Weekend Economists Ring in the Old, Wring Out the New: Dec. 30, 2011 to Jan. 2, 2012

[Demeter]

107. Going Postal

http://www.truth-out.org/going-postal/1324663564

What kind of nation won’t fund a post office?

There was a time not too long ago when mantles lined with Christmas cards were as ubiquitous as Christmas trees, when birthdays bestowed us with similar arrays, when the US Postal Service would regularly visit our homes and drop off tangible graphic reminders that people loved us—that we were part of a community. Now our hundreds or thousands of Facebook “friends” hit a key and post to our pages. Our email inboxes might clog for a day or two with similar messages, laden with pop-ups to market us happiness or merriment in accordance with what the date requires. Offline, in the real world, where things have texture, our social environments grow more barren. Love, hate, and business, the pundits tell us, have migrated to email and social media, and hence that molluscan dinosaur, snail mail, is extinct.

But my disgust with the radical scheme to kill off the Postal Service has nothing to do with nostalgia or romanticism. The Postal Service is not a mere delivery service, an outdated, inefficient alternative to FedEx or UPS. It’s a public service that every nation on earth, except for Somalia, maintains, with the US joining Somalia as one of the only nations on earth not to fund a postal system. We used to fund it, from the birth of our nation until the Reagan presidency. It’s one of the only public services specifically addressed in the US Constitution—right in Article One. Its genesis dates back to the Second Continental Congress, which appointed Benjamin Franklin as our first postmaster general.
Delivering democracy

The original purpose of the Postal Service was not to deliver Christmas gifts or iPads but to deliver democracy.

AND WHEN THE UNION CAME IN, THAT WAS TWO GOOD REASONS FOR FASCISTS TO DISMANTLE IT. BESIDES, THE POST OFFICE WAS THE REFUGE OF VETERANS AND A SOURCE OF POLITICAL PATRONAGE...