New Black and White Gold
Part 1 Old Oil Out -- New Fuel IN
At 26 I felt I was on the way to success. When I went to sleep last night, I was already a department head, and many felt I was one of the "fair haired boys" who was being groomed for a fast trip up the executive ladder. I was confident to the point of being almost arrogant, I suspect. However, armed with my Ph.D. in engineering from Cornell, I really did not feel that I needed to take a back seat to anyone.
Like most American I had become used to tales of conflict in the Middle East. I had also gotten over the fear of something ever happening to our biggest supplier of oil, Saudi Arabia. Well as it turned out the defenses around the Saudi oil fields were not as adequate as we had assumed, and indeed as our President and the Saudi King had promised us.
The morning began as usual. I woke up and stumbled into the kitchen. I turned on the TV to check up on the weather and the scores. I usually kept the sound down when I was working on the toast, orange juice, and grapefruit. I glanced over at the picture eventually, and I saw a picture of fire and huge clouds of smoke billowing skyward. Turning up the sound I stopped with the toast half way to my mouth. I heard the announcer say in a shrill, almost hysterical voice, "These are the most recent pictures of the Saudi oil fields burning out of control." Another voice cut in "It has been confirmed that the largest oil field in the world was hit today by a nuclear device. Experts now seem to agree that the disaster in not only the estimated millions of gallons of crude oil now burning every minute. The long term catastrophe is that the oil remaining after the fires are extinguished will be so radioactive that it will be unusable." My jaw dropped, and I tried to comprehend what this would mean to my world. I decided as I absently dropped my toast. "My world has just turned to shit, " I thought.
Six months later the news was no better, and I found that my prediction of my little part of the planet would be in deep shit was more correct than I had even dreamed when I saw those first pictures. There was an energy crisis like no one could have ever believed. A gallon of gas was not the $3.00 a gallon that had so excited everyone in earlier in the year. Now a gallon of gas was very a little over $600, and the economy of the United States was in what could might only be called the Mother of All Depressions because what had happened to the world economy was so total and so completely devastating that the Great Depression of the 1930's seem a pleasant technical correction. All of the vaunted technology was useless as there was not enough electricity to make it work. If you could afford to commute to work now, the trip was easy. Only a few - about 100 - could afford to drive to work on the extensive and expensive highways that now were virtually empty. Most persons were either riding a bicycle or one of those scooters like a Vespa which could go several hundred miles on a gallon of fuel. Farmers were faced with crops that they did not know how to harvest. The mammoth machines simply ate up too much fuel to allow harvest. I was hanging on to my job by a thread. Only because I had desperately told my superiors that I could engineer some very energy efficient vehicles had my ass not joined the millions who no longer had work. Crime was skyrocketing as desperate people did desperate things to survive. The prisons of the nation were stuffed with prisoners, and states had little money to feed and watch this glut of prisoners.
It was at this point that the Governor of the great State of Iowa suddenly hit the country with a way out. He made an address to the legislature of Iowa in which he asked them to solve the problem of the massive overcrowding of the state prisons by turning these prisoners from tax drains into tax gains, and at the SAME TIME, solving the crisis facing the state's farmers of having crops in the fields that they could not afford to harvest with the low mpg and high cost of the fuel for those mammoth machines that used to do the harvest. Governor remembered the exact wording the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution which prohibited slavery in the United States. The Governor remembered that there was a specific exception made in this prohibition of enslaving persons - prisoners.
The Governor asked for authorization from the legislature to sell prisoners to farmers as slaves for the length of their imprisonment for the farmers to use on the farms. The machines were useless but the farmers could put a gang of slaves to work with the old fashioned hand tools to harvest the crop. The legislators were thrilled with the idea, and the same night each house of the legislature went back to their respective chambers, passed the legislation that the governor had proposed, and sent it to the Governor, who signed this change in status for the states penile population.
The first slave auction was a great success, and the predictable challenge by the ACLU got the fast track appeals to the Supreme Court. When Chief Justice Scalia and his super conservative and government power loving associate justices heard the case, the decision came back in ONE WEEK. The Governor of Iowa was sustained, Prisoners were specifically excluded from the ban on slavery, and the prisoners could be shipped to their new owners. It was noted that they were indentured servants and not slaves, but everyone knew they were slaves by any other word and would be treated and used as slave labor.
Therefore any person who had been convicted of a crime could be sold as an indentured servant (slave) for the length of the sentence. States legislatures across the nation rushed into session to make their prison population into hard working assets for the state and the nation, and not freeloading drains on the public treasury. The Supreme Court in its unanimous opinion had also stated that the only restraint on the use of these prisoners would be the same as were in place when the Constitution was adopted. Therefore prisoners used as indentured servants were no longer protected from almost unfettered use of corporal punishment. States followed across the nation with laws allowing owners the broadest powers to make these indentured slaves work as hard as possible, and also allowed their owner to decide on what tasks they would be ordered to do. The only real problem an owner could get into in his or her use of the prisoner slave would be if the slaved died. That was destruction of public property, and even owners could find themselves under arrested, convicted and under the whip for killing a prisoner slave.
All of a sudden there was work for makers of restraints - chain makers and handcuff and shackle makers first hired workers, and then bought slave-workers to turn out the needed implements of a slave based economy - whips, chains, shackles, cuffs, slave prods, and bars for all sorts of cages. Even Purina was thrilled as it produced a bland but totally nutritious slave chow which flew off the shelves on to the backs of and then into the stomachs of the newly created slaves.
"We may have lost our imported back gold, as oil used to be called," the Governor of Iowa proudly proclaimed, "but we have found an abundance of black and white gold in the bodies of our prisoners right here in the Unites States. " The Governor ended with a screamed "WE ARE ENERGY INDEPENDENT NOW!" The crowd cheered for seven minutes.
The new class of prisoner slaves were not cheering, but they also were not being consulted. Since the prisoner population he United States had been primarily late teen to early thirties, slaves were in their prime years for work. It was interesting that although the new slave population was primarily black - as in the good old days - there was a sufficiently high number of white prisoners who became slaves just as quickly as the black prisoners, that no longer was slave synonymous with black. The new slave population was an equal opportunity situation for all races now, and indeed there was a certain status to having some white slaves as well as black. As their new owners smugly said "New Black gold and New White Gold providing the power for a stronger and independent America."
I started engineering vehicles for the slave owner to use in both transporting goods, and for personal use. I used all sorts of space age materials and an appreciation of physics to create "new slave-powered highly efficient and cost effective trucks." I also created personal slave - powered "cars" which used one, two, and eventually four and eight slaves to power and to move the slave owner in comfort and luxury down the old freeways to their destination. The slave owner could even have air-conditioning with a small compressor running off a wheel which added just a little more resistance for the slave engine to overcome. The ads did not mention how much more work the slaves would have to do, since no owner really cared, but did emphasize that YOU could be in air-conditioned comfort and reasonably expect your slave team to maintain the same pace as before.
It was, I have to admit, my motivation for self preservation and improvement and not a concern to keep from making the life of the slave more tolerable that I worked so hard on this efficiency. I knew that if the air-conditioning made slaves less able to keep up the pace and distance that their owners expected that there would be complaints, and I might be denied my bonus or in the very worse case - fired. I also was blithely unconcerned about the stories outlining the large number of offenses that were now punished by life penile servitude (slave-for -life) . If you were a male in your late teens and up to thirty, you needed to be very law-abiding. The numbers of men arrested, convicted and sentenced was no longer a burden on a state, but a cash cow that made the money states used to make from gambling seem insignificant by comparison. The death penalty was universally abolished. However murderers were now created a special category of slave. These slaves could be worked harder, and were subject to no-questions-asked punishments for any deviation from working as hard as they could for their owners. These slaves knew that even if they were whipped to death, their owners only had to file a report that this category "M" slave ("M" for murderer) had died. There were no questions asked about how or why. There were lurid stories of some murderers who worked in the mines and quarries until they could not keep up, and then were sent to a rendering plant so that their very in shape bodies could be harvested for parts. They were kept alive as their parts were systematically removed bit by bit from them until at the last the internal organs were all harvested. The final remains were ground up for slave chow, or other animal feed products.