doing it our way

Toiling in a Dickensian hell – the miners who fuel China
The scene is Dickensian. On the surface a miner heaves a truck off the pulley lift, pushes it by hand along the rails and empties its load down the side of a coal heap. A bulldozer and two men with shovels fill a lorry that will take the coal for processing. “It’s hard work,” another miner said, “but it’s better paid than tilling the land.” ...
The Government’s aim is to shut down operations with outdated equipment and to cut the number of small mines from 23,000 now to 10,000 by 2010. ... But in China coal is black gold, and many mines are reluctant to comply with new safety rules. In Henan some that have been closed but not yet sealed operate under cover of darkness, making the work all the more dangerous.

The funny thing about globalization is when it succeeds, it fails. These Chinese miners are suffering through their own industrial revolution, without having learned a thing from the prior ones. It doesn't just stop with arrogantly errant thinking, such as Alan Greenspan recently demonstrated, then causing the sensible and coolly observant Steven Lagavulin to flip his his lid:

WTF!?! Did you just blame us!?! How dare you , you (...) horse-turd!

So the policymakers hands are all tied, is that it? It's all just "natural evolution of market forces"? Because all those spoiled little American people just won't stop buying the foreign goods THAT THEIR CORPORATIONS NO LONGER ALLOW THEM TO MAKE FOR THEMSELVES BECAUSE THEY SHIPPED ALL THE JOBS OVERSEAS WHICH IS WHAT'S SENDING THE CURRENT ACCOUNT DEFICIT "SKYWARDS" IN THE FIRST PLACE!

So now this whole mess is all OUR fault, is it?

OK that's it, I wanna fight you.

Globalization just allows rich people to do stupid things faster. Coal is one of the stupidest things going. Oh yeah -- and humans need it, fer burnin, until humans stupidly run out of it, at which point the size of the mercury hangover will depend strictly on how much easily accessible coal nature randomly generated for the world.

It isn't sexy.

It moves mountains into valleys.

It pollutes.

It is dirty, and this cannot be hidden, only willfully ignored.