+Dear friend: You make a lot of powerful points that have receiving insufficient attention in the corporate media: 1) The increasing polarization of wealth that allows the richest 1% to capture 23% of all annual income. 2) Inequality has widened because one administration after another has tolerated increasing erosion of the National Labor Relations Act, often by illegal means that have become routine. 3) The auto bailouts provoked enormous complaints, yet for all the wrong reasons. GM and Chrysler were subjected to a down-sizing strategy that sent more jobs to Mexico and China, with no plan for the discarded US workers …
Member Profile
Roger Bybee
Roger Bybee is a Milwaukee-based freelance writer and progressive publicity consultant whose work has appeared in numerous national publications and websites, including Z magazine, Dollars & Sense, Yes!, The Progressive, Multinational Monitor, The American Prospect and Foreign Policy in Focus. Bybee edited The Racine Labor weekly newspaper for 14 years in his hometown of Racine, Wis., where his grandfathers and father were socialist and labor activists. His website can be found here, and his e-mail address is winterbybee@gmail.com.
Most Recent Articles view all 68
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1.2M Jobless Face Unemployment Extension Deadline—and Regressive Tax on Benefits
By Roger Bybee With polls about the election of GOP Sen. Scott Brown in Massachusetts showing that much… more
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As Milwaukee’s Economy Fails, How Can Public Schools Succeed?
By Roger Bybee Milwaukee's public schools are in trouble: less than half of students who begin high school… more
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Dems Need to Sharply Re-Focus on Workers’ Plight
From Washington to Wisconsin, the line between Dems and the GOP is too blurry Republican… more
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Teaching Assistants’ Union Resists University’s ‘Neo-Liberal’ Turn
Ban on foreign students joining union part of corporatist trend, labor leader says By Roger Bybee Thanks to… more
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Corporate Unionbusting Continues, Even as Unionized Workforce Shrinks
By Roger Bybee A couple months ago, a student of mine at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee got desperate… more
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Tuesday’s Message to Dems: Which Side Are You On?
By Roger Bybee The Democrats' stupefying Senate defeat Tuesday in Massachusetts undoubtedly will lead most pundits and conservative… more
Latest Comments view all 10
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The Abominable Snow-Man certainly exemplifies everything that is wrong with the economic system. To cite just two points about the way Snow and Cerberus do business:: MAXIMIZING PROFIT WITHOUT REGARD TO THE SOCIAL COST: The closing of the profitable, productive paper plant in Kimberly Wis--without regard to the 600 veteran workers and their families---was unnecessary because at least four other firms wanted to buy the plant. SPOUTING FREE-MARKET RHETORIC WHILE LINING UP GOVERNMENT BAILOUTS The Chrysler bailout protected Cerberus' investment while well over 30,000 Chrysler workers lost their jobs. Some of the bailout money was even used to move 850 jobs …
Posted to From Plant Shutdowns to Plasma, Cerberus is Financial Vampire
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Delighted to hear about this terrific worker action against racism in Houston! I'm sure I will be hearing about more such shop-floor actions, including largely unrecorded sit-downs in the US, in response to my articles, as this militancy has become a lost part of American labor history. Five quick comments: 1) This action seems to have been an after-shock to the massive strike wave among US workers peaking roughly 1967-73 that far exceeded strikes by supposedly more militant European workers. This wave of militant labor action--most often iniitiated at the rank-andf file level-- among industrial workers subjected to humiliating treatment and …
Posted to What Fuels Overseas Sit-Down Strikes?
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Truly an excellent piece explaining the dilemmas of being a conscientious and sharp labor reporter like Steve Greenhouse. As the editor for 14 years of the Racine Labor, which survived 60 years as probably the most radical "official" labor weekly in the nation, I certainly saw my share of bad reporting on the labor movement, some of which is chronicled in articles in Extra! and Norman Solomon and Martin Lee's Unreliable Sources. But most of labor had no clue on how to respond to ill-informed or biased coverage, because labor hierarchies never provided any training on dealing with the media. For …
Posted to Where Have All the Labor Writers Gone?
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Dear Jeremy: This is a very significant victory for workers in the global economy, especially in the context of post-coup Honduras and the ongoing instability. The major US media have done an appallingly poor job of illuminating the situation in Honduras, much less coverage of the anti-sweatshop warriors' victory. This is consistent with the content of major media on Honduras for some time, where the brutality of sweatshops operated for US firms has been minimized and progressive activists painted in sinister tones, hiding a concealed motive of protectionism. Here'es an excerpt from a piece I wrote for Extra! in 1996: "In …
Posted to Huge Anti-Sweatshop Victory for Activists—And Hondurans
- Joined July 14, 2008
- Last Visit February 8, 2010
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