They weren’t falling asleep in class, they weren’t crying with stomach cramps.”
Soon, the program had been embraced by party outposts
nationwide. At its peak, the Black Panther Party fed thousands of
children per day in at least 45 programs. (Food wasn’t the only part of
the BPP’s social programs; they expanded to cover everything from free medical clinics to community ambulance services and legal clinics.)
For the party, it was an opportunity to counter its
increasingly negative image in the public consciousness—an image of
intimidating Afroed black men holding guns—while addressing a critical
community need. “I mean, nobody can argue with free grits,” said
filmmaker Roger Guenveur Smith in A Huey P. Newton Story, a 2001 film in which he portrays Newton.
Free food seemed relatively innocuous, but not to FBI head
J. Edgar Hoover, who loathed the Black Panther Party and declared war
against them in 1969. He called
the program “potentially the greatest threat to efforts by authorities
to neutralize the BPP and destroy what it stands for,” and gave carte
blanche to law enforcement to destroy it.
The results were swift and devastating. FBI agents went
door-to-door in cities like Richmond, Virginia, telling parents that BPP
members would teach their children racism. In San Francisco, writes
historian Franziska Meister, parents were told the food was infected
with venereal disease; sites in Oakland and Baltimore were raided by
officers who harassed BPP members in front of terrified children, and
participating children were photographed by Chicago police.
“The night before [the first breakfast program in Chicago] was supposed to open,” a female Panther told historian Nik Heynan, “the Chicago police broke into the church and mashed up all the food and urinated on it.”
Ultimately, these and other efforts to destroy the Black
Panthers broke up the program. In the end, though, the public visibility
of the Panthers’ breakfast programs put pressure on political leaders
to feed children before school. The result of thousands of American
children becoming accustomed to free breakfast, former party member
Norma Amour Mtume toldEater, was the government expanded its own school food programs.
Though the USDA had piloted free breakfast efforts
since the mid 1960s, the program only took off in the early 1970s—right
around the time the Black Panthers’ programs were dismantled. In 1975,
the School Breakfast Program was permanently authorized. Today, it
helps feed over 14.57 million children before school—and without the radical actions of the Black Panthers, it may never have happened.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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