I listen to NPR, and Air America.    Less and less do I watch tv.   Not even much on the History Channel has been grabbing me.

       I go to bed earlier and earlier so I am able to work at a certain standard.

       I want to be able to think clearly, and come up with clear criticisms of the events.

       I want to grasp what my story means.

       What is my story?

       What good is a past?

        What do I really know about the present?

        What am I doing right for my personal individual future, and the one that we and our children will share?

        It is a wonderful thing to go to work and come home and have love and hobbies and sometimes go on trips called vacations, and generally be safe.    Happy safe and warm.

       The erosion of the American society and its return to something more like Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle feels like what is happening, is being achieved.

        Working Class people are not being protected, or given much respect.   Working Class people are being blamed for their increasing vulnerablity on the streets or at their jobs.    Gephart might have done better if he had made more clear how he would achieve an international minimum wage.

         I wonder if his plan was better than the one I have offered.

        My plan was to have the World Bank determine domestic and international minimum wages that were adequate to pay for food shelter clothing and medical care for each person wherever they are.

        National leaders and their governments would be then given loans, measured against their policies that advanced pay to workers that  reality.

        Capitalism has the prospect of being fair only when property laws and laws both internationally and domestic are accepted as well as enforceable.

         These days it seems that the powerful are making laws that sell one set of workers after another out with the the piviot of nationalism dividing workers so well as to continue to show that divide and conquer is an effective tactic.

        It will help if an international minimum wage is determined and made generally internationally known. 

       I tell you as a working class guy I’ve been about as adaptable and had enough careers to know that if I’m not making it and am doomed to an earlier death than I really deserve, with a diminished and diminishing share of the wealth of the nation, there are people to blame and fight against besides myself.

        I made good use of my time in the Boy Scouts and the Community College.   The list of jobs I’ve had is long.    In the main I’ve worked in Aviation Services and Motion Picture production.   These were my careers.

        But I’ve had to take what was in front of me to do to make a living and it is significant that I am now working as a carpenter in much the same capacity I did when I was in my twenties.

        The competition between states, nations cities and counties all ads up and it is obvious the working classes are losing.

         There does need to be a World Government in some basic form for the protection of the integrity of work.   Chicago isn’t perfect, but I’m about more interested in the Labor Wars, than I am in the War in Iraq.

         Time for the EU and the UN to merge in my opinion so that the whole thing is a balance to China.

         And I even love the I Ching.    If I threw it on this I think it would say the same thing.

         To achieve an internationally achievable minimum wage all off book accounting has to be eliminated. 

         Well I say to hell with you Mr. Greenspan.

         I’ve had more jobs than you and you have no right to tell me I need to retrain with all the experience I’ve got.

                                                                                                         Love, Russell