Category Archives: Wage Slavery

The verb revive means to restore to life or consciousness or to regain life or strength. The first-ever Revive Fashion Show on Oct. 6 did exactly that.

Hosted and sponsored by Fair Indigo, an ethical and sustainable clothing company based in Madison, all of the proceeds from the show benefit the Dressember Foundation.

Dressember, a non-profit organization founded by Blythe Hill, provides education, life skills, training, medical treatment and aftercare to the survivors of human trafficking. Hill initially started to hear about human trafficking in 2005 when she learned that slavery continues to exist in every city in the world, including all fifty states.

UW professor applies research on sex, human trafficking to help local victimsThe University of Wisconsin Campus Womens Center hosted UW gender and womens studies professor Araceli Alonso Thursday to discuss her Read

According to the foundation, approximately 35 million people are currently confined to slavery, 70% of them being women. This is becoming the worlds fastest-growing criminal industry and its flourishing. Because of what we know as fast fashion in the clothing industry, society is purchasing 400% more clothing today than we did 20 years ago.

Not only this, but the workers making these clothes earn just 1-3% of the retail price of an item. Statistics such as these are what inspired the Revive fashion show to come to fruition.

We at Fair Indigo really realized how Dressember and Fair Indigo have been combating this issue separately and in different ways for years, Stacy Imhoff, a co-organizer for the Revive Fashion Show, said. We thought it was a great opportunity to get our two like-minded organizations together to bring more awareness to the issue of ethical and fair trade fashion.

As a graduate of the University of Wisconsins textile and apparel design program, Imhoff approached other women who had also graduated from the program in addition to harmonious brands and businesses within the community. The event had a mix of different brands, vendors and models participating, all of which were proponents of ethical fashion.

Spring fashion trends that wont break the bankIm going to be honest, feeding my bubble tea and customizable salad addictions costs more money than I am willing Read

At this family-friendly event, vendors were eager to educate the public about the benefits of this cause.

A pop-up market before the show featured handmade ethical goods from makers and brands around the area, where a portion of the proceeds would go towards the Dressember Foundation.

Here, guests of the event were immediately engrossed in an environment full of passion and enthusiasm to inform individuals about the cornerstone of Fair Indigo and Dressember: ethical fashion.

Ethical fashion the exact opposite of slave labor that is employed to make cheap fast-fashion clothing is what Fair Indigo is all about, Imhoff said. We pay the people who make our clothes a fair, living wage and ensure they have clean and safe working conditions and are treated with respect.

These brands intend to stray away from the expectation of inexpensive and disposable clothing, which causes a high demand for cheap labor.

[Cheaply made clothing] also results in more waste more clothes are thrown away or donated to second-hand shops that are then exported to other countries for resale or disposal. If we can find a way to reuse what we already have, there is less demand for cheap labor. Plus its just generally better for our environment too, Imhoff said.

One stand at the market was home to Lev Apparel company where founder Krystle Marks said she employs women from New Delhi, India at a fair living wage to make clothing. This pulls the women out of poverty while empowering them to contribute to a product with a purpose.

Lack of women in entrepreneurship hurts businesses, start-ups, panel of female entrepreneurs sayLocal female entrepreneurs shared their experience and expertise in a panel Thursday night. The panel, hosted by University of Wisconsin Read

Following the pop-up market, guests gathered around the runway to witness models dressed in unique, fashion-forward, recycled garments. Models wore pieces made of everything ranging from neckties to mens collared shirts to old tablecloths.

Fabric that was otherwise deemed unwearable was converted into hand-painted art. The oohs and ahs were audible as each piece was presented and smiles lit up the room.

We at Fair Indigo see this as a community-building event to bring like-minded organizations and people together around a common goal, Imhoff said in response to her hopes for the fundraiser. Its been a really fun event to organize and see how excited people are to participate.

What started as a style challenge for a college student in need of a creative outlet ultimately became a global campaign stretching across over 115,000 supporters, 45 countries and six continents and continues to grow. As the Dressember Foundation website says, Dressember is more than a dress.

Join thousands of advocates around the world by wearing a dress or tie every day this December as a symbol of liberty and empowerment to declare inherent dignity for all people, a line from one of the videos played during the fashion show.

According to a video from Dressember at the fashion show, For one month, with a dress as our flag, we will carve a path to a better future for women everywhere.

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Revive Fashion Show combats human trafficking, fast-fashion - UW Badger Herald

Theres a very good reason you couldnt get your Katsu curry last week

Last week, around 80 Deliveroo riders refused to take orders from Wagamama on the Triangle and at Cabot, amid concerns about pay.

According to the organiser of the strike, Joseph Nunes, 43, riders can wait up to 25 minutes in a Wagamama restaurant while they prepare the food.

The wasted (and unpaid) time means that riders can do significantly fewer trips.

We all dread the waiting time at Wagamama. Its not fair on the riders. Nunes told The Bristol Post.

While the minimum wage for an over-25 is 8.21, Nunes claims to make 6 per hour when you factor in petrol costs, moped maintenance and insurance. He described his working conditions as similar to slavery.

The strike occurred on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday of last week, following a 100-strong strike concerning pay that occurred on 21st of September.

A spokesperson for Deliveroo said: Deliveroo works closely with our restaurant partners and the riders we work with to make sure we have an efficient and reliable service.

Deliveroo has recently made changes to rider fees so riders are paid more for longer distance deliveries and wait times at restaurants are taken into consideration when calculating how much riders are paid.

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Deliveroo riders boycott Wagamama amid pay concerns - The Tab

KENNETT SQUAREEvery product has a maker, and every maker has a story, says Clean Slate Goods owner Kari Matthews.

Shes passionate about carrying beautiful, handmade goods that her customers will love and that also create jobs for artisans in vulnerable circumstances. As shes learned more about communities of designers and makers around the world, shes heard many stories and been inspired by the amazing transformation that happens when people have dignified work and earn a fair, livable wage.

Clean Slate Goods opened last year, tucked into its cozy spot around the corner from State Street on North Union.

I was happy and comfortable there, Kari says, and the last thing on my mind was a move. But when the landlord mentioned that the larger, centrally located location where the landmark State and Union had been was becoming available, she said, Im not interestedtell me about the space. She smiles. But the doors continued to open, and although I couldnt quite imagine another renovation so soon after the last one, it became clear that Id regret it if I didnt take the opportunity.

After a chaotic month of renovation and a nail-biting, down-to-the-wire photo finish, she opened on August 1st. She couldnt have done it without help from her husband, staff, small group Bible study members, friends in the Kennett community, and my mom, who was here every day, she says. Now the bright, beautifully renovated shop is the newest addition to State Streets vibrant shopping scene.

Kari has refined her vision for Clean Slate Goods over the past year. Im a little more maker-focused, she says. I make sure that every brand I carry is helping artisans who lack opportunity for dignified jobs. Staying true to such a mission entails challenges.

There are so many for-good brands, she says. Personally, I want to help every good cause out therefrom planting trees and cleaning up the oceans to supporting local artisans. But she knows if she tries to save everyone she wont help anyone. Its cool how God puts different passions on different peoples hearts so we as individuals dont have to do it all, she says. Instead, we work together as a community.

Kari lives in West Chester with her husband Jason, who describes himself as a soccer dad, and their three sons. The shop, she says with a smile, gives her girl time. Shes found a caring community here in Kennett Square and the perfect home for Clean Slate Goods. Kennett Square is beyond cool, she says.

Part of what fuels Karis passion for the artisans whose work she carries is her own experience as a maker. I know what goes into creating handmade goods, she says, and I also know how difficult and important it is to find the right marketplace for them.

Clean Slate Goods began in 2014 as Clean Slate Designs, as Kari created home dcor pieces from reclaimed wood and sold her products at local vendor shows. As her knowledge of, and appreciation for, handmade goods grew, she also began to learn more about companies around the world that were training individuals in marginalized communities and providing them with sustainable employment.

She partnered with some of these companies to sell their goods alongside her own work at shows and on her website. Her growing desire to be able to do good and make a lasting difference for these artisans developed into Clean Slate Goods.

The cohesive aesthetic of the store is also critical. Pity sales only go so far, Kari says. In order for this market to be sustainable for the makers, they have to create goods that are high quality and that people want to buy. Often designers work with artisans to help them create product lines that are on trend.

These two piecescreating jobs that pay fair wages as well as a high design aesthetic and qualityare my equation for accepting a brand, Kari says. Customers often come to Clean Slate to find the perfect, one-of-kind giftsomething they know the recipient will actually love.

She carries such a great variety of unique products at affordable price points that people can find a great gift, with a story behind it, for anyone on their list. Its almost a two-for-one gift, she says, because buying a handmade product truly impacts the life of the person who made it.

Supporting these artisans is a step beyond charity. When people in vulnerable communities receive a fair wage, theyre able to bring themselves and their families out of crushing circumstances including poverty, addiction, incarceration, and prostitution. The point is not to make us feel good about ourselves because were helping the poor; the point is to be conscious of the makers behind the products we buy and give them the diginity they deserve, Kari says. Talent is evenly distributedopportunity is not.

She enjoys highlighting the makers behind the products and sharing their amazing stories. And, she says, as we buy their products we can be part of their stories too. One of the new brands shes carrying, Haiti Design Co., employs over 150 people and also helps to provide resources including healthcare and artisan entrepreneur training and mentorship so people can start their own businesses.

Their products, including leather goods and beaded earrings, marry design with purpose. We can tend to be more reactive in the aid we give to vulnerable communities, Kari says, but staying in a place and figuring out how to help create sustainability in that context is hard work. There are many different and inspiring models for creating this sustainability. Instead of operating their own factories, for example, ABLE supports people in Ethiopia who already have factories by working with them. Causegear is yet another brand for good, and purchasing one of their beautiful and fashionable bags helps support and free women in South Asia from slavery and poverty.

Bags are our bread and butter, Kari says, and currently Clean Slate carries ten different brands of one-of-a-kind bags. She also carries a wide range of jewelry as well as soap, candles, beauty products, home accessories, toys, and more. In her new, expanded space shes looking forward to adding a few key staple pieces of clothing made by artisans. A selection of fun and heartfelt handmade cards for every occasion makes Clean Slate Goods a one-stop-shop for gift giving.

Kari also wants Clean Slate Goods to be a place where people from the community can gather and be creative together, and she hopes to offer a creative workshop every month. After her Oct. 3 chocolate tasting with Estelle Tracy, plans are in the works for succulent and Christmas ornament workshops. Sign up for the Clean Slate Goods newsletter at CleanSlateGoods.com and follow her @cleanslategoods

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After a year in Kennett Square, this business gets a 'Clean Slate' - southern chester county weeklies

Some farms and plantations that supply UK supermarket giants are being linked to poor pay and harsh working conditions, according to new research by charity Oxfams global Behind the Barcodes campaign.

The research found that workers in India, Brazil and five other countries are being exploited during the production of tea or fruit for import to retailers including Lidl, Aldi, Sainsburys, Tesco and Morrisons.

Interviews with workers across 50 tea plantations in Assam found that a lack of access to toilets and safe drinking water spreads typhoid and cholera among workers. Wages are also low, with women workers being the lowest paid when doing labour-intensive jobs, causing them to be on ration cards from the government.

The supermarkets confirmed they source their own brand tea from the companies visited in Oxfams research, with Lidl confirming they source their tea from the Assam region. The supermarkets also take the largest share of the price of the tea bought by consumers, with workers collectively receiving 3p of the 79p pence paid by consumers.

Oxfam ethical trade manager Rachel Wilshaw said: Despite some pockets of good practice, supermarkets relentless pursuit of profits continues to fuel poverty and human rights abuses in their supply chains. Supermarkets must do more to end exploitation, pay all their workers a living wage, ensure women get a fair deal and be more transparent about where they source their products.

Supermarkets are snapping up the lions share of the price we pay at the till but the workers who toil for hours to harvest tea and fruit face inhumane working conditions and are paid so little they cant even feed their families.

Dun & Bradstreet head of product and strategy Chris Laws said: With more than 40 million people living in some form of modern slavery in the world today, this problem requires a global situation which has NGOs, governments and businesses working together. Oxfams research has shone a spotlight on how this problem allegedly extends to some of the biggest retailers in the UK through their supply chains and the call for more supply chain transparency to identify and address risks has never been louder.

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Research links UK supermarkets to abuse of farm and plantation workers - Retail Insight Network

People in the audience hold up signs as President Donald Trump speaks at the Pennsylvania Farm Show Complex in Harrisburg, Pa., April, 29, 2017. Some academics are beginning to seriously study the fascination some white Americans have with "Trump's fascist rhetoric," and how, in the face of intensifying exploitation, they are looking to Trump "the boss" to save them. | Carolyn Kaster / AP

Idiomatic expressions by their nature are difficult to pin down. They point to intended meaning but depend mostly on the hearer or reader to construct a definition from context. But meanings arent arbitrary, and they depend on the contested and conflicted sociality of language.

This linguistic dynamic holds for the expression heart of America. That idiom is in the subtitle of a new book by sociologist Jennifer M. Silva, titled, Were Still Here: Pain and Politics in the Heart of America. The books goal is to explain the puzzle of working-class politics, or why the working-class, in part, seems to support the authoritarian philosophy of the Trump administration.

Consider: The heart of America implies something definable and knowable about the two objects presented in the phrase. America seems obvious. It refers to a place, a country, usually by the political name of the United States of America.

But, many critical voices challenge this conflation of America with the U.S., pointing instead to its contested history, replete with genocide, slavery, brutal war, class exploitation, and imperialism. What Mexican-American author Jos Ordua calls, in his book The Weight of Shadows, our foundational violence. Foundational in the sense that it is continuously the starting point, repeatedly, for constructing Americanness in a particular way.

The U.S. Constitution supposedly created a democratic, representative, and liberal set of freedoms. The framers, however, crafted many of its provisions to defend slavery and genocide, as historian Gerald Horne writes in his books The Counterrevolution of 1776 and The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism. These atrocities had become imperatives for capitalist development and territorial expansion.

While some people usually regard the political system as a democratic one, it is also accurately characterized as corrupt and dominated by the 1%. (Although saying that can earn one the label of being unpatriotic). Americas economic system is called a free market. But it is defined by worker exploitation, oligarchy, environmental waste, racist and gendered income and wealth inequalities, and corrupt, inefficient corporations that control most political processes.

America furthermore means more than the United States. A name derived from its colonialist history, America may refer to the entire Western Hemisphere and its peoples. The narrowest usage of the term America typically betrays willful indifference to the existence, histories, and cultures of most inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere, including the descendants of the indigenous, enslaved people, and migrants. The political and economic interests of corporations whose power emanates from the U.S. and the comprador classes govern many Western Hemispheric countries.

At bottom, America is a place saturated with contradiction. A never-perfected (dis)union of geographies, cultures, peoples, and social classes; lands of white colonial settlement, white supremacy, and cultural oppression. A site, too, of anti-colonial struggle, anti-racist insurgency, and revolutionary consciousness.

So, what does it mean to be at the heart of this place?

A quick look at an online list of 70 American-English idiomatic expressions that use the word heart reveals that it tends to mean something like a site of ones authenticity, honesty, integrity, love, emotion, fervency, compassion, courage, romantic love, ones feelings. Spatially, we use it to mean a center or fountainhead of passion, meaning, values, and essential humanity.

When we get to the heart of the matter, we speak of a place of origin, authentic meaning, the truth about a situation. When something is in our heart, we mean that it has a deep, compelling value and worth in the meaning of our lives. When we talk about a heartland, we likely mean the place of the original identity, the place where you can find those who are the original people of that culture. When we heart something, we mean that we love it, identify our interests, goals, culture, and sense of worth with that thing. When something is felt deep in my heart, it means that truth beyond the surface is felt rather than rationally known. The heart is an instrument more powerful than logic in discerning truth.

Silvas phrase in the heart of America, then, locates her research findings in the space of a merged emotional center, original identity and authenticity, and fundamental truths about America. Because America is more than the geography of the U.S., I argue that meaning is implicit in her words, even if she doesnt intend it.

The full subtitle is Pain and Politics in the Heart of America. Pain in ones heart references a deep wounding, possibly life-threatening, but perhaps of such emotional effect as to render permanent the disruption of bonds of friendship, love, or even kinship. I will return to the political dimension indicated in the subtitle shortly.

The main title, Were Still Here, an utterance from a working-class person, stakes a rhetorical claim to endurance and resilience, despite the pain experienced at the heart of America.

In her opening chapter, Silva describes her methodology for this study as a fluid one. She had intended to study white working-class views of Donald Trump in the campaign season before the 2016 election. She focused her research on a community in the Southern portion of Pennsylvania, which she labels Coal Brook, to hide the identities of her interviewees. She claims, however, that she struggled finding people who felt strongly enough about politics to fully identify with a political party or advocate for specific policy platforms. So, her research agenda shifted.

Evidently, reality forced her to reconsider the media and political stereotype that equates the working class with white people or the equally distorted distinction between the working class and low-wage workers. In this vein, Carmen Rojas, the founder of The Workers Lab, has argued, The caricature is a blue-jeans wearing, Harley Davidson riding, white man who has a job his dad and granddad once had. This working man, as hes often portrayed in the media coverage he gets, feels left behind, misunderstood, and angry because he cant go anywhere without hearing a language other than English and cant turn on the TV without Black and Latinx faces overwhelming his options. The frequent association of the white working class exclusively with small towns and rural communities adds a further distortion of reality.

As it turns out, none of Silvas interviewees were coal miners. And, while the surrounding area once employed 175,000 coal miners, since the 1970s, it has become a collection of abandoned mines with only a handful of workers still associated with that industry. Further, as she notes, in the past decade, rising housing costs, poverty, and crime have pushed black and Latino people out of urban economies and into the coal region.

Instead of finding some realistic correspondence to the white male miner stereotype, Silva spoke with people who hold a variety of jobs, educational statuses, income brackets, genders, ethnic and racial identities, political beliefs, and relationships to the concept of the heart of America. Many white people, who had made this place like Alabama without the blacks, felt threatened by the demographic changes. Change threatened their claim on white racial exceptionalism and identity as the working class in the heart of America.

This threat produced an emotional response articulated as loss and being left behind. It fueled resonance with Trumps racially coded slogans and demands such as Make America Great Again, a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border, and restrictions on migration from non-white and majority Islamic countries. Trumps rhetoric seemed to align with prior equations of crime and disorder with people of color encoded in the assertion that Blue Lives Matter. This transitional period represented a new landscape in Southern Pennsylvania politics, which had just a few years back tended to support Democratic candidates actively.

Economic change does lie at the heart of these big political shifts to the authoritarianism and racism of the Trump campaign. Larger numbers of non-white, working-class people in their midst, however, served most to disrupt white self-identifications with the media stereotype. Indeed, Silvas evidence reveals that many whites had (perhaps reluctantly) accepted the exchange of economic insecurity for the psychological comfort of white racial exceptionalism. White emotional affiliations with a caricature of the hard-working white person recall W.E.B. Du Boiss concept of a psychological wage of whiteness.

Class politics in a multi-racial society, by their nature and by all rational logic, require a political and cultural identification with other people from racial and ethnic communities based on the work they do and their relation to the boss and to capital. As Silva writes, borrowing from the Marxist cultural historian E.P. Thompson, social class as a political identity, is neither automatic nor something to be assumed in advance. Rather than a response to sharing the same education level, income bracket, or job, it is a process of constructing, contesting, and remaking a collective identity through concrete social relationships that generate values, traditions, and shared interests.

In other words, organized action, community building, and struggle produce a politicized class identity.

She writes that the new political terrain represented by support for Trump indicates that class is not happening as it used to. This is an insightful remark. It links a shift in class politics to the emergence of a significant fracture in class identity and action in the region that is new, perhaps within the last decade. It suggests attempting to associate this fracture solely with structural changes, such as the decline of coal, manufacturing, unionization rates, or of the emergence of neoliberalism, would be flawed and partial.

What it indicates rather is something potentially more disturbing. If the process of class identity formation has shifted in the past decade, it suggests that class had been made and remade in ways that seemed to uphold racial/gendered pieces of the working-class caricature. Indeed, that this caricature was identified with Democratic Party politics in Southern Pennsylvania suggests a disastrous association of white males as icons of Democratic Party working-class politics up to the Trump era. Silva shows that this iconic association made voting for Hillary Clinton far too hard.

Any way you skin this cat, the evidence shows that many people, in the worst traditions of Americas foundational violence, had constructed a working-class identity that rested primarily on their whiteness. Instead of a democratic alliance of all people aiming to claim power over their lives and communities in the face of corporate dominance, environmental disaster, and rampant economic exploitation, many whites seem to want tight control over the advantages of being a white person. The seeming loss of these feels like the worst disaster, the beginning of the decline of our country.

As a result of apparent trends such as this, researchers have begun to talk about white Americans fascination with Trumps fascist rhetoric, as political scientist William E. Connolly argued in a recent study of similarities between Trumps and Hitlers leadership styles. Philosopher Samir Gandesha pointed to an increase in popular identification with the aggressor among white Americans as a component of the authoritarian personality now apparently more visible in American society. Anthropologist Gregory Duff Morton linked popular acceptance of Trump as the boss to emergent structural changes in the economy that have intensified exploitation for workers.

Since altered racial demographics have challenged the caricature of white working-class identity, a rupture in political identities occurred. This crisis shows that the decline in unionization, especially one focused on organizing a multi-racial alliance, has left the ground open for such a disastrous turn of events. It also shows that racism wont let us put into our heart of hearts the people who should mean the most to us: those who share our struggles, our workspaces, our aspirations for a fully democratic and equal society, our love for hard work as a source of meaning for our lives, our belief that we, together, all of us, make the world every day through our joint labor and deserve to control its future.

Were Still Here: Pain and Politics in the Heart of America

Jennifer M. Silva

Oxford University Press, 2019, 224pp., $24.95

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Keep me in your heart: Race and class politics in the Trump era - People's World

Vince Emmer, your golf metaphor for big government is a really, really sad attempt to dis big government. But columns have always been the work of a duffer.

First thing your metaphor misses is there is a par to each hole. You don't make us understand what constitutes under and over the balance line that would be consensus. What is the bogey or the hole in one, spending wise?

Next most golfers play 18 holes, and the game is much more about the back nine than the front end.

But of course your brand of economics never ventures onto the back nine, where the sand traps of wage slavery and rust-belt industry are negotiated only by Asian players.

Case in point, saying each household owes $56,000 a year is just a fear tactic. With the current tax structure, and the many ways government finances debt, nobody actually owes this. Instead we pay forward a portion of the earning (which the government is borrowing, interest free) plus various fees and taxes to local agency, where one chooses to be a member of the same civility. This would be the front nine.

The back nine is the fact that the structure of government is much the same as corporations, in that they are champions or duffers to the extent they can carry debt.

The ability to carry debt in capitalist societies keeps the operation under par even with forays into the woods like Afghanistan and Iraq, and breath test-qualified mortgage-backed securities, etc. If you equate the per-household equivalent in the corporate world, it would be the cost passed onto consumers, hidden fees and the fact banks are borrowing peoples savings at a rate as close to interest free as it can manage.

But of course, our current neo-liberal economist and business school caddies don't even know the difference between the putter and the driver in this matter. Face the fact governments are financed by more than one club and must always play the full round, while business can spin off debt into subsidiaries and spend their time in the clubhouse.

Eric Olander

Glenwood Springs

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Letter: Par for the column - Glenwood Springs Post Independent

When FANTASTIC NEGRITO released his Grammy award-winning album The Last Days of Oakland in 2016, it received critical acclaim for its honest look at racism, gun violence, wage slavery, and other challenges facing our country. That continues with the re-release of the album on September 1, 2017 via Cooking Vinyl, which features two new tracks, "Push Back" and "The Shadows", which anticipated the events of today.

Almost prophetic in its subject matter, both "Push Back" and "The Shadows" reveal the soul of an artist trying to make sense of the political world around him that affects not only the governments but the fate of families, especially for people of color. Tackling the results and lack of progress from the current Administration head on in "The Shadows" ("I got trouble on my mind / I've been reading the headlines / That man that said "you're fired" / Brought the Devil out of retirement") and the Border Wall and immigration in "Push Back" ("They're trying to build a wall / But that won't help at all"), these two tracks are a direct response to the current state we as a country are in.

"Being African American in this country is f****** brutal," he explains. "It's painful and we, as individuals, have a way to combat that. And Fantastic Negrito for me is a way to combat that."

In addition, Fantastic Negrito will be supporting Sturgill Simpson on his Fall U.S. tour. TOUR DATES Supporting Sturgill Simpson

SEP 07 Smart Financial Centre / Sugarland, TX SEP 08 Verizon Theatre / Grand Prairie, TX SEP 09 AUSTIN360 Amphitheatre / De Valle, TX SEP 14 Radio City Music Hall / New York, NY SEP 15 Merriweather Post Pavilion / Columbia, MD SEP 16 Blue Hills Bank Pavilion / Boston, MA SEP 19 Fox Theatre / Detroit, MI SEP 21 Fox Theatre / St. Louis, MO SEP 22 Huntington Bank Pavilion / Chicago, IL SEP 25 Red Rocks Amphitheatre / Morrison, CO SEP 28 Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall / Portland, OR SEP 29 Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall / Portland, OR SEP 30 Marymoor Amphitheater / Redmond, WA OCT 06 The Greek Theatre / Los Angeles, CA

Fantastic Negrito's The Last Days of Oakland took home the 2017 Grammy for Best Contemporary Blues Album Grammy Award. While blues is an integral part of Fantastic Negrito's overall foundation, his music defies genre, blending hip hop, rock, and other styles to create a sound that led Pitchfork's Greil Marcus to say "he could be inventing the blues for the first time."

He made his national television debut as Fantastic Negrito on the season finale of Fox's Empire, performing both his single "Lost in a Crowd"-the track that brought him to national attention, winning NPR's inaugural Tiny Desk Concert Contest-and the hit song "Good Enough" alongside "Empire's" Jamal Lyon.

Photo Credit: Max Claus

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FANTASTIC NEGRITO Addresses Current Events in New Tracks - Broadway World

Thailands $7 billion fishing trade is among the worlds biggest. In recent years, its also been one of the most severely scandalized an industry blighted by reports of slavery on fishing trawlers. Many of these tales recall 18th century-style barbarity at sea.

Each year, Thailands docks have traditionally launched thousands of trawlers into the ocean, often with crews of roughly 20 men. Most are not complicit in forced labor. But less scrupulous captains have taken advantage of the oceans lawlessness.

In port cities, theyve bought men from Myanmar and Cambodia for $600 to $1,000 per head. Duped by traffickers, the migrants come to Thailand seeking under-the-table work in factories or farms.

Instead, theyve found themselves hustled onto fishing boats that motor into the abyss, thousands of miles from civilization, where they are forced to fish for no pay. Various investigations have uncovered thousands of cases.

As one deputy boat captain of a Thai trawler told GlobalPost: Once a captain is tired of a [captive], hes sold to another captain for profit. A guy can be out there for 10 years just getting sold over and over.

Related: Read our award-winning investigationSeafood Slavery

But Thailand is now installing a new system that if effective could seriously reform an industry that has been murky for far too long.

Were trying to change as fast as possible, says Adisorn Promthep, director general of Thailands Department of Fisheries. We want to make sure no vessel escapes our scope.

Installed last year by Thailands military government, Adisorn is charged with bringing transparency to a business marked by opacity.

For years, fish have been routed through a dark supply chain that obscures their origins. This has given exporters plausible deniability with regard to forced labor.

Practically everyone has acknowledged the accounts of escaped or freed slaves, who have come ashore reporting tales of murder and beatings aboard trawlers. But there has been genuinely no way of proving whether this pound of mackerel or that box of fish sticks was sourced from a captive.

This is not a concern limited to Asia. It has serious implications for shoppers in the United States and European Union, two primary importers of seafood from Thailand.

Recent investigations by Greenpeace have implicated Nestl Purina and The J.M. Smucker Company producers of Fancy Feast and Meow Mix cat food, respectively in sourcing fish from factories accused of forced labor violations. Other reports have shown Costco and Walmart entangled in tainted supply chains allegations that led both to join a Seafood Task Force to clean up criminality in the seafood industry.

Here are some key elements of the Thai governments new plan, which is designed to reduce overfishing as well as root out forced labor.

Obscuring the origins of fish caught on dodgy vessels has traditionally proved rather easy. The fish is often offloaded to a massive mothership, a sort of way station and marketplace floating on distant seas, hundreds of thousands of miles from Thai shores. There, slave-caught fish gets mixed in with legit catches.

But under new rules, Adisorn says, every batch of fish will be recorded in an extensive digital log book. Once fully operational, this will illuminate the entire supply chain so that any factory, any consumer, should be able to check where the fish actually came from.

Thai authorities have actually banned offloading fish from trawlers to motherships for the time being. This applies to any boat officially flying the Thai flag and is designed, in part, to stop captains from buying and selling captives on motherships.

There is a caveat: These transshipments may be allowed if monitored by onboard observers. These observers are paid roughly $120 per day an incredible salary, considering Thailands daily minimum wage hovers around $10. These observers are technically freelancers. But they will be trained by Thailands fisheries department. Their main job is to collect data on the supply of fish in parts of the ocean prone to overfishing.

But the Thai government also expects them to deter illegal labor practices on board. Only a few dozen have been trained for deployment so far.

Every boat that can carry 60 tons or more will be outfitted with a GPS-style monitoring system that is just like the navigator in your car, Adisorn says.

Captains used to file paper documents about their whereabouts. Thats no longer good enough, Adisorn says. We need to know where theyre located. At all times.

Moreover, most of the boats now undergo rigorous inspections at newly installed control centers every single time they leave or return to port. Thai officers wont just check equipment and inspect nets full of wriggling fish. Theyre also supposed to check that crew records match the actual fishermen on board.

If a captain has 10 laborers, and one isnt supposed to be there, the arrest happens at the port, Adisorn says. The prosecution starts right there.

We have about 10,000 vessels total that we have to check. We cant check all of them, he says. Last year, officials tried to do that, he says, and managed to cover roughly 85 percent. But sometimes, when you try to do too much, the quality isnt good enough.

The officers have since been ordered to conduct more intensive checks on fewer boats a shift to give them ample time to properly scrutinize each crew. Adisorn recalls one recent case in which an officer, skeptical about a young fishermans age, pulled the worker off the boat and checked his bone density at a local hospital. He turned out to be underage.

This complex set of rules and tracking systems is now roughly 80 percent operational, Adisorn says. Such a sweeping effort to sanitize the Thai fishing industrys turbid supply chain will face great resistance from many factions. Among them: unscrupulous officials, corrupt factory owners and uncooperative boat captains.

The current government of Thailand, a junta that seized power in 2014,is also an unlikely crusader for liberty. Critics of the royally backed army government can be treated as seditionists. Some have been locked away for mere Facebook posts.

But the governments anti-slavery plan is already earning cautious praise from Greenpeace, an organization that is more often railing against the fishing industrys abuses.

I actually think theyre trying to do the best they can, says Anchalee Pipattanawattanakul, a Bangkok-based campaigner for the group. They want to show theyre being transparent. They mostly want the EU to see them as progressive.

Two years back, the EU sowed fear among Thai officials by threatening to ban all seafood shipments from Thailand if illegality continued unabated. That threat remains in place.

These reforms were also prodded along by the US State Department, which ranked Thailands trafficking problem in a tier alongside the worlds worst offenders such as Haiti or Sudan.

The US has since lifted Thailand from that bottom ranking a move to acknowledge a wave of prosecutions and asset seizures against traffickers that add up to more than $21 million.

Meanwhile, Thai officials privately note that US pressure has relented under President Donald Trumps administration, which has proved uncommunicative and not terribly interested in the trafficking issue.

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Why the West should care about Thailand's new fight against fishing slavery - PRI

The statue of Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson on Monument Avenue in Richmond, Va.

At 9 p.m. last Tuesday night, city workers began to enclose in plywood the Confederate monument that sits in Birminghams Linn Park. By the following afternoon, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall had announced that he was suing the city for violating state law.

Activists in Birmingham first began calling for the removal of the 52-foot Confederate Soldiers and Sailors monument in 2015, after white supremacist Dylann Roof murdered nine parishioners in a Charleston, South Carolina, church. That, in turn, prompted Gerald Allen, a state senator from Tuscaloosa, to introduce the Alabama Memorial Preservation Act to prohibit cities from removing or altering historic monuments more than 40 years old without the approval of a state committee. The predominantly (if not entirely) white Republicans who control the legislature passed the bill along party lines. Republican Governor Kay Ivey signed it into law in May.

Birmingham Mayor William Bell ordered the monument to be covered amid a renewed and urgent call from activists and officials to remove such tributes to the Confederacy, after white nationalists in Charlottesville, Virginia, rallied around a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee and proceeded to attack counter-protesters, killing one woman. Several citiesfrom Baltimore to San Antoniohave since taken down Confederate monuments while others debate similar actions.

Mayor Bell, who is black, says he doesnt necessarily want to remove the statuedespite demands from local activistsbut he does think it should provide a broader context that condemns the Confederacy, rather than celebrates it. The Confederacy was an act of sedition and treason against the United States of America and represented the continuation of human bondage of people of color, Bell told the Prospect in an interview. Its anathema to anyone supportive of the United States government to have such a structure sitting on public property.

Furthermore, he points out, Birmingham didnt become a city until 1871, during the post-Civil War Reconstruction era. And the monument wasnt erected until 190550 years after the war endedwhen a local chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy commissioned the memorial as a gift to the city.

Its my desire to no longer allow this statute to be seen by public until such time that we can tell the full story of slavery, the full story of what the Confederacy really meant, Bell told reporters last week. Now, Bell says, the city is exploring its legal options in light of the states lawsuit. The state attorney general is asking a district court to fine the city $25,000.

I don't believe that the legislative body has the authority to dictate what monuments or statues we have on public property. Thats a right that the municipal government should control, Bell says. This was built with private dollars and is now protected by the state. The city should have the power to eliminate any source of contention and to maintain public tranquility.

THE STATE OF ALABAMA'S CRACKDOWN ON BIRMINGHAMis just its latest attempt to limit the authority of the majority-black city, which has a black mayor and a majority-black city council. In February 2016, the Birmingham city council approved a $10.10-an-hour minimum wage. Two days later, the Republican-controlled legislature passed a law prohibiting Alabama cities from passing such ordinances and voiding a wage hike for tens of thousands of Birminghams low-wage workers.

The experience of Birmingham is indicative of a broader GOP-led assault on the political power and home rule of Southern cities, home to large black populations, often led by black politicians, and, increasingly, purveyors of progressive policies that seek to improve upon the low standards of state law. From the removal of Confederate monuments to the enactment of local minimum wages, Republican-controlled statehouses are preempting blue citiesand undermining black voices.

These are nothing more than 21st-century Jim Crow laws, Johnathan Austin, chair of the Birmingham City Council, said of the monument removal and minimum-wage preemption laws in an interview with the Prospect. The state of Alabama is trying to control the [states] largest cityand largest black city by prohibiting us from governing ourselves.

Twenty-five statesincluding nearly every Southern statehave laws that prohibit cities and counties from setting their own minimum wage. The four states that have no minimum wage of their own (Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee), adhering to the federal minimum instead, are in the South. Now, at least six states have laws limiting the power of cities to remove Confederate monuments, with most passed in the last couple years. All of them are in the South, where Republicans control every single legislative chamber. Despite their calls for local control and fewer regulations, state Republicans are now regulating both the cultural and economic authority of localities.

Last year, state legislators passed the Tennessee Heritage Preservation Act of 2016, which requires public notice, hearings, and a two-thirds majority vote of the legislature in order to remove historic monuments. In 2015, North Carolina signed the Cultural History Artifact Management and Patriotism Act, an Orwellian amalgamation of nouns that requires a state historical commission to approve any removal of monuments. Georgia, Mississippi, and Virginia also have similar laws.

In Memphis, a majority-black city, officials are ready to suethe stateif it denies its a new waiver request to remove a statue of Confederate President Jefferson Davis downtown, as well as a statue of Confederate General and Ku Klux Klan founding member Nathan Bedford Forrest. The move came after the city tried and failed to slog its way through the byzantine maze of GOP-instituted regulations protecting such statues. The matter may very well end up before the state Supreme Court. Legislators in Tennessee, which has the highest proportion of minimum-wage workers in the country, also passed a law in 2014 that prohibits cities from enacting minimum-wage ordinances higher than the state level, which is chained to the federal minimum of $7.25 an hour.

As Barry Yeoman reported for the Prospect last week, protesters in Durham, North Carolinaa liberal city stripped of its authority to take down monuments by the right-wing legislaturefound a way around that impasse by pulling down a Confederate statue themselves. I understand why people felt this was the most expedient way, Jillian Johnson, an African American member of the city council, told Yeoman. There was no legal way to make it happen.

Meanwhile, the Durham council has also been barred from increasing the minimum wage (save for city employees) by the same infamous legislation that restricted transgenders bathroom use.

Durham is just one of dozens of Democratic-controlled citiesAtlanta, Birmingham, Charlotte, Charleston, Durham, Jackson, Nashville, Memphis, and so on, the blue dots in red stateswhich have lost the authority to raise wages for their (predominately black) workers struggling to get over the poverty line or to remove prominent monuments to a racist and oppressive ideology so their residents dont have to see a general fighting for slavery looking down on them as they go to work.

Republicans insist that protecting these monumentsthe majority of which were built in the early 1900s or during the 1960sare about preserving the history and heritage of the South. Just as they insist that prohibiting local increases to the minimum wagewhich hasnt been lifted on the federal level in eight yearsis about protecting low-wage workers from job loss.

In these ways, GOP lawmakers are actually memorializing the values of the Antebellum South: White supremacy and lowor, rather, nowages.

This article has been corrected to clarify that the city of Memphis has not yet sued the state, but intends to if its waiver to remove its Confederate monuments is denied, and that one of the statues is of Confederate President Jefferson Davis.

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On Monuments and Minimum Wages - The American Prospect

In his third - and most appalling - set of remarks on a violent white supremacist rally, Donald Trump not only engaged in moral equivalence between neo-Nazis and anti-racist counter-protesters, he went so far as to defend the grudge that brought the white supremacists to Charlottesville in the first place.

"Many of those people were there to protest the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee," the president said. "So this week, it is Robert E. Lee. I noticed that Stonewall Jackson is coming down. I wonder, is it George Washington next week? And is it Thomas Jefferson the week after? You know, you really do have to ask yourself, where does it stop?" The next day, Trump doubled down on this message via Twitter, suggesting that his defense of Confederate monuments is no passing whim but a deeply held conviction. Even the president's outside attorney, John Dowd, got into the act, circulating an email claiming: "You cannot be against General Lee and be for General Washington, there literally is no difference between the two men."

This is moral sophistry of a high order. At the most basic level, the difference between George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, on the one hand, and Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, on the other, comes down to this: The former helped created the United States of America; the latter fought against it. It's as simple as that. And it doesn't take a lot of knowledge of history - which the president plainly does not possess - to grasp that basic distinction.

This helps to explain why there are, in fact, no calls to raze the Washington Monument or the Jefferson Memorial even from those who believe that the United States should pay reparations for slavery. True, Washington and Jefferson were slaveholders, and they were acutely conscious that this shameful practice contradicted the soaring ideals of the Declaration of Independence. That is why Washington in his will freed his slaves after his death (although his widow continued to own her own slaves). Jefferson, for his part, freed five slaves in his will and the other 130 were sold by his estate to cover his substantial debts.

But Washington and Jefferson also created a system of government that, while stained by the original sin of slavery, nevertheless established certain "unalienable rights" that would finally be vindicated after the struggles of the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the civil-rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. That Jefferson and Washington were flawed human beings does not negate their greatness or the debt that we owe them for creating our country.

By contrast, what is it that we are supposed to be grateful to the Confederates for? For seceding from the Union? For, in the case of former U.S. Army officers such as Lee and Jackson, violating their oaths to "support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic"? For triggering the most bloody conflict in American history? For fighting to keep their fellow citizens in bondage?

There is nothing praiseworthy about any of this even if, like all soldiers, many Confederates showed considerable prowess and bravery in battle. But then so did Nazi German generals such as Erwin Rommel and Heinz Guderian. The same could be said of Japanese Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto, who planned the attack on Pearl Harbor. Heck, even the 9/11 hijackers were undoubtedly courageous if also deeply twisted. Why not honor them while we're at it? The cause in which bravery is displayed matters a lot, and the cause of the Confederacy, to maintain and preserve slavery, was evil. Therefore we should not pay tribute to its leaders. Full stop.

Attempts to suggest that Robert E. Lee was somehow different - that he was a glorious cavalier who embodied a noble "Lost Cause" - are founded on little more than ahistorical mythology. As noted by Adam Serwer in the Atlantic, while Lee was troubled by slavery, he was not an advocate of emancipation. He was, in fact, a cruel taskmaster as both a slave-owner and a general. "During his invasion of Pennsylvania," Serwer notes, "Lee's Army of Northern Virginia enslaved free blacks and brought them back to the South as property." Moreover: "Soldiers under Lee's command at the Battle of the Crater in 1864 massacred black Union soldiers who tried to surrender." After the war, Lee opposed giving the vote to freed slaves.

The most praise-worthy thing that Lee did was to conclude the peace at Appomattox in April 1865 and reject calls to wage guerrilla warfare against the Union. But his motives were only partly altruistic - he feared that an insurgency would destroy the social system dominated by the South's plantation class. The fact that Lee, like German and Japanese leaders, was willing to accept defeat after being soundly beaten does not obviate his fundamental crime in waging war on a country he had pledged to serve.

If there is any Confederate worthy of special recognition it isn't Lee but his subordinate, Gen. James Longstreet, who after the war battled white supremacist militias in New Orleans who were seeking to deprive freedmen of their rights. But it is precisely for this reason that Longstreet became anathema to his fellow Confederates. No statues to Longstreet were erected until one finally went up at the Gettysburg battlefield in 1998.

And, no, it isn't rewriting history, as Trump claims, to take down statues honoring Confederates. The real attempt to rewrite history was undertaken by white supremacists who made a fetish of honoring the Confederacy so as to preserve segregation - the oppression of freed slaves and their descendants - when it was under challenge from the 1860s to the 1960s. Mainstream historiography has already been revised to dispel the myth of the "Lost Cause" that was created by white supremacists after the Confederacy's defeat. Taking down the statues is simply allowing the statuary to catch up with the history.

There is still a place for Confederate statues and even Confederate flags. But that place is on battlefields and museums where history can be recounted in an even-handed and accurate fashion. It is not in public squares where such monuments serve as rallying symbols for neo-Nazis. The very fact that white supremacists are so bent on preserving Confederate statues, by force if need be, tells you all you need to know about why the president of the United States should not be defending them.

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Boot is a fellow for national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

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The difference between George Washington and Robert E. Lee - Chicago Tribune