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We are requesting collection for friends and colleagues who are suffering severe conditions through the holidays.

Max is dying of digestive failure because she does not have any income, safe food, or healthcare support despite having worked non-stop on behalf of others for the last several years.

Other colleagues in our network are in similar circumstances. They all deserve relief for the faith they have shown in the life-saving work they have been doing.

If you have any income, if you have a safe place to stay, food to eat... if you have friends or a community that cares for you, please consider putting a few dollars (or more) into this PayPal account.

💸 https://paypal.me/IntuitiveInvisibles

If you'd like to make a recurring contribution, these two Patreon accounts will be updated as soon as someone is strong enough to update them, and in the meantime it will build income streams for those who need (and deserve!) them most.

💸 https://patreon.com/IntuitivePR
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When you are considering how to move through this coldest time of year and holidays that remind us to care for one another, please do not forget about those who have worked to save the lives of others while they are dying themselves.

They can survive and recover, with our help.

Please copy, paste, and pass this message on.

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By what steps do we restore economic independence, media privilege, and professional authority to survivors of severe disability, violence, and sex trafficking?

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Forwarded from 🔊 @DarkMatterMemo • Memos Make Matter • Dark Matter (All-Beings) Sisterhood • RPI •••

https://www.facebook.com/333661528320/posts/10157554842633321/

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There was some pushback in an earlier post against a statement that Black people built much of the US economy and wealth. I am reposting this example of how slavery was extended through convict labor and how white wealth was bought at the cost of black lives: "The blood-drenched history that gave the city of Sugar Land, Tex., its name showed its face earlier this year, when a school construction crew discovered the remains of 95 African-Americans whose unmarked graves date back more than a century. The dead — some of whom may have been born in slavery — are victims of the infamous convict leasing system that arose after Emancipation. Southerners sought to replace slave labor by jailing African-Americans on trumped-up charges and turning them over to, among others, sugar cane plantations in the region once known as the Sugar Bowl of Texas.
...
"Against this backdrop, archaeologists, who are constructing an increasingly detailed portrait of the injuries and illnesses suffered by these inmates, have opened a window onto the murderous nature of sugar cultivation, an industry that earned its reputation as the slaughterhouse of the trans-Atlantic slave trade by killing more people more rapidly than any other kind of agriculture.

"Slaves in the Louisiana sugar cane world lived what the former slave and civil rights activist Frederick Douglass termed a “life of living death.” The average life span of a mill hand was said to be only seven years — a message that circulated widely among enslaved people who feared being sold into bondage in sugar fields.

"The former slave and memoirist Jacob Stroyer wrote in the 19th century that enslaved people saw Louisiana as “a place of slaughter.” When a train lurched out of a South Carolina station carrying slaves to Louisiana, Stroyer wrote, “The colored people cried out with one voice as though the heavens and earth were coming together, and it was so pitiful that those hardhearted white men who had been accustomed to driving slaves all their lives shed tears like children.”

"As the historian Richard Follett shows in his book “The Sugar Masters,” growers were in the vanguard of mechanization, using steam-powered rollers to crush sugar cane into juice that was then boiled and rendered into sugar. Mechanization sped up the tempo across the plantation, making it harder for slaves who cut the cane by hand to keep up with the demands of the mill.

"Taken together, haste and fatigue and lengthening work hours heightened the risk of accident already endemic on the plantations. Unlike cane workers today, who wear heavy, protective clothing, the enslaved workers were vulnerable to being gouged and cut by the lacerating leaves of the plant.

"The fiery boiling house — where the cane was pressed into juice that was then heated and crystallized into the coveted sweetener — had what the writer Adam Hochschild describes as a “satanic ring.” Men and women who were scalded found themselves unable to shed the sticky burning substance that clung to their skins.

"Bone-tired slaves — who fed the cane stalks into the mechanical rollers that pressed them into juice — lost hands or were pulled into the rollers and dismembered. This outcome was common enough that a slave was often stationed nearby with a sword to sever the mill feeder’s arm before she could be pulled to her death in the rollers. The death rates on such plantations were compounded by malnutrition and disease, and were so obscenely high that the ranks of the enslaved needed constant replenishment.

"Mr. Hochschild likens the rusting hulks of the sugar mills that he visited in the Caribbean to the remnants of the Russian gulags where millions of anonymous people were put to death during the Stalinist era. When he came upon the remains of a sugar boiler in Jamaica, he asked himself: “How many slaves were worked to death feeding this boiler? How many had their arms crushed in the rollers of the mill that must have been next to it?”

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Replacement Bodies

"The Texas sugar plantations were profitable because they depended on slave labor. Abolition crushed the industry, but the convict leasing system resurrected it in a form that can legitimately be seen as more pernicious than slavery: Slave masters had at least a nominal interest in keeping alive people whom they owned and in whom they held an economic stake.

"By contrast, when a leased inmate died in the fields, managers who had contracted with the prison system for a specific number of bodies could demand a replacement. Beyond that, as Michael Hardy wrote last year in Texas Monthly, the working conditions on the plantations in Fort Bend County, where the Sugar Land dead were discovered, were “as bad or worse than they had been on the slave plantations. Mosquito-born epidemics, frequent beatings and a lack of medical care resulted in a 3 percent annual mortality rate.”

Others got rich on their suffering.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/27/opinion/sugar-land-texas-graves-slavery.html?fbclid=IwAR2cNAsDx9QJnl9ZdL6h1FaNjlrXVJvEePvT55NBzRuGdQjej6ZMTr18G5M

https://www.facebook.com/333661528320/posts/10157554842633321/

Nytimes

Opinion | A Fate Worse Than Slavery, Unearthed in Sugar Land

Bodies of sugar cane workers recently discovered in Texas reveal gruesome details about the convict leasing system.

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