The BobboSphere: Don't believe everything you think.

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They stand over the city like the great predatory wading birds they are named after. And from time to time, like those great predatory wading birds, they come down swiftly on those below and take a life...often more than one. They are the construction cranes, whose numbers grew with the massive lending sprees that fueled the hi-rise building boom in our great cities.

But the construction cranes don't take lives with sharp beaks and unerring vision like their avian namesakes. Instead people get electrocuted when the cranes collide with power lines, operators fall out of them, they fall on top of people, or they crush people in the other gruesome ways that heavy complex machinery can destroy the human body.

So Barack Obama is tacking to starboard. That's steering to the right for you landlubbers. But as a politician who lives next to those inland seas we call the Great Lakes, he must have seen sailors do this hundreds of times. He's already tacked to the port or the left side. Now it's time to tack to the right or the starboard side. Paradoxically, that's how you sail in a "straight" line and end up arriving at your destination.

Let's remember that Barack Obama is a South Side Chicago politician. Veering to the right after starting out on the left is a time honored Windy City tradition.

One of the many things that puzzle me about American life is the notion that the right wing is pro-business...more specifically, pro-small business. Groups like the Republican Party, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and their large corporate backers claim to fight for small business which is supposed to flourish under their version of free market economics.

As a bona fide independent contractor working in a small biz with a grand total of 3 employees (but with a somewhat larger number of associates and co-contractors), I am going to weigh in here from the point of view of a little guy.

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"It's changin' out there. Just like last time. There's a storm comin' Harry. And we all best be ready when she does."-- Rubeus Hagrid from Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

We do love anniversaries here in the USA. This year it was the 40th anniversary of 1968, one of those years like 1776, 1860, 1929, 1941 and 2001 where we stood at some kind of societal crossroads.

Of course the problem with anniversarial history is that the only time we're supposed to think about our history is when the Corporate Media waves its digital wand and provides us with a safely sanitized version that doesn't threaten the present Established Order.

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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.

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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.

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.

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.

A few weeks back, we did a cartoon about management waterboarding employees.

According to the Salt Lake City Tribune, a Provo Utah based motivational coaching business called Prosper, Inc actually did waterboard an employee to demonstrate that they should work as hard at sales as the unfortunate employee had worked to breathe.

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.