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Now
When I was growing up in New England
during the 1940's, the symbol for reliability, punctuality, and
efficiency was the United States Post Office. Indeed, people
could almost tell the time of day by the postman's twice a day
delivery rounds.
Unfortunately, ever since President
Lyndon B. Johnson appointed a commission to reorganize the Post
Office on "a business basis" in 1967, the postal system
has been in a defensive posture, tied down by demands from such
groups as major corporate mailers, competitive rivals, and partisan
politicos. There has been no place for bold new ventures of the
past, such as Rural Free Delivery, Parcel Post, Postal Savings,
or Air Mail. If the Post Office Department had been responding
to the profit-making demands of the market or to the political
influence of large corporations none of these advances would
have even been attempted. Parcel Post, lest we forget, was introduced
in the face of corporate competitors' opposition due to the fact
that they were providing an entirely unsatisfactory, oftentimes
price gouging, service to large parts of the nation.
President Ronald Reagan called
government "the problem." Was government the problem
when the Post Office made open communications between the Continental
Congress and George Washington's army possible during the Revolutionary
War? Was government the problem when the Post Office provided
invaluable aid to the establishment of a vibrant national and
local press by delivering periodicals throughout the land? How
about when the Post Office Department constructed a national
infrastructure for aviation? Is government the problem when letters
and packages from home reach military personnel in distant parts
of the world today? Or when citizen organizations are enabled
or often made possible by a non-profit postage rate? When universal
service--uniform service at uniform rates throughout the country--allows
friends and families to exchange letters, cards, and packages?
When semi-postals raise tens of millions of dollars for breast
cancer research? When the National Association of Letter Carriers'
National Food Drive collects over 70 million pounds of food to
help alleviate the nation's shameful hunger crisis? Through the
postal system, as Christopher Shaw describes in Preserving
the People's Post Office, the national government has long
played a beneficial role in our lives. For that and other ideological
reasons, corporatists with no regard for the value of universal
postal service are waging a campaign to destroy the world's finest
postal system.
Absence of an understanding
of the Postal Service as a public service has allowed corporatists
to obscure our postal system's defining mission: "to bind
the nation together." There are promoters of a corporate
postal system who would ultimately like to steal the Postal Service
from the American people by eliminating its public service function
and "privatizing" (i.e. corporatizing) it. Operation
of the postal system on "a business basis" has helped
make their case for them.
Preserving the People's
Post Office demonstrates
how a patronizing attitude toward the individual postal patron--"Aunt
Minnie"--that accompanies a corporate mindset has caused
service reductions for the general public, as the relentless
pressure of corporate demands for receiving preferential services
burdens the citizenry more and more. Instead of focusing on new
ways for our government to serve its citizens through the Postal
Service, service reductions--such as closing post offices, removing
collection boxes, and ending door delivery--have shifted emphasis
to business practices focusing on how much the traffic will bear,
further diminishing the spirit of public service.
The recent push for postal
"reform" legislation demonstrates the degree to which
the public has been marginalized. Postal Service management,
major mailers, corporate ideologues, business competitors, postmaster
associations and the beleaguered postal unions have all been
included in this legislative process, but there has been a noticeable
absence--the consumer, who has been excluded from having a seat
at the table. Instead of being discarded, as they largely should
have been, the recommendations of the recent corporate dominated
President's Commission on the Postal Service, which were not
public service oriented, are apparent in the legislation.
Postal unions and postmaster
associations represent memberships committed to serving patrons,
and these organizations do show a willingness to reach out to
consumers. But the American Postal Workers Union has been the
sole union voice consistently advocating the universal public
service principle. Greater efforts on this front could reap even
larger rewards for both postal employees and postal patrons,
as united they could forge jointly a more robust and vital Postal
Service. An annual "Postal Appreciation Day" held in
towns throughout America, replete with a parade to the downtown
post office, would provide an opportunity for postal workers
and postal patrons to unite, interact, and demonstrate their
shared esteem for this valuable public institution.
Fortunately there is a single
solution that would go a long way toward solving this lack of
organized and skilled consumer participation--the proposal for
an independent non-profit Post Office Consumer Action Group (POCAG).
Several million people would join. All that is required is a
simple law directing the Postal Service to send residential postal
patrons a letter twice-a-year giving them the opportunity to
pay a small amount of dues in order to join POCAG. Postal officials
have been putting off this proposal for decades, but their excuses
for not delivering materials making consumers aware of POCAG
become more and more indefensible: The Postal Service has now
begun delivering postcards to all residences nationwide carrying
postal promotional messages from cartoon characters. So why not
send a notice for POCAG? Through this suggested action group,
residential postal consumers can become organized, as Mr. Shaw
describes, to shape consumer-friendly postal policies and create
an expanding and vigorous American postal system that would make
our first Postmaster General Benjamin Franklin proud.
For more information contact
info@csrl.org or send an old
fashioned letter to Mr. Christopher Shaw, P.O. Box 19367, Washington,
DC 20036.
CounterPunch
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