and Other Ideas About Peace
The age of big oil would have us think that livestock and agriculture are health hazards within communities or cities. Funny that Big Oil and auto manufacturers would notice that about horses. I say manufacturing will never surpass the horse. Because the horse reproduces itself. Can your car do that?
But there are ways to live with superior environmental stewardship and less cost. More below the fold, after the wake-up call.
The Wake-Up Call
We need to examine what we do in the US for a living. Does everyone realize that our State department actually brokers arms deals with "clients" worldwide? Actually supplying war tools in wars where we face no national threat? From Wikipedia:
U.S. arms are sold either as Foreign military sales (FMS), in which The Pentagon is an intermediate negotiator, or as Direct Commercial Sales (DCS), where a company directly negotiates with its buyer. Many sales require a license from the State Department. The Defense Department manages the Excess Defense Articles (EDA), weapons from the US military given away or sold at bargain prices, emergency drawdowns, assistance provided at the discretion of the President, and International Military Education and Training (IMET).
Our government trains whom for what?
In fiscal year 2002, $70 million USD was spent on International Military Education and Training IMET for 113 countries. During this same year, $46 million worth of drawdowns were provided to Nigeria ($4 million), Afghanistan ($2 million), Georgia ($25 million), the Philippines ($10 million) and Tunisia ($5 million).
From this source:
The U.S. government is training soldiers in upwards of 70 countries at any given time. The most transparent, and consequently well known of these training programs is the Pentagon's International Military Education and Training Program (IMET). Recent graduates as well as soldiers soon to be trained by this program come from countries at war or with horrific human rights records, including Indonesia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Congo, and Cote d'Ivoire.
Do most of us have any idea what our government does in the name of warfare? From the same source as above:
Of the active conflicts in 1999, the United States supplied arms or military technology to parties in more than 92% of them --39 out of 42. In over one-third of these conflicts - 18 out of 42 - the United States provided from 10% to 90% of the arms imported by one side of the dispute.
In the period from 1998-2001, over 68% of world arms deliveries were sold or given to developing nations, where lingering conflicts or societal violence can scare away potential investors
We, the people, have a hard reckoning about how our nation makes money. Again, from Wikipedia:
The United States is by far the largest exporter of weapons in the world, with a sales volume that exceeds the next 14 countries combined. Military sales equate to about 18 percent of the Federal budget, far and away the greatest proportion of any nation. (Estimated budget authority as presented in the President's budget.) John Ralston Saul states that the American government cannot reduce arms sales because of the consequent fall in GDP.
_________
So how do we dial down from an oil/war economy? How do we prepare to tighten the belt as we wean the country off of weapons manufacture?
In Mexico we see people riding horses down cobblestone streets, and for me it suggests the 1970’s in Montana. There were still horse- or pony-driven carriages used in town. We rode horses all over, for every family with a little land had horses, which was a way of life for common people in those times. Land and horses were not exclusively for the rich. It simply was the agrarian way of life. Kids rode horses everywhere in Livingston, Montana. Now the rich have seized all the lands peripheral to public lands, closed access, the town people have paved all the cinder paths where we used to ride, and made equestrian access impossible in many areas. My old riding pal says she has to haul her horses at least fifteen miles out of town to find forest access. And to think we used to ride directly into the mountains from town with no problem...
But the myth that horses would destroy peoples’ health took them off most US streets. Not as early as one might think, either. My husband, born 1943 in St. Paul, saw horse-drawn vehicles bring ice, milk, haul garbage, and other commerce until the 1950’s. Most families in the US could not afford cars until after 1945 or later.
That’s big oil for you. Most of the readers on Dkos are probably too young to remember the years when horses worked in urban areas. Horses are now thought of as the sole province of the rich and elite except for cowboys. And thus our modernity has betrayed us to think we no longer have any use for the animals, that we have to reinvent the horse in the name of needing cars. But it’s food for thought. Life could be far less manufacture-dependent, expensive, and chemically filthy.
Idea: fight our nation’s dependence on big oil by community design incorporating such things as the horse and land reform. Why? We need to ask ourselves just what big oil, industrialization, big banking and the entire rehash of indentured servitude known as "progress" have really done for us as a people. We have more "stuff." But we’re also dying of debt. Our land, air and water is being raped and poisoned. Pursuit of oil has invested our nation in war beyond comprehension.
Much work can feasibly be done with horses, which can drastically reduce costs and oil consumption. Imagine a lot of communities where town centers are closed off to most vehicles. Deliveries are trucked/railroaded to a peripheral location, where they are then brought into the center by horse-drawn vehicles. Special lanes of traffic are dedicated to horse traffic, and horse-drawn trolleys and taxi cabs are available to citizens.
Why in the US have we mostly banished horses from our daily lives? There never were more excellent "vehicles" of transportation. Yes they produce manure, but surely modern society is clever enough to harvest and manage this, perhaps by designating certain roads for horses. There exist "poop diapers" often used on donkeys in more agrarian countries to keep waste off the streets. One thing is for certain, horses don’t destroy the air the way the internal combustion engine does. If one is unable to ride, they still can pull a heated cab. Horses don’t freeze up in the winter.
You could say with this thought that there is much unsung potential for getting big oil out of our lives, and the Congress people who live by their money. I guess you could say a call back to horses is revolutionary whether you would welcome it or not.
Another thing probably beyond the memory of most readers here was the prevalence of railroads. In the 1960’s it was not a given that trucking should rule transportation. The railroads were healthy, functional and nearly ubiquitous then. But the same way the banks and oil interests convinced farmers to go into debt to replace work animals with tractors, big oil eventually won the fight for transportation. A wild series of railroad mergers (which would not have withstood scrutiny of anti-trust legislation, had the public gotten serious about preserving railroads) put what was once a public trust back into the pockets of the rich. People don’t realize that the nation was checkerboarded with lands assigned as public trust for development of the railroads, as well as timber and other natural resources. The robber barons gradually appropriated these for their own. Is it too late to question that before Congress?
In fifty-plus years the people of the US have been moved off their lands and into urban areas ostensibly to serve the factories for forty years until they can retire to backyard barbeques and hobby gardens. By this we see what our joys and priorities are, but in the name of modernity our nation mostly complied and gave it all up. Even in the public education system we were marched into auditoriums to watch movies about the joys of modernism. Factory work was glorified.
Meanwhile ranchers and farmers were steadily suckered into increasing levels of debt to afford all the shiny new manufactured farm equipment. Yes it made increased production possible (the soul of capitalism, to "expand capital") in farming, but this was because the producers increased their debt load in direct proportion to their increased yield, and eventually in the late 70’s a majority of farmers/ranchers faced foreclosure on their loans and lost the land. So production increased - how then was it worth it, to lose the land and a way of life? Are we happier now in suburbia as a nation, using over-priced housing as an ATM card, ready now to be foreclosed upon and driven not only off land, but out of housing ownership?
I say in the face of the "system" which has steadily beguiled people for three generations to go into debt, it is time for land reform. I’m not kidding. We have, as a people, gradually gotten accustomed to the idea that we must be factory workers or other widgets for corporations, do things that would not be our first lifestyle choice for decades, wait for years or ever suffer mortgages before ownership of housing. But we need to examine the ways in which we were removed from an entitlement to land, which was the premise for our forebears ever even coming to the US. Land to the coffin boat Irish, whom the British were forcing off their real estate, was the promise that made them suffer what they did to come here. People usually didn’t immigrate to the US to rent.
But now we accept that as a way of life. Well, tough, Congress. Pay day should arrive now. We may need now to insist that of all the public lands, we be allowed to have our own. We, the people, need to have land as a right, not slave for it in what is now often a less responsible indentured servitude than was suffered in feudal Europe. We assume that instead the petroleum companies should hold leases on the public lands to rob it of its oil and gas, that earnings from the same should roll into public coffers, and then trickle down. Well for one, start enquiring of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) as to how cheaply the oil, gas, timber and mining people acquire these leases! They pay the public next to nothing for all the mineral and resource extraction.
But oh, it’s "good for the economy." There’s another "truism" forced upon our collective understanding. Ummm... pull up to the gas pump and ask yourself where the money goes.
Get maps, look at all the land out west held by the BLM. This as it stands is devoted mostly to energy producers, who really aren’t paying the public a thing for all their rape of the lands and destruction of our aquifers. Behold, all the open land managed by the BLM. Yes some has scant water yield. But weren’t we once a clever people in the WPA era, capable of putting in water lines, canals, public works? Central Wyoming and her farmers are testimony to this.
The end of huge cities? So everyone can’t all live in the same place. Maybe the idea of living crunched together in huge cities has to go. Maybe a more tenable lifestyle is possible by spreading ourselves out more. And breaking dependence on automobiles and the ways and wiles of big oil, mass production, and their major spin-off product: war.
Because that is most of what the US produces. That and debt, known globally as the credit bubble. Or "financial services."
We can design new communities, new ways of life. Yes we can look into ethanol, still avail ourselves of technologies that don’t destroy our planet. We can also engage in cooperative agriculture. We can resurrect horse culture. We can develop new communities that employ the best of everything, also offering public stables, horse by-ways, whatever. This doesn’t mean we forsake everything manufactured. We don’t have to live like the Amish to do this. But I say we need to break our paradigms that hook us into banking and oil as a people, and the inevitable by-product of war.
Look at the nearly 9 trillion dollar national debt. Here is our price tag for "progress.". Do the arithmetic: if every soul’s share of the national debt is half a million dollars, just how then have we gotten ahead? More in debt than ever, more despairing of health care than ever, and shackled to the mentality of warfare. Some progress indeed. We need to mend our ways as a people. We need to question how we make our income as a nation.
Interested in more about the changing west? I’m working on a three-part series titled "the Montana Index" which will discuss who we are as a people and an economy, particularly in light of recent Montana history.
The first is about the global credit bubble, and how the rich are expatriating themselves and their assets from the US in record numbers. A lot of critics believe this is because they are terrified about 1) what will happen when the credit bubble bursts, bringing on global economic collapse, and 2) how the current administration certainly could take advantage of that due to asset confiscation laws passed through the Patriot Act(s). The inspiration for the title has to do with the rich buying out most of the best land in Montana to build retreat properties for billionaires and mountain compounds equipped for Armageddon-style living in a post-economically-collapsed world. I grew up there, have watched the place be sold off to the rich. I can guarantee that the powerful and rich are, for whatever reasons, literally heading for the hills. I am getting good coaching on a teach-in about "hedge funds for beginners" written for the non-economist. In terms you could take to the pub.
The second has a working title of "life imitates art," a meditation on how Hollywood invaded Montana (Redford shot Horse Whisperer and A Realtor Runs Through It in my hometown of Livingston Montana, which is how I became an accidental observer/critic of the super rich (hence Congress). The diary examines ways the media has mis-educated us as to who we are as a people, focusing in particular about perverting the cowboy legacy (my forebears for generations in Montana were "cowboys" and ranchers) to the end that we have the White House we now do. But the current rodeo athletes and politicians are hardly representative of the ranching people known as cowboys. Note: there are cowboys all over Mexico (caballeros) and they still ride horses and tend cattle.
The third is an exploration of the conflict between big oil and railroading in the 1960’s, in particular the national conflict over the merger of the Burlington, Northern Pacific and Great Northern Railroads. My hometown of Livingston, Montana, due to lying midway between Minneapolis and Seattle where key repair shops on the railroad line serviced locomotives, became the flashpoint for a stand-off between big oil vs. railroading. The Montana Democratic party, my parents and the late Hon. Senator Mike Mansfield joined together for an historical populist moment in 1964 when it fell to the Montana Congress to decide upon the merger. Together the Democrats worked to prove the merger was illegal, which led to a seven-year moratorium on the merger, and seven more prosperous years to the entire nation by protecting railroads. In 1970 the merger again came up, and was approved. Hence the decimation of US railroad culture.