Andre Gonsalves orospntdSeAmtmhbh7 0Mt01a:5e8g8mmuefluc228hr7h0c mth0D3 441 e · The most effective marketing campaign in history was launched in 1676. The product was Racism. Before that year, the Elites in America had a massive problem. In the colony of Virginia, poor white indentured servants and black slaves were friends. They worked the same fields. They lived in the same shacks. They even married each other. They realized they had the same enemy: The rich plantation owners. So, they united. Led by a man named Nathaniel Bacon, this mixed army of black and white workers marched on the capital and burned Jamestown to the ground. The Elites were terrified. They looked at the math and realized: "If the poor unite, we are finished." So they went to work. They needed to make sure these two groups would never shake hands again. They passed the Virginia Slave Codes. They didn't give the poor whites land. They didn't give them money. They gave them something more powerful: Status. They gave the poor whites the legal right to police the slaves. They invented a "Social Wage." They told the poor white man: "You may be starving, you may be broke, but at least you aren't one of Them." It worked. The poor whites stopped fighting the rich. They started guarding the rich. They accepted their poverty because they had been given a false sense of superiority. The "Divide and Rule" algorithm was born. 350 years later, the campaign is still running. The Elite are still terrified of Unity. So they feed us "Culture Wars." They highlight our differences. They forces us to pick a tribe based on skin color, gender, or politics. Why? Because if you are busy fighting your neighbor on Facebook, you won't notice who is robbing your bank account. Racism is not just hate. It is Insurance for the Ruling Class. If you hate people based on their demographics, you are not a Rebel. You are an unpaid security guard for the Elites. - Andre

Today in Labor History December 29, 1939: Madeleine Pelletier died. She was a first wave feminist, psychiatrist, and anarchist. During her lifetime, she advocated for the right to sexual pleasure for women, and access to contraception and abortion. In July 1906, she and other suffragists, including Caroline Kauffmann, invaded the French Chamber of Deputies and rained down from the gallery pink slips of paper containing an appeal for the right to vote. She was the first woman in France to receive a degree in Psychiatry. She was a member of the French Section of the Workers' International. She became hemiplegic in 1937 due to a stroke. Nevertheless, she was still found guilty of assisting an abortion on a teenage survivor of incest, in 1939, despite being physically incapable of assisting in the actual procedure, and was forced to spend the rest of her life in a mental asylum, where she died of a second stroke. #workingclass #LaborHistory #feminism #birthcontrol #abortion #choice #anarchism #psychiatry #MadeleinePelletier

Today in Labor History December 29, 1970: President Nixon signed the Occupational Safety and Health Act into law. Ever since, successive administrations have whittled away at the efficacy of this agency, which was designed to protect workers. Nevertheless, a study in 2012, published in the journal “Science,” found a 9.4% reduction in workplace injuries and a 26% reduction in the cost of workplace injuries since 1970. They also found that these reductions came at no additional cost to business or consumers. A 2020 study by the “American Economic Review” found that President Obama’s press releases that named and shamed companies that were violating OSHA had the same effect on improving compliance by other companies as having 210 inspections. It makes one wonder how many fewer workplace deaths and injuries would occur with an increase in inspections and penalties, on top of naming and shaming. In 2022, there were 5,486 fatal workplace injuries in the U.S., a 5.7 % increase from 2021, a rate of 3.7 deaths per 100,000 full-time equivalent workers. There was a slight drop in 2023 and a significant drop in 2024. However, the data for 2024 would have been released in 2025, by the Trump administration, which has gutted OSHA and the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the actual number of deaths could be significantly higher. #workingclass #LaborHistory #osha #WorkplaceSafety #WorkplaceDeaths #nixon #obama #trump

Today in Labor History December 29, 1937: The Irish Free State adopted a new constitution making it the modern independent Republic of Ireland. The Irish Free State was created on December 6, 1922 under the Anglo-Irish Treaty after the Irish War of Independence. It was a nominally autonomous part of the British Commonwealth. However, its representatives still had to swear an oath to the king of England. Consequently, many of its elected leaders never took their seats in office. #workingclass #LaborHistory #ireland #republican #irish #colonialism #independence

Today in Labor History December 29, 1890: U.S. Army troops slaughtered 300 Sioux men, women and children in the Wounded Knee Massacre on Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, South Dakota. Two weeks earlier, they had killed Sitting Bull for failing to stop the Ghost Dance. The people living in Sitting Bull’s camp fled to the Pine Ridge Reservation, where the U.S. Army caught up to them on December 29. They began disarming the Lakota warriors. However, Black Coyote didn’t want to give up his rifle, because he had paid a lot for it. When his rifle went off in the struggle, the U.S. Army began shooting indiscriminately at the mostly unarmed Lakota. In addition to the 300 Lakota who died, 25 U.S. soldiers also died. And 20 soldiers were given the Medal of Honor. L. Frank Baum, author of “Wizard of Oz,” was a newspaper editor at the time. He wrote, “Having wronged them for centuries, we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth. In this lies future safety for our settlers and the soldiers who are under incompetent commands.” Sound similar to some of the current quotes coming from Israeli and U.S. politicians with regards to Palestine? Or MAGA fascists with regards to immigrants and trans folk? And then there was General Martinez, who launched the 1932 genocide against El Salvador’s indigenous people, and against it’s communists and union activists, who said that the U.S. was great because it had wiped out its indigenous population, and for El Salvador to become great, it must do so, too. #workingclass #LaborHistory #WoundedKnee #indigenous #genocide #lakota #treaty #nativeamerican #sioux #ghostdance #indigenousrights #palestine #israel #FreePalestine #EndTheOccupation #EndThesiege #israel #communism #elsalvador

Today in Labor History December 29, 1835: The U.S signed the Treaty of New Echota with a minority Cherokee faction. The treaty gave all the Cherokee lands east of the Mississippi River to the U.S. However, the treaty was never approved by the Cherokee National Council nor signed by Principal Chief John Ross. Nevertheless, it was ratified in March 1836 and became the legal basis for the forcible removal known as the Trail of Tears, which killed 4000-6000 indigenous men, women and children. #workingclass #LaborHistory #TrailOfTears #indigenous #genocide #cherokee #treaty #nativeamerican #indigenousrights