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Dispatches from the Culture Wars - Piketty fencing edition

Billy Frank Jr, fishing rights fighter; Piketty and critics; Demystifying abortion; Lessons from old school labor; Deconstructing the fashion industry

Billy Frank, Jr. (1931 - 2014),http://ravenredbone.wordpress.com/

Billy Frank Jr., 83, Defiant Fighter for Native Fishing Rights

By William Yardley
May 9, 2014
New York Times

The crime was fishing. The year was 1945. The boy was 14. It was his first offense, but it would not be his last. Billy Frank Jr. continued to fish, and he continued to get arrested - more than 50 times over the next decades. He was not out to cause trouble. The goal was to preserve the traditions he had been taught as a member of the Nisqually tribe, people who had fished for millenniums in the waters that flow from the foot of Mount Rainier into Puget Sound in Washington.

For Mr. Frank, who was 83 when he died last Monday at his family's longtime home on the Nisqually River, that arrest at 14 was the beginning of his leading role in what would become known as the "fish wars" in the Pacific Northwest in the 1960s and '70s.

He became one of the most recognizable faces of a unique and successful civil rights movement that included years of highly publicized "fish-ins" (Jane Fonda showed up, as did Marlon Brando, who was briefly taken into custody), protests at the State Capitol in Olympia, confrontations with non-Indian fishermen, and lawsuits waged with the help of the N.A.A.C.P., the American Civil Liberties Union and eventually the Department of Justice.

Studying the Rich: Thomas Piketty and his Critics

By Mike Konczal
April 29, 2014
Boston Review

It is easy to overlook the achievement of Thomas Piketty's new bestseller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, as a work of economic history. Debates about the book have largely focused on inequality. But Capital reflects decades of work in collecting national income data across centuries, countries, and class, done in partnership with academics across the globe. Beyond its remarkably rich and instructive history, the book's deep and novel understanding of inequality in the economy has drawn well-deserved attention and criticism. By understanding the initial debate over the book, we can examine what is at stake in how Capital is understood.


This Woman Filmed Her Abortion to Show Other People it doesn't Have to be Scary

By Tara Culp-Ressler
May 5, 2014
Think Progress

Emily Letts, a 25-year-old abortion counselor at a clinic in New Jersey, knew that she wanted to use her own abortion story to help other woman making their own decisions about whether to end a pregnancy.

In an essay published on Cosmopolitan.com, Letts explains that she decided to film her procedure after trying and failing to find a video of a surgical abortion online. She decided that she wanted to have a surgical procedure - the option that seems scarier to many women - to help educate people about what it's actually like.

The few representations of abortion on film are fictional, and they tend to portray it extremely negatively. A recent review of the fictional abortion storylines in TV shows and movies found that the procedure is typically depicted as far more dangerous than it actually is. Ultimately, pop culture helps further the myth that abortion is always dangerous, dramatic, and violent.

So Letts set out to offer a different narrative with her own story. "I feel good. I'm done," she says after it's over. Abortions can certainly inspire a complicated mix of emotions, including negative emotions like grief and guilt. But the most common emotion women report is relief.


The Next Big Idea for Workers Will Come From the Old School Labor Movement

By Sara Horowitz
May 1, 2014
Fast Company

The new economy is drastically changing today's workforce--and vice versa. Freelancers everywhere are looking for an independent way to work and a healthier way to live. They value time, well-being, and community as much as a paycheck, and they want their consumption to match their ideals. But where are the institutions that support this new way of living and working? Social purpose institutions built by and for freelancers are popping up across the country to help independent workers live a 360 life  -- where work and life and passion are all equally important. Like the new workforce itself, many of these institutions are new--but the idea goes back a century to something called "social unionism." The concept of social unionism--the idea that worker-backed institutions can generate revenue and community value--is making a serious comeback. Independent workers are building the economy of the future, where fair work and a full life are combined.

Taking On the Fashion Industry

By David L. Wilson
April 2014 issue
Monthly Review

Review: Tansy E. Hoskins. Stitched Up: The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion. Pluto Press, 2014. 254 pages.

To say that Tansy E. Hoskins' Stitched Up deconstructs the garment industry would be a misrepresentation. What the British activist and journalist does is more like a controlled demolition, using facts and footnotes to strip away the apparel trade's decorative exterior and then to dynamite the foundations.

Hoskins' polemic begins with the title. In British usage "to stitch up" is "to swindle, to overcharge exorbitantly," according to the Oxford English Dictionary, and Hoskins' goal is to show the many ways that fashion swindles us all. Through its own media outlets and its billions of dollars in advertising, the industry creates a glittery illusion of beauty and sophistication. The reality is a $1.5 trillion industry as grimy and profit-driven as any, and the glossy pages of Vogue conceal a record of human and environmental damage we might expect from coal mining or oil drilling.

The media tend to depict garment workers simply as victims, but as Hoskins points out, for more than a century "predominantly female garment workers" have led "some of the bitterest and hardest fought battles of the international labor movement." Workers in places like Haiti and Bangladesh need our solidarity far more than our sympathy. In recent years consumers from the Global North have helped win meaningful changes in the garment industry, but this has happened only when they acted in collective, organized campaigns coordinated with the workers in the Global South.

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