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.

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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 do 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, physical violence and others much too numerous to mention. Seriously, there are now whole books written on the subject.

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I still have my old green 59 cents button around somewhere. That relic symbolized the female pay gap in the early 1970's. I can't help feeling we should have done a lot better over the past decades.

Women in the United States are still paid only 77 cents for every dollar earned by men.

And for women of color, the numbers are even worse. African-American women earn 63 cents and Latinas earn 52 cents for every dollar paid to white men

It’s time to take action.

How did it happen? We finally had a Democratic primary where a genuine national discussion could perhaps cut through the Gordian knot of race, gender and class. Instead we blinked at the last minute and settled for something far less. We cry for "change" at political rallies then like the horses in Anna Sewell's classic Black Beauty, we run back into the burning barn of familiar prejudices and stale political infighting.

It would be easy to surrender to cynicism and sit this one out. I have a Trotkyist friend who impatiently dismissed all of the candidates, even Dennis Kucinich, as tools of capitalism, not worthy of anyone's vote. What made me sad is that a lot of his criticisms of the Democratic Party candidates actually made sense, despite being framed in a 20th century left-over ideology.

So what are we supposed to do?

People sometimes ask what  a coathanger has to do with reproductive justice. As a former history teacher, it only reinforces what I believe to be the great failure of my former profession. Despite our best efforts, and god knows a lot  of us worked at it pretty diligently, Americans really don't know much about their own history.

­On January 22, the 35th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, NARAL Pro-Choice America is asking pro-choice bloggers to join them ­fo­r Blog for Choice Day!
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Blog for Choice Day provides us with an opportunity to raise the profile of reproductive rights in the blogosphere and the media, while celebrating Roe's 35th anniversary. Plus, it's a great way to let your readers and the mainstream media know that a woman's right to choose is a core progressive value that must be protected.

For more info, check out the Blog for Choice page. I'll be blogging that day. Will you?