Nor Gloom of Night
by Gary Phillips
How ironic these days many on the left are not in the streets advocating for revolution, out to storm the barricades and overturn the government, but fighting to preserving the bureaucracy. The right has mounted effective attacks on undercutting the rights and benefits of public workers, curtailing Social Security—a Ponzi scheme on the young, proclaims presidential aspirant, Governor of Texas Rick Perry, and has also set its sights on the venerable Post Office. An institution that has fallen mightily in the eyes of the general public since its inception with the help of Founding Father Ben Franklin, our first Postmaster General. It is a 263-year-old institution around before the establishment of the Constitution.
It used to be working for the postal service was seen as a staple of Americana. Manly work in fact, virile and vital. Didn’t Buffalo Bill Cody and Wild Bill Hickok have to use their fists and uncanny pistol mastery to establish the Pony Express? As they had to in the ’50s film Pony Express with Charlton Heston and Forrest Tucker as the cowboy legends. Or what about the Tales of Wells Fargo, a TV show from the early ’60s about the outfit that initially started by purchasing part of the Pony Express route in California? In the episodic Dale Robertson was Jim Hardee, a six-gun slinging troubleshooter for the company solving gold robberies, mail thefts and such. These macho men blazed the path for the postal worker as a solid citizen.
Why here comes Mr. Caruthers in that Leave it to Beaver or Father Knows Best episode bringing that package from Aunt Martha in Milwaukee. As he handed you the post, you exchanged a few pleasantries with him and wished him well as he went on with his duties. At the local barbershop you’d encounter Mr. Caruthers on his day off, having a lively checkers game with Ned Winslow, the plumber. There was no grumbling about Mr. Caruthers’ being able to work and retire with a humble pension because maybe you too had a pension in your future from the factory. Going postal was an unknown phrase then and the Post Office wasn’t the butt of jokes about lazy staff always going on breaks when it was just your turn to come up to their window.
Not exactly sure when the wheels began to come off the wagon image-wise for the Post Office, but we’ve all complained about the long lines at the local post office. How they weren’t friendly and helpful at the window, and just what was it all those people in the back were doing when there was only one person up front. In what seemed to have a class undercurrent, my fellow Wilshire Vistans of various ethnicities were unhappy a few years ago because our mail came out of the West Adams station set back in a large strip mall on Washington a block or so east of Crenshaw when what they wanted was for the mail to come out of the Pruess Station on Pico, near La Cienega. I went to a packed community meeting held with our then councilman Martin Ludlow where there were various complaints about the distance to go pick up a package, the longer lines, and the, well, ’hood ambiance of the other station’s surroundings.
We’ve come to accept because of e-mailing and competition from the likes of FedEx and UPS, that this is the reason the United States Postal Service is today on the ropes and bankruptcy looms. That the taxpayer is on the hook for a bunch of feather-bedded union members who get to retire on full pensions when they wrench their wrists delivering the mail. Yet according to a piece that ran on Truthout on September 8 by Allison Kilkenny, the reality is, not surprisingly, different than the perception.
Since the Postal Reorganization Act of 1970, the Post Office has been mandated to be revenue neutral. It’s supposed to break even, and makes its money from the sale of stamps and other products. Even in this cyber age, in 2006, the Post Office handled the largest volume of mail in its history. That same year, Kilkenny notes, Congress passed the Postal Accountability Act wherein the Post Office was mandated to fully fund future retiree health benefits. This is the only federal or semi-federal agency required to do so. And it seems the deficit the Post Office faces could be easily corrected given they’ve made overpayments into the retiree system.
But they’re being stymied from doing this by the likes of California’s Darrell Issa (R-Vista). The once alarm king, who spearheaded the end of affirmative action here with his Proposition 209 in 1996, now chairs the House’s Oversight and Government Reform committee. It’s not ideologically or practical in his and fellow right wingers’ interest to have the Post Office, the second largest employer in the United States—Wal-Mart being first—intact. What with a union of some 500,000, a union with a good number of people of color members that generally leans into the Democratic camp. This is not an entity Issa and his ilk get warm and fuzzy about.
What to do? Taking our cue from films like the aforementioned Pony Express, Postal Inspector (a 1936 effort wherein stalwart postal inspector Ricardo Cortez battles shady nightclub owner Bela Lugosi, up to no good using the mail system in a scheme) and the two Lou Gossett starring Showtime movies with him as another stalwart postal inspector battling a mail bomber and a credit card fraud outfit, time to boost the institution’s public image once more. We need to stand up for institutions that are meant to exist in the name of the public good. The Post Office can be remade as cool and noble again. Give it that defiant quality like what Kevin Costner did in the post-apocalyptic future in The Postman, where delivering the mail becomes a symbolic act of knitting communities together.
Our story opens in a back room of conspirators. Revolution is in the air and anxiety is high as there are snitches and double agents about. The setting is right before the Revolutionary War and Postmaster General Ben Franklin has assembled a grouping of men and women, white and black, to take a secret oath as a special branch of the Culper Ring, an actual spy network under General George Washington.
This grouping, we’ll call it Branch X, operates behind the scenes throughout the decades and centuries to come in preventing mail robberies, presidential assassination, mad bombers and on and on. Jim Hardee, Wild Bill Hickok (his death holding aces and eights at the poker table in Deadwood is revealed as a planned killing by the enemies of Branch X), Major Taylor, the Worcester Whirlwind, a black cyclist champ from the early 1900s, Amelia Earhart and others will be shown in stories as secret agents of Branch X. This will lead us to stories of today and the derided, self-doubting, but nonetheless dedicated servants who will give new meaning to the words: “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds."
Dear Ed ,
In my youth, I was a proud postal worker. Today, hundreds of thousands of Americans are postal workers – the largest unionized workforce we have left.
The U.S. Postal Service is our most trusted government agency. It provides universal service to all Americans – rich or poor, urban or rural. It receives not a penny in taxpayer subsidy.
And it faces destruction – thanks to Republicans in Congress, acting for huge corporations through a manufactured “Shock Doctrine” crisis.
This is an attack on unionized public workers like the attacks on teachers and state workers in
Help save the post office by forcing a vote on HR 1351, a bill cosponsored by 211 Congress members -- almost half the House of Representatives.
Click to contact Congress and to find out where there's a "Save America’s Postal Service" rally near you tomorrow (Tuesday).
The postal service would be operating in surplus if not for a bill rammed through the Republican Congress in a voice vote in December 2006, and signed by President Bush. The bill required $5 billion annual PRE-payments toward retiree health benefits for 75 years into the future – “something no other government or private corporation is required to do,” asserts Ralph Nader.
HR 1351, drafted by Democratic Rep. Stephen Lynch, would end this sabotage and save the post office -- without a single penny of taxpayer funding.
Tell your Representative to sign a discharge petition to force HR 1351 to the floor of the full House despite the obstruction of GOP Committee Chair Darrell Issa.
And please forward this email to your friends.
A decent society requires a postal system that serves everyone, everywhere, at a low price.
If corporate forces take over, imagine no more mail delivery or pick up one day.
Imagine all hardcopy communications, including with your elected representatives, subject to the tender mercies of corporate delivery. (Emails to Congress are already handled by Lockheed Martin.)
As the great Joni Mitchell told us: “You don't know what you've got till it's gone.”
Take action now.
Sincerely,
Jeff Cohen
and the RootsAction team
P.S. Our small staff is supported by contributions from people like you; your donations are greatly appreciated.
Resources:
“The Great Postal Heist” video
Statement from National Association of Letter Carriers local leader
Ralph Nader letter
Column by American Postal Workers Union local leader
Congress' Lockheed Martin Internet
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