"Workers of the World, Arise!"

I have mixed feelings about unions after having been in one for 23 years. Our local at the paper mill wasn't very effective, mostly because we spent more energy arguing amongst ourselves than we did arguing with management. After working briefly in the same plant without a union, however, I can testify that the old saying is true: "Any union is better than no union." There are probably lots of reasons for the decline in the union movement in America, not the least of which is that most of the manufacturing jobs have moved overseas. A job without a union isn't much fun, but a union without a job is worthless. You know I'm not a fan of anything global, but now that we have a global economy, maybe what we need is a global labor union. Since I never could get 200 paper mill employees to agree on anything, I  certainly have no idea how to get all the workers in the world to agree on anything, so somebody with more savoir faire than me needs to get working on that right away. I understand that they already have labor unions in Red China, so that might be a good place to start. Of course their unions are controlled by their government, but so are their corporations. Unions, governments, and corporations are only as good as the people in them, so it seems that all we've got to do is get their people to shape up and everything else should fall into place.

In retrospect, the invasion of Iraq was probably a mistake, although it seemed like a good idea at the time. As it turned out, Bin Laden was eventually found hiding in plain sight in Pakistan, so maybe that's where we needed to put our boots on the ground all along. What you said about our efforts in Iraq helping Israel makes a lot of sense. I wish I could believe that our guys did that on purpose, but probably not. I don't know nothing about those neo-cons, but everybody should be pro Israel because they are the only good guys in the Middle East. I suppose that only hold true for other good guys, though, the bad guys would naturally be on the other side. What you said about those insurance companies switching sides makes a lot of sense too.

What you said about guns makes a lot less sense, at least to me. Some time ago, I saw on the TV news that lots of people were out there buying their first guns. This was on one of the regular channels, not FOX or MSNBC. They also said that most of them were taking classes so they would know which end of the gun the bullet comes out of, which has got to be a good thing. I also read in one of my hunting magazines that, for the first time in history, more people are buying guns for protection than for hunting. I don't know if that's a good thing or not. For some time there has been concern that the number of hunters has been declining although, last I heard, that trend was starting to turn the other way. I guess Obama shouldn't get all the credit for the increase in gun ownership, but he certainly hasn't hurt the cause any.

Speaking of Red China, have you heard about the big stock market crash they had last summer? It helped our own stock market at first because people were dumping their Chinese stocks and buying American stocks, but now all this money pouring into our country has caused the dollar to become too highly valued by the international money changers. That might sound like a good thing, but it's not because it makes our exports more expensive than our imports, or something like that. Anyway, the Chinese crises has caused ripples all over the world, and now everybody's stock markets are going down like submarines. Of course it will all level out eventually, and now might be a good time to buy stocks at bargain prices, if you're so inclined.