A list of links to resources that have been recommended to people concerned about recent events in Minneapolis, MN. I don’t know enough about any of these resources to comment on them – just making a list here because they are being suggested by reputable sources.
ATF Launches ICE’s Corporate Collaborators: Exposed Campaign – Americans For Tax Fairness
Noncooperation Library – Freedom Trainers
Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee
This latest VR experience, a short little clip in the life of an unnamed Murtuen refugee, however, felt different.
But for an accident of birth, that little girl could have been me. Her mother even had my mother’s eyes.
For the first time in years, after her youthful idealism had been ground down by the indifference of the world after college, she felt compelled to do something.
Byzantine Empathy, by Ken Liu; published in Solar Punk: Short Stories from Many Futures, edited by Francesco Verso.
To be clear, I made the decision to add the social media portion of this strike just for myself – it’s not an official general strike request.
Resources:
Indivisible
ThePeoplesSickDay.com
What to know about National Shutdown on Jan. 30 in Wisconsin
The General Strike
https://www.advocate.com/politics/general-strike-nationwide-anti-ice#rebelltitem1
The problem of female labor as a “competitive menace” came to Milwaukee in the spring of 1852. At that time, Madame Mathilde Franziska Anneke founded the first woman suffrage paper of the state, Die Frauen Zeitung. Madam Anneke had been offered the use of Moritz Schoeffler’s printshop where the first German daily of the state, the Wisconsin Banner, was published. However, the printers at Schoeffler’s establishment refused to set the type, perhaps because of their opposition to a woman-suffrage paper, but more likely because of Madame Anneke’s advocacy of female compositors.
Early Unions in Milwaukee 1840-1884, by Thomas W. Gavett, Workers and Unions in Wisconsin, A Labor History Anthology, edited by Darryl Holter
Some of our friends in college thought of Jianwen as a Chinese nationalist, but that’s not quite right. She dislikes all empires because to her, they are the ultimate institutions, with deadly concentration of power. She doesn’t think the American empire is any more worthy of support that the Russian one or the Chinese one. As she put it “America is only a democracy for those lucky enough to be Americans. To everybody else, it’s just a dictator with the biggest bombs and missiles.”
She wants the perfection of disintermediated chaos rather than the imperfect stability of flawed institutions that could be perfected.
Byzantine Empathy, by Ken Liu; published in Solar Punk: Short Stories from Many Futures, edited by Francesco Verso.
The first successful strike in Milwaukee was called in September, 1848, by a Ship Carpenters and Caulkers Association at the shipbuilding company of George Barber. The skilled workers demanded improvements in hours and wages, and a restriction on the number of unskilled workers — “barndoor joiners” as the strikers dubbed them — employed…When the agreement was broken, the union members, for the first time in Milwaukee, decided to start a cooperative store and warehouse with $1,200.
Early Unions in Milwaukee 1840-1884, by Thomas W. Gavett, Workers and Unions in Wisconsin, A Labor History Anthology, edited by Darryl Holter
Jianwen despised elitism in all its forms — she was keenly aware of the irony of this, coming from an Ivy-educated financial services technologist with a roomful of top-end VR gear like her. It was one group of elites who decided that democracy wasn’t “right” for her country, and another group of elites who decided that they knew best who deserved sympathy and who didn’t. The elites distrusted feelings, distrusted what made people human.
Byzantine Empathy, by Ken Liu; published in Solar Punk: Short Stories from Many Futures, edited by Francesco Verso.
Tan Jianwen ripped off her headset, gasping. Her hands shook as she unzipped her immersion suit, and she managed to peel it halfway off before her hands lost their strengths. As she curled up on the omnidirectional treadmill, the bruises on her sweat-drenched body glistened dark red in the faint white glow of her computer screen, the only light on in the dark studio apartment. She dry-heaved a few times before breaking into sobs.
Though her eyes were closed, she could still see the grim expressions on the faces of the soldiers, the bloody pulp that had been the mother’s head, the broken little body of the baby, her life trampled out of her.
She had disabled the safety features of the immersion suit and removed the amplitude filters in the algics circuitry. It didn’t seem right to experience the ordeal of the Muertien refugees with pain filters in place.
A VR rig was the ultimate empathy machine. How could she truly say she had walked in their shoes without suffering as they did?
Byzantine Empathy, by Ken Liu; published in Solar Punk: Short Stories from Many Futures, edited by Francesco Verso.
We, the Huron-Wendats, have always been allies of the French, so that was positive; but when I went out West, to British Columbia, well, the story was told quite differently. The English were the allies of the Iroquois, so there, it was the good Iroquois and the bad Hurons! That certainly gave me a different perspective on things. And that is when I realized that history is not always the same from one side to the other and that it all depends on who tells it.
Pierre Martineau, Wendat, Guidance Counselor, Center de developpment de la formation et de la main-d oeuvre Huron-Wendat.
–Quebec Was Born in My Country: A Diary of Encounters Between Indigenous and Quebecois Peoples by Emanuelle Dufour
“Wisconsin’s most historic and bloody labor incident occurred on May 5, 1886 on the shores of Lake Michigan in the Bay View area of Milwaukee. That day dawned after four days of massive worker demonstrations throughout Milwaukee on behalf of the creation of eight-hour day laws.”
Bay View Tragedy 1886, Wisconsin Labor History
“That year, labor organizations nationwide were demanding an eight-hour work day, and they wanted it by May 1. Many Milwaukeeans were working 10-hour days, six days a week for paltry wages, Milwaukee historian John Gurda noted in his book “The Making of Milwaukee.”
“As companies balked at the demand, strikes grew. By May 3, about half of Milwaukee’s men were on strike, Gurda found. They marched through the city, urging more workers to join them. Panicked officials called in militia from across the state after police were unable to “quell the disturbance,” the Milwaukee Journal reported…
“On the morning of May 5, about 1,500 marchers returned to the mill. When they were about 200 yards out, the militia fired. Among the seven dead was a 12-year-old boy.
“The next day, streets were deserted. Local officials conferred about how to prevent “socialistic agitation,” deciding to arrest as many demonstrators as they could, the Journal reported.
“Labor leaders, meanwhile, had public opinion on their side. They turned their focus to winning elections.
“That year, the labor-backed People’s Party of Wisconsin won elections up and down the ballot, with priorities including progressive taxes, child labor restrictions, and arbitration of labor disputes, Gurda wrote. While socialist leaders initially supported that party, they later split and ran their own candidates, launching Milwaukee’s socialist era in 1910.”
The History of the Bay View Massacre and the Rolling Mills plaque, Milwaukee Journal Sentinal, May 2024, by Rory Linane
“The striking workers spent two years building their movement for an eight-hour workday, warning noncompliant businesses that they would call a nationwide strike if they didn’t meet the demand by May 1886…
“”People have always stood up for labor,” Larson said. “That has happened for 50 years. People have been spat on, beat up, punched, shot at for protecting their rights. We’re just part of that.”
“The Senator from Bay View: Chris Larson Fights for Worke Rights in Wisconsin”, We Are Wisconsin, by David Dayen, edited by Erica Sagrans, February 2011