Global Warming: a Soliloquy
A few words from a lightly-imagined slave trader who adores the idea of climate havoc
The following is a made-up soliloquy from an imagined slave trader. That does not mean it’s fiction.
You saw the stories recently, yes? In Madras, or whatever they’re calling it these days, the four reservoirs that provide the city with water are almost bone-dry. This, in a city on the coast! Water water everywhere, you know? People are beginning to take longer holidays, or to visit relatives, anything to get away from the city for a while, and to a place that has some water.
This is how it begins, little **** like that that just grows and gets worse and worse till people are fleeing the city for forever and killing each other over a bucket of water, and I’m telling you, I can’t ****ing wait.
Oh, don’t look at me like that. The whole global economy is built on cheap labor, and there’s no better way to create cheap labor than by setting up the conditions that make starving people. Whether it’s sweat shop workers or field-hands or prison-labor ditch-diggers or sex workers or whatever, cheap labor is the reason why all your stuff isn’t crazy expensive. You want your shirt to cost three dollars less? Ignore the fact that the manufacturer hired someone in Bangladesh who’ll sew buttons on for two dollars a day. Want cheap strawberries? Just look the other way while illegal immigrants get herded out into the fields to replace legal, union-wage workers. It’s easy. All you have to do is not pay attention to what’s happening in the rest of the world, or even next door practically, and hey presto, cheap stuff for life!
That’s just simple capitalism, baby, and I’m telling you, I love it. I’m so rich from this ****. You ever flown on a private jet? I can make that happen if you want, but just for you, okay? Don’t tell anyone. Discretion is everything in this business.
So when you’ve got — what’s that? What do I mean by “cheap labor”? Come on, you know what I’m talking about. You don’t need me to actually say the word. There was that line in that Thor movie, remember? “Prisoners with jobs.” That works for me, let’s go with that.
So when you’ve got an endless demand for cheap labor on the one hand, and a crisis that’s gonna displace millions of people and make ’em desperate for food and water, what do you get: an un*******believable opportunity for profit for me and people like me. If you’ve been — well not you of course, it’s never you, you’re, you know, white and male and all that — but if some poor foreign dip**** has been forced out of his home because there’s no water, and there’s hundreds of people just like that on the same road looking for work and water and food, then you’ve got what economists call downward pressure on wages for everybody in that area. Which just means, cheap labor breeds more cheap labor. And this global warming ****, it’s gonna be the greatest creator of cheap labor since I don’t know when, since the pharaohs and the pyramids maybe.
Y’know, even here, good old USA, even here your boss depends on poor people. Your boss needs poor people. Otherwise, how’s he gonna keep you in line? If you come to him and say you deserve a raise, he’s gonna respond that there’s dozens of people who could also do your job for a lot less money because they’re poor. And none of you ****s ever has the balls to call his bluff. Without poor people they don’t have that leverage. So it goes to figure, then: the more poor people there are, thanks to climate change or whatever, the more your boss can keep you in line. Works great. For them. The bosses. Works great for you, too. The cheap shirts and strawberries and such. You love that ****. It’s why you don’t push too hard to get the raise, because really you’ve got plenty of money since things that should be expensive aren’t on account of all those desperate hungry poor people.
And you’re right, it works for me too. It works amazingly for me. But you’ve got the wrong idea about what I do, the wrong idea entirely. Think of me as a broker, with clients looking for specific services at excellent rates. I bring those clients together with people for whom a scrap of bread makes an amazing difference in their lives, and my clients are perfectly happy to provide the stupid ****ing bread. I’m a personnel consultant, really, is all I am. Maybe a little more under the table than most, but that’s about the only difference.
Yeah, sure, I know what they say. Climate change is gonna kill us all, rich and poor alike, boo ****ing hoo. I’m not a scientist, I don’t know, who cares. What I do know is that there’s money to be made now, there’s money to be made ten years from now, twenty years from now, however long before it all goes kerblooey. I’m supposed to, what, walk away from that? **** you, I’m not walking away from money like that.
Besides, we’re all gonna die, so my only question to you is, do you think I’m gonna die some poor morally righteous *******, or do you think I’m gonna die completely insanely rich? And really, when it comes right down to it, wouldn’t you make the same choice? I mean, really, wouldn’t you?
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