Davos

Subject: Davos 

The great and the wealthy, the decision makers and the money men and women are once again descending on the Alpine resort of Davos, not to take part in the skiing  but to discus and communicate their vision of the world especially as it concerns finance.
It's not a meeting we are invited to although we are the fodder or grist to the mill of their deliberations. We are the quiet mob outside the castle wall, noisy but impotent, aware that a party is going on without us and that we should have a voice but the bouncers stand firm, ensuring entrance is by invitation only. Of course it has always been so. Never privy to the boardroom machinations, or the smoke filled rooms where the minds of the occupants are, as one, to see we don't gate crash the party.
This year our needs are a greater threat to the movers and shakers than usual. The repeated cries of climatic devastation have become swollen with the video footage of out of control wildfires in Australia, the annual shrinking of glaciers and the wholesale diminution of the  frozen wastes of Antarctica. It's no longer the case where the doomsayers could be described as unhinged scientists or hair-suited propagandists and the sight of Greta Thunberg fighting back tears of frustration as she lambasted the United Nations, whilst Donald Trump smirked in the background  is still with us as a reminder of how impotent we are when it comes to measuring our worth against the wealth of the Trumps, Jamie Diamond and their colleagues at Davos.
The needs of the planet versus the need to make money out of the status quo is at the heart of this years meeting. No more kicking the can down the road but a realisation that business as usual can't continue if we are to halt global warming with its dreadful implications for millions of people living on what is becoming a fragile planet.
One of the marvels of the our investigation of how we evolved is the importance of the right mix of chemistry and an atmosphere which allowed us to do so.  The atmosphere is under threat and with it, so are we, as we continue to pour out pollutants which contaminate  the fragile balance of the constituent parts which make up the protective shield that has allowed life to prosper here on this planet. We are a freak of nature. Nowhere else in the multiplicity of universes as far as we know has this eye watering evolution  of life forms been allowed to prosper, develop and replicate to the extent to what we see today. The freakiness of this balance of atmosphere and the constituents which provide an environment in which we can survive is truly amazing. Statisticians may calculate the probability of another Mother Earth in the billions of stars and untold trillions  of planets, all held together by the gravitational dance which stretches as far as our imagination can grasp, billions of light years in terms of distance but which uniquely seems to have ear marked us out as special.
Could this apparently unique laboratory of chance be earmarked, through mankind's  greed and shortsighted myopia, for extinction focused as we are on the Market and the Financial forces which drive it. Forces which seem as powerful in our self centred motivational universe when weighed by a man's  wallet. It  simply illustrates the blind, craven appetite exhibited by the investment banks such as Goldman Sacs, or the balance sheet driven COs such as Jamie Diamond, or Richard Fuld,
Are we totally in the throes of a system, capitalism where the financial comparison is the only value system we have.