First Class: The U.S. Postal Service, Democracy, and the Corporate Threat - Brossura

Shaw, Christopher W.

Brossura

ISBN 10: 087286877X ISBN 13: 9780872868779

Casa editrice: City Lights Books, 2021

Riassunto

Investigating the essential role that the postal system plays in American democracy and how the corporate sector has attempted to destroy it.

"With First Class: The U.S. Postal Service, Democracy, and the Corporate Threat, Christopher Shaw makes a brilliant case for polishing the USPS up and letting it shine in the 21st century."—John Nichols, national affairs correspondent for The Nation and author of Coronavirus Criminals and Pandemic Profiteers: Accountability for Those Who Caused the Crisis

"First Class is essential reading for all postal workers and for our allies who seek to defend and strengthen our public Postal Service."—Mark Dimondstein, President, American Postal Workers Union, AFL-CIO

The fight over the future of the U.S. Postal Service is on. For years, corporate interests and political ideologues have pushed to remake the USPS, turning it from a public institution into a private business—and now, with mail-in voting playing a key role in local, state, and federal elections, the attacks have escalated. Leadership at the USPS has been handed over to special interests whose plan for the future includes higher postage costs, slower delivery times, and fewer post offices, policies that will inevitably weaken this invaluable public service and source of employment.

Despite the general shift to digital communication, the vast majority of the American people—and small businesses—still rely heavily on the U.S. postal system, and many are rallying to defend it. First Class brings readers to the front lines of the struggle, explaining the various forces at work for and against a strong postal system, and presenting reasonable ideas for strengthening and expanding its capacity, services, and workforce. Emphasizing the essential role the USPS has played ever since Benjamin Franklin served as our first Postmaster General, author Christopher Shaw warns of the consequences for the country—and for our democracy—if we don’t win this fight.

Praise for First Class:

"Piece by piece, an essential national infrastructure is being dismantled without our consent. Shaw makes an eloquent case for why the post office is worth saving and why, for the sake of American democracy, it must be saved."—Steve Hutkins, founder/editor of Save the Post Office and Professor of English at New York University

"The USPS is essential for a democratic American society; thank goodness we have this new book from Christopher W. Shaw explaining why."—Danny Caine, author of Save the USPS and owner of the Raven Book Store, Lawrence, KS

"Shaw's excellent analysis of the Postal Service and its vital role in American Democracy couldn't be more timely. … First Class should serve as a clarion call for Americans to halt the dismantling and to, instead, preserve and enhance the institution that can bind the nation together."—Ruth Y. Goldway, Retired Chair and Commissioner, U.S. Postal Regulatory Commission, responsible for the Forever Stamps

"In a time of community fracture and corporate predation, Shaw argues, a first-class post office of the future can bring communities together and offer exploitation-free banking and other services."—Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen

Su questo libro

Informazioni sull?autore

Christopher W. Shaw is an author, historian, and policy analyst. He has a Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Berkeley, and is the author of Money, Power, and the People: The American Struggle to Make Banking Democratic (University of Chicago Press, 2019) and Preserving the People’s Post Office (Essential Books, 2006). His research on the history of banking, money, labor, agriculture, social movements, and the postal system has been published in the following academic journals: Journal of Policy History, Journal of Social History, Agricultural History, Enterprise & Society, Kansas History, and Journalism History. Shaw was formerly a project director at the Center for Study of Responsive Law. He has worked on a number of policy issues, including the privatization of government services, health and safety regulations, and electoral reform. He has appeared in such media outlets as the Associated Press, National Public Radio, Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor, New York Post,Village Voice, Philadelphia Inquirer, and Buffalo News, among others. He lives in Berkeley, CA.

Named by The Atlantic as one of the hundred most influential figures in American history, and by Time and Life magazines as one of the most influential Americans of the twentieth century, Ralph Nader has helped us drive safer cars, eat healthier food, breathe better air, drink cleaner water, and work in safer environments for more than four decades. Nader was instrumental in the creation of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CSPC), and the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA). Many lives have been saved by Nader's involvement in the recall of millions of unsafe consumer products, including defective motor vehicles, and in the protection of laborers and the environment. By starting dozens of citizen groups, Ralph Nader has created an atmosphere of corporate and governmental accountability. Nader's recent books include Breaking Through Power with City Lights, Unstoppable, and The Good Fight. His Animal Envy, A Parable was published by Seven Stories Press in the fall of 2016. Nader writes a syndicated column, has his own radio show, and gives lectures and interviews year round.

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INTRODUCTION

 

In a vast, diverse nation, the United States Postal Service provides a unique common bond. The familiar footsteps of a uniformed federal employee arriving with the mail. The creak when the handle of the blue mailbox on the street corner is pulled to drop a letter inside. The postal clerk behind the counter whom you have known for years. The ubiquitous eagle profile emblazoned on the side of a mail truck navigating a busy city street. The tunnel-shaped mailbox standing alongside a country road with its red flag raised to signal the need for a collection. These are all part of the everyday experience of being an American in the twenty-first century.

For more than two centuries, the U.S. Mail has occupied a central place in our national life. The reliability of the U.S. post office is a hallmark that generations of Americans have depended on and taken for granted. Given this history, there was widespread shock and outrage when events during the summer of 2020 suddenly made the vulnerability of the Postal Service broadly apparent. In the middle of a pandemic, with a fast-approaching presidential election that demanded an unprecedented reliance on vote-by-mail, Louis DeJoy—a major Republican Party donor who had no previous experience at the agency—became postmaster general and launched a cost-cutting program that thoroughly disrupted postal operations. By cutting window hours at post offices, removing mail processing equipment, and uprooting blue mailboxes, DeJoy slowed down mail delivery nationwide.

Rallies to “Save the Post Office” arose in cities and towns nationwide. DeJoy was called before Congress to account for what looked like an attempt to dismantle the agency. “After 240 years of patriotic service delivering the mail,” Representative Stephen F. Lynch (D-Mass.) asked, “how can one person screw this up in just a few weeks? I understand you bring private sector expertise. I guess we couldn’t find a government worker who could screw it up this fast.” Like many observers, Lynch concluded that “either through gross incompetence, you have ended the 240-year history of delivering the mail reliably on time, or…you’re doing this on purpose…you’re deliberately dismantling this once-proud tradition.” The strong reaction both from the public and inside Congress forced DeJoy to halt his plans. This responsiveness to citizen action was an encouraging development, since for years the public has lacked adequate representation when postal policy is determined.

While DeJoy’s policies were unusually severe and startlingly abrupt, they fit a well-established pattern. For decades, corporate interests and anti-government ideologues have sought to transform the Postal Service from a government service that exists to benefit the public into a business that operates to meet financial objectives. Although the Postal Service’s purpose is to provide universal service at uniform rates to all people in the United States, this objective is under attack because it conflicts with commercial calculations and market imperatives. Anti-government ideologues want to eliminate the public service philosophy and transform the Postal Service into just another profit-maximizing corporation. This aim is one part of their broader campaign to eliminate and privatize government services generally. 

There are three main categories of corporations that take an active interest in postal policy: major mailers and the Postal Service’s competitors and contractors. Major mailers—corporations that send out bulk mailings—want low postage costs, which means they deem postal functions that are not directly involved with injecting their mail into mailboxes expendable. The mailers remain wary about privatization because they want to maintain the reach that universal service offers and ensure that mail continues to be delivered. A Postal Service that obeys the commercial logic and calculus of a business is useful because it will privilege what the industry wants over what the public needs. But a postal system operated solely for profit would seek to divert the mailers’ financial surplus to its own bottom line. 

Postal delivery and courier services are a source of concern to two of the most powerful corporations in Washington, D.C.—FedEx and UPS. While the both have an ideological bent toward privatization, the prospect of a privatized Postal Service is troubling to them because it would gain new freedom as a business competitor. Corporations in adjacent lines of business are similarly concerned with containing the agency and preventing it from offering additional services. Other corporate interests are eager to see postal functions outsourced so they can acquire these contracts. Such businesses would like to see postal operations privatized piece-by-piece until the Postal Service is privatized in everything but name. Although various pro-corporate interests are not in complete agreement about postal policy, they all are pushing to make the public postal system more “businesslike.”

The influence that corporate political interests exert over the Postal Service is extensive, but the agency’s official governing authority is the Board of Governors. The president appoints, and the Senate confirms, as many as nine governors to seven-year terms. No more than five of these officials can belong to one political party. The presidentially appointed governors select a postmaster general, who becomes a member of the board as well. This body then picks a deputy postmaster general, who also joins the board. Congress has authority over the Postal Service, but for years has exercised minimal oversight of the agency’s operations. Setting postage rates is often the most contentious postal policy issue, and this matter is the Postal Regulatory Commission’s responsibility. (Prior to 2007 this body was called the Postal Rate Commission.) Five commissioners who review rate changes are appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate for six-year terms. The president selects one of the commissioners to serve as chair. Like the Board of Governors, the Postal Regulatory Commission is designed to be bipartisan: no more than three members can belong to one political party.

The questions that postal officials face evolve constantly. Twenty-five years ago, despite the central role the postal system plays in the nation’s economy and society, the Postal Service has been cash-strapped for its entire existence. Operating under a mandate to be self-funding through the sale of postage ever since the Post Office Department became the United States Postal Service in 1971, the agency has functioned on a hand-to-mouth basis. And the enactment of a 2006 law that instructed the Postal Service to pay $5.5 billion every year for the next decade to pre-fund its future retirees’ healthcare created severe financial difficulties by converting long-term financial liabilities into short-term ones. No other government agency or private corporation is required to follow such an aggressive payment plan. Congress imposed this requirement to correct $71 billion in overpayments the Postal Service had made to its retirement fund. Yields on the Treasury bonds the fund was invested in had exceeded expectations, and pre-funding would offset the overpayments without increasing the federal budget deficit. But when the economic downturn following the financial crisis of 2008 reduced postal revenues, the onerous pre-funding requirement became a millstone.

The daily operations of the Postal Service have maintained a steady cash flow, but the enormous burden created by the pre-funding obligation has impeded the system’s capacity to update the sorting and transportation infrastructure required to handle more packages and less mail. At this time, the Postal Service also is in a unique position to make important social contributions by leveraging its existing network to offer new financial and electronic communication services. However, the same 2006 law that imposes the pre-funding mandate restricts the Postal Service’s ability to explore new services.

While accounting concerns have dominated recent discussions of the Postal Service’s future, our public postal system has existed to serve a larger purpose since its founding. The long-standing mission of the post office to “bind the nation together” by serving all the American people is inherently centered on an egalitarian vision of democracy. The Postal Service is an institution that touches the lives of the entire U.S. population on a daily basis, and it does not discriminate on the basis of race, class, or location. Every U.S. citizen is equal in the eyes of the Postal Service, and all are entitled to receive the same service. This affirmation of the principles of public interest, democracy, and equality makes an unequivocal statement to a diverse population that the national government exists to serve all equally. In First Class, I present an account of the U.S. postal system through the lens of those principles and argue why it is in our collective best interest not just to defend the system, but to strengthen and expand it.

As the Post Office approaches 250 years of operation, a moment of decision looms. Instead of allowing big business and idealogues to gut the agency’s public service mission and convert the postal system to a for-profit business, we should follow in the footsteps of Philadelphia’s “Merchant Prince” John Wanamaker who served as postmaster general from 1889 to 1893. Wanamaker was a business innovator who founded one of the first department stores and promoted ideas that became retail basics, such as price tags and money-back guarantees. Yet Wanamaker understood that the Post Office fulfilled a special social function precisely because it was not a business. “It is for the interest of a private company,” he observed, “to extend its business only so fast and so far as it is profitable; it is the aim of the government to extend its service wherever it is actually needed.” Wanamaker’s tenure at the Post Office ushered in a remarkable period of creativity and expansion. A skilled administrator, he oversaw numerous service improvements, including increasing the number of cities with home mail delivery, speeding up railroad transportation of mail, and establishing post offices on ocean liners. In addition, Wanamaker promoted home delivery of mail in rural areas, a postal package delivery service, and a post office savings bank, revolutionary reforms that subsequently became features of the twentieth-century postal system. 

A public service philosophy placed the postal system at the center of American life historically, and can guide the Postal Service to important future endeavors as well. Decades of neoliberal policies have hollowed out government institutions, marking the postal system as a striking example of democratic public service in this second Gilded Age. With millions of Americans lacking internet access and bank accounts, the Postal Service could promote the common good by extending affordable internet nationwide and offering banking services at its 30,000 post offices. In a period of deep social divisions, high inequality, and a diminished public sector, the Postal Service has a vital place in contemporary American society. The central role postal workers played in the 2020 election spurred more public interest in postal policies than at any other time in living memory. Sustained citizen engagement can ensure the Postal Service successfully defends itself against privatization and achieves its full potential as an instrument of democracy and the public interest.

Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: City Lights Books
• Data di pubblicazione: 2021
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 087286877X
• ISBN 13: 9780872868779
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 229
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile