The BobboSphere: Don't believe everything you think.

"This is a war on the middle class", an American Axle worker said, "People are losing their homes, while the banks and the rich are getting more profits. They preach they are creating more jobs—but what kind of pay are these jobs?"

The jobs that the striking American Axle worker referred to pay $14 an hour, down from the $28 an hour that the American Axle parts workers had been formerly paid. As peoples' mortgages, car payments, kids' college tuition and health care went down the drain when the strike was lost, American Axle CEO Richard Dauch was rewarded with an 8.5 million dollar bonus for his brave service in the battle against the American middle class.

The above cartoon is a total misrepresentation of reality. No, not the actions of the boss. That is clearly satirical license showing how American management routinely bullies their underlings.

I mean the actions of the worker. She fights back with a bit of creative guerrilla theater.

But how many people that you know actually push back against the verbal and physical abuse that American management dishes out as a matter of course? This abuse takes on the form of malicious rumors, constant criticism, profanity, unfair punishment, tampering with work equipment, posting nasty pictures, sexual intimidation, spying, stalking, unreasonable work assignments, screwing around with vacation and time off, stealing a person's ideas, internet harassment and others much too numerous to mention. Seriously, there are now whole books written on the subject.

I attended my first Black History class in 1968 at the University of Maryland. The class came about because Black students demanded it in that tumultuous year. They were supported by a small but significant number of white students.

On the first day of class it was a shock to all of us to find out that a southern white professor was the teacher. Because of UM's Jim Crow history, it had almost no Black faculty at the time. But Professor Dan Carter turned out to be very knowledgeable and an relentless foe of Dixie apartheid. All of us learned a lot from that man.

In Jean-Paul Sarte's play, No Exit, 3 people are locked in a room together forever. Eventually they figure out that they are in hell and this is their punishment.

If being locked in a room with 2 other people is hell, what do you call it when the room is on fire and you can't get out?

That's what American writer Florence Lasser explored in her play, The Story of the ILGWU (International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union). One of the episodes includes the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Fire of 1911 when 146 mostly immigrant Jewish and Italian women workers were killed because the fire exits were locked. Some of them leaped to their deaths as the flames drew closer.

Since Reverend Wright is not running for office or a place on the Sunday morning gab fests, he can speak truth to power in a way that is forbidden to mainstream political candidates and pundits. Speaking truth to power does not mean that one is always right. Some of his pronouncements are off-base, but he does appear to be speaking from his heart.

Of course one's heart is not where most public political pronouncements come from. Most of these come from the word processors of fresh-faced communications graduates filtered through the mesh of endless focus groups. That way all genuine substance can carefully strained out before being released to the public.

On the Global Waterfront: The Fight to Free the Charleston 5 by Suzan Erem and E. Paul Durrenberger. Monthly Review Press: 240 pages, 2008. $17.95.

When the union's inspiration through the workers' blood shall run

There can be no power greater anywhere beneath the sun;

Yet what force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one,

But the union makes us strong.

This old labor hymn was written by Ralph Chaplin way back in 1915 and is the unofficial anthem of the US labor movement. It's sung at labor rallies and gatherings, but with an interesting twist. Organizers often pass out songsheets because many of the assembled labor activists don't know the words.

It's a sobering and even embarrassing moment for the US labor movement which is now down to about 8% of the private sector workers. Those who romanticize organized labor based on college history classes or nostalgic folksong fests need to remember that solidarity always begins with a hope....not a certainty.

And if solidarity leads to even a small partial victory, you can bet there will have been lots of hard work, hard feelings and heartaches along the way to that ecstatic moment when the victory celebrations begin.

Suzan Erem and E. Paul Durrenberger have put together a book that tells how solidarity really works and that yes, the words Ralph Chaplin penned can become a reality even to those of us who can't remember the lyrics without a songsheet.The book is the product of years of research and writing from a team that consists of a former union organizer and an anthropologist . You couldn't ask for a better combo.

In late August of 2005, Hurricane Katrina ravaged the US Gulf Coast killing nearly 2000 people and flooding 80% of the City of New Orleans. Entire neighborhoods disappeared under water and many people were trapped on rooftops or in the New Orleans SuperDome for days.

The working class areas in and around New Orleans were the hardest hit, especially the 9th Ward which was largely Black. Today, nearly 3 years later, many people have not been able to return to their homes and the City of New Orleans is using the catastophe as an opportunity to gentrify the city, drive out thousands of its former citizens and insure huge profits for the real estate industry at the expense of the city's displaced residents.

The hurricane may have been a weather disaster, but the rebu­ilding of New Orleans is a human disaster of cold-blooded ethnic cleansing.

He wouldn't answer the door, so we left him some presents: a huge letter decrying the racist management practices of  West Suburban Hospital and a batch of helium filled balloons that read END RACISM. Then we sang some freedom songs on his front yard and talked to his neighbors in the toney subdivision of Yankee Ridge outside of Chicago. It was just another day in the life of Jay Kreuzer, CEO of  West Suburban Hospital, part of a chain owned by the Resurrrection Corporation.

We drew this cartoon in reaction to the racist harassement over at West Suburban Hospital here in the Village of Oak Park IL.

Black and Latin workers in the housekeeping department at West Sub have been subjected to unfair discipline and even firings to silence their protests over discriminatory treatment. Their supervisor favors the white workers with better assignments, less work and more flexible schedules.

Workers at Chicagoland's Resurrection hospital chain have been battling management for the past several years as part of an AFSCME Council 31 effort to organize what was once a group of charity hospitals run by impoverished orders of nuns.

There are still nuns on the governing board, but they are hardly impoverished: Sr. Sally Marie Kiepura earned a $317,633 annual salary in 2005. If you walk into any Resurrection hospital, one can see the religious paraphenalia from its Catholic past. If Jesus were alive today though, he would take out that whip of his and drive these moneychangers from the health care system of Illinois.

Resurrection has sued poor people for hospital bills and has fired workers who have spoken up against the deteriorating working conditions that have accompanied a drop in the quality of patient care. At our local West Suburban Hospital, management has pursued a nasty racist campaign against Black and Latin housekeeping workers who have dared to speak out. This has led to several demonstrations at the hospital.

As a representative of the Oak Park community, I gave a short speech at an AFSCME organized "Funeral of Racism" that included a Dixieland Jazz band and a NOLA style funeral march. My speech follows: