The BobboSphere: Don't believe everything you think.

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.

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.

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.