Impeccable timing Brennan! Having the chapter on Capitalism and Class on the 1-year anniversary of OccupyWallStreet.
This chapter, as much is the book so far, is very revealing. I had no idea that the Spanish had settled in 1/3 of what we now call the United States or that labor unions excluded blacks until the 1930s. The overall trend in this chapter is something that has been introduced to me before but having it said so thoroughly and with another's perspective is rewarding. Something that really stuck out to me had to do with the labor laws. Kaufman explained that "[w]hen the Federal Wage and Hours law was passed as part of the New Deal legislation in 1938, it specifically excluded farm labor from its protection. Farm labor was instead regulated under the Farm Labor Standards Act, which was much weaker." This to me was pretty amazing that when so many workers were fighting to improve their lives, they would leave out fellow workers that also needed help. Ahhhh, the power of racism.
Last week in class we had a nice discussion on the incident that went on in your Ecopysch class and it lead to a nice discussion that went on for an hour or so. It later came time to discuss the projects and it was interesting that we had 4 projects that related to food and 1 that related to air/water. GMOs were also spoken of in all 4 food projects if I remember correctly. Over these past weeks I've had lots of information flowing my way and thanks to Jaynie's annotated bibliography I now have another book, "In Defense of Food."
Apologies again for not getting to a blog post until now. Chapter 1 and 2 to follow
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