“Animal Farm” was George Orwell’s satirical allegory of a popular revolution gone wrong. He was writing about Stalinism, of course. The animals’ founding ideal, “All animals are equal,” devolves over time with the addition of “but some animals are more equal than others.” The Russian revolution had not eliminated class struggle, only redefined the ruling class.
This country’s founding “all men are created equal” was never true. Women were second-class citizens and “other Persons” (slaves) were property. Efforts over two and a half centuries at forming “a more perfect Union” have met with some movement toward realizing the original ideal. Quite a bit of blood has been spilled securing what “equal” there is. Nonetheless, the human dynamics that ruined the animals’ experiment in self-government in Orwell’s tale have worked just as quietly at ensuring some persons are more equal than others in our system.
It was always so. It’s just that “persons” now includes legally constructed artificial ones: corporations.
There is no time this morning for another disquisition on that subject. But there is a pressing example of our government’s creeping preference for private, profit-driven artificial persons (and their owners) over new “other Persons.” Support for persons operating collectively in support of the “general welfare” has eroded over time. Profit-driven persons are more equal in the eyes of an American ruling class now more equal than almost anywhere else in the world.
Sarah Jones at New York Magazine’s Intelligencer examines the dire financial situation facing the U.S. Postal Service. The former Cabinet department is authorized in the U.S. Constitution as one of those not-for-profit, general-welfare functions the framers envisioned as government’s responsibility. Now an independent executive branch agency, the USPS employs over 600,000 persons, many of them veterans and members of minorities. Like schoolteachers, they stand between privatizers and their profits.
As on Orwell’s farm, “some persons are more equal than others” has slowly crept into the way government officials see the business of governance. The notion that it is government’s job to provide postal services universally and at a uniform price on a not-for-profit basis to all states and territories has adversaries. Profit-driven adversaries.
Jones begins by laying out USPS’s current dilemma:
As Americans shelter in place across the country, the U.S. Postal Service has assumed special importance in their lives. Postal workers deliver medicines and toiletries; in states that allow voting by mail, they help democracy function. But the economic crisis created by the novel coronavirus has dealt a serious blow to the USPS, and the Trump administration isn’t prepared to help. The recent stimulus package omitted any assistance for the USPS, which employs over 600,000 people. “We told them very clearly that the president was not going to sign the bill if [money for the Postal Service] was in it,” an anonymous White House aide told the Washington Post. “I don’t know if we used the V-bomb, but the president was not going to sign it, and we told them that.”
Though the pandemic has created an acute crisis for the USPS, the postal service has been vulnerable for a long time. To conservatives, it’s an obstacle in the path to small government, and some support its full privatization. A 2006 law requiring the postal service to fund retirement health benefits ahead of time created further financial strain. The Trump White House may believe it has a rare opportunity before it to allow the USPS to die. That would be a disaster for workers, and for the millions of Americans who rely on the postal service.
Jones spoke with Mark Dimondstein, president of the American Postal Workers Union (APWU) about the acute challenges the service now faces. The union represents around 200,000 postal service workers, and is asking Congress in its next stimulus package for the same kind of bailout funding it so generously provided to the airline industry.
Read the interview here and please urge your congresscritters to allocate some “Benjamins” to saving Benjamin Franklin’s baby. Don’t let the disaster capitalists turn over this universal service to the private sector and add to the instability in people’s lives wrought by the pandemic.
Dimondstein talks about the stability universal health care would bring to people’s lives and to the general welfare:
Let me give you an example in this moment, about how important society-based health care is versus employer-based health care. Our people have good health care. And we’re still paying tons of money and getting less year after year after year. Now look at what’s happened in this crisis. Millions and millions of workers who are in unions, including many who aren’t in unions, that had employer-based health care lost it overnight. It is not society-based. There’s no stability now. People have to make a choice between paying rent and seeing a doctor during this crisis.
The other part of it is, if we don’t have a collective approach to each other, we all suffer. Because if the person standing in line with us at the grocery store in a pandemic doesn’t have health care and they’re sick, we’re going to be sicker. And so I think that one of the lessons we learned from this tragedy is that we truly have to be our brother’s keeper. And what better way to make sure that health care is not just based on profit, but that it’s there for everybody?
Not to mention postal services.
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For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.
Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way by June, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.