Good Morning Friends and Seasons Greetings to you all,

I suppose we should note the fact that the G20 countries have concluded their climate change summit in Coppenhagen and... and.... and.... My sense of it is that the meeting fell flat. Nothing like the reductions in CO2 emissions were agreed to that scientists tell us are necessary, and so forth. Of course, its a shame the way we burn up fossil fuels and can't let the dinosaurs rest in peace.

But for me the tragedy of climate change is not the way we use too much energy or waste too much energy. Its not the way we don't recycle enough plastic and tin and paper and so on and so forth. Yes, its a shame the way corporations illegally dump their various waste products into bodies of water that have an almost sacred reverence for people in developing countries around the world, causing disease, birth defects, and the like.

The tragedy is not the massive deforestation of the Amazon and other places. Its not the poaching of various animals on the protected/endangered species list. And on and on. The hits keep on coming.

The tragedy of our climate challenge is the way we waste human beings. I think I mentioned this before. Some people work as sanitation workers (garbage haulers). Some people work as window washers of those high-rise buildings hauling themselves up on those rickety scaffolds. I believe some people work in sewers (if The Honeymooners is still relevant - remember Ralph Kramden's friend Norton?). Some people work as waiters in restaurants. Unless their transitory "students" or "actors," they have to make their living serving other people.

Some people work in animal slaughtering plants to get the meat ready that we buy from the supermarkets and consume in fine restaurants. Some people have to work as security guards, as I once did. Frankly, I think companies used "security" guards as a vanity acoutrement. Yes, there was a lot of talk about post-9/11 and the need for... for... for.... increased security, I guess.

Some people are needed to do marginal farm laboring tasks that... let's face it, that only undocumented workers seem willing and desperate enough to do. The very structure of society sustains a type of development that creates a structural necessity to have legions of people servicing it on the margins.

To me it is a humanist injustice that such jobs exist. And their existence is the wall up against which the pronouncements of politicians run. As I said before, take the policy of former president George W. Bush in education, "No Child Left Behind." It doesn't matter that Bush is a conservative Republican. It wouldn't matter if he was a Democrat, Independent, or member of some other party.

The system needs to leave millions of children behind through various ways, of course. It can be no other way and yet the system must give upward mobility to a small sliver of persons in order not to lose all rhetorical credibility.

We are talking about more than capitalism or neoliberalism. We are talking about what I heard one socialist activist refer to as the world capital system which preceded capitalism by thousands of years. I will talk more about this next time when I reintroduce the idea of Absurdity from Existentialism.

Until next time.

wingedcentaur