Murderous Reform: A Plan to Privatize Postal Profits at Public Expense
January 10, 2013
BY GRAY BRECHIN
The National Academy of Public Administration has released a “Work-in-Progress” report entitled "Restructuring the U.S. Postal System: The Case for a Hybrid Public-Private Postal System." The Academy is now embarking on a study of this proposal, which would privatize a large portion of the country's postal system.
The
Academy's study is billed as an “Independent Review of a Thought Leader
Proposal to Reform the U.S. Postal Service.” Unfortunately, no study
conducted by a four-man panel chaired by David M. Walker, the former President and CEO of the libertarian Peter G. Peterson Foundation, can seriously claim either the independence or non-partisan objectivity that the Academy itself boasts.
It
has been my experience over the past 30 years that "hybrid
public-private partnerships" are often little more than a sedative
euphemism for the private sector taking the profits while the public
bears the costs. Such is the case with this "reform,” which will, as is
so often claimed in such instances, "unleash the power of market
forces" by transferring the USPS profit centers to the private sector
while saddling the public with the cost for "the last mile." Meanwhile,
the public is already being stripped of its assets in broad daylight
while the media sleeps.
The
proposal is predictably one-dimensional — as befits men who seemingly
have little or no sense of the public service mission for which the Post
Office was created 238 years ago under the direction of Benjamin
Franklin. Its purpose, then as now, was democracy and equality, not
efficiency or profit. Thus, the report omits much.
Nowhere
in the proposal is there any mention of unions, let alone of living
wages, so one can only presume that a primary means of reducing costs
will be to drive down the income of those postal employees who remain
after the USPS is radically downsized and diminished as proposed.
The
report also simplistically states that "the root cause of the postal
crisis is the historic change in how we communicate," omitting other
forces now undermining it such as Congress itself. Nor does it mention
the invaluable artistic, historic, social, environmental, and commercial
function of many post offices currently being thrown onto the market
with virtually no oversight. It neglects to say that a commercial real
estate firm (CBRE) chaired by Senator Dianne Feinstein's husband,
Richard Blum, is profiting from the sale of properties paid for by
taxpayers for well over a century.
Finally,
there is no serious discussion of alternatives characteristically
described in such reports as “out of the box” for making the USPS
solvent again, such as reviving the U.S. Postal Savings Bank and
providing other public services currently available outside this
country. That is because the self-proclaimed thought leaders who framed
the report do not actually seek to save the Postal Service but to
“reform” it virtually out of existence.
My
studies of the New Deal have revealed an ethos of public service that
seems entirely alien not only to the men who produced the Academy’s
blueprint but to current postal management as well as to those in
Congress who saddled the USPS with fiscal obligations seemingly designed
to eliminate it as a competitor to private carriers, a goal long sought
by those very carriers and by the libertarian think tanks they lavishly
fund.
Several
WPA-built structures here in California bear an inscription by the
Roman poet Virgil: "THE NOBLEST MOTIVE IS THE PUBLIC GOOD." The
Academy’s preliminary report contains nothing noble or new. Quite the
contrary, it is yet more of the same demonstrably failed neoliberal
experiment that has, over the past three decades, so disastrously
despoiled the U.S. economy as it has demoralized our citizens.
Unleashing
the power of market forces did not work so well in 1929 or in 2008, and
it will not do so again as those very forces seek to finish off the
public sector as a competitor once and for all. MORE
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