May 28, 2013
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In 1906, surveyor Stephen Puter wrote a tell-all book from prison,
Looters of the Public Domain,
which details how Puter transferred thousands of acres of prime
timberlands in Oregon and Washington from public to private owners. This
sort of hustle was common in the 19th century, when much of the public
domain was enclosed and converted into private fortunes with
congressional help.
History is repeating itself today with the nation's postal service, and much of the press is asleep at the wheel.
The
public in 1906 became aware of frauds like Puter's because the U.S.
then had a diverse and competitive media environment willing to support
gumshoe journalists as well as a president willing to investigate and
prosecute criminal activity at the highest level — even U.S. senators of
his own party. How times have changed as we now watch the U.S. Postal
Service (USPS) looted like prime timberland. A venerable institution
that helped build the country is being gutted. This is not, as the
mainstream media slothfully claims, because the Internet has rendered it
obsolete, but because it represents lumber ripe for the taking while
what’s left of the press takes an extended holiday from curiosity.
Last
July, the USPS succeeded in uniting a famously fractious town when it
announced plans to sell Berkeley’s century-old downtown post office.
Berkeley has, ever since, proved a public relations migraine for USPS
management. USPS
occasionally
meets its legal obligation to take public comment on pending sales, and
it did so in Berkeley on February 26 at a meeting where USPS
representatives endured hours of abuse and outrage from an overflow
crowd at the old City Hall. The city council and mayor unanimously
condemned the proposed sale. Activists demonstrated at the historic post
office, gathered petition signatures, and — in lieu of local press —
leafletted town residents about what they were about to lose.
Perhaps because of that unprecedented resistance, Postmaster General Patrick Donohoe paid Mayor Bates the courtesy of a
letter he said would “clarify the facts about the Postal Service’s financial crisis.”
That
crisis, Donohoe claimed, has forced him to radically shrink his agency
while selling properties paid for by U.S. taxpayers for over a century.
Among those properties are architecturally distinguished, landmarked and
centrally located post offices like Berkeley’s, many of them containing
a gallery of unique New Deal murals and sculpture intended for and
belonging to the American people. The handsome buildings marked by
flagpoles are often the only federal presence in small towns where they
double as community centers — and those public venues are vanishing
under Donohoe’s watch.
The Postmaster General insisted that his agency’s nearly $16 billion deficit is
not the result of a “manufactured crisis.” He neglected to mention the Republican Party’s
stated intention
to “modernize” the 238-year-old agency by privatizing it. Nor did he
cite the pro-privatization white papers churned out by right-wing and
libertarian think tanks like
Cato and
American Enterprise, or the
political contributions lavished on congressional representatives by private carriers lusting for the USPS profit centers, or that
some of those representatives and their spouses would like to “reform” the USPS right out of existence.
Absent, too, was any mention of the ruinous
Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act passed by Congress in 2006
that requires the USPS, within 10 years, to fully fund its retiree
health benefit fund 75 years into the future while simultaneously
barring it from offering services that would compete with the private
sector. Donohoe instead fell back on the “Internet-made-us-do-it” meme
so often parroted by the U.S. press when it bestirs itself to report on
the postal crisis at all. He explained that in order to put the USPS
back onto a sound financial footing, he had slashed the size of its
workforce by 193,000 employees through attrition, pared some 21,000
delivery routes, and reduced operating expenses by $15 billion. Despite
all this and his recent effort to eliminate Saturday delivery, he clamed
that the leaner and meaner USPS had “provided increased access to
postal products and services.” Tell that to postal customers and workers
these days.
The Postmaster General concluded his letter by
insisting that “the Postal Service is the first to acknowledge how
important it is to preserve our historic buildings, which,” he said, “is
why we are going through a lengthy and transparent process to assure
their protection before they are sold.” That lengthy and transparent
process includes a minimum15-day comment period following a public
meeting that it
might hold. Those two weeks give citizens faced
with the loss of their post office an opportunity to vent in writing to
a USPS which displays all of the transparency of Kafka’s
Castle.
Without
addressing any of the city’s concerns, the agency responded to
Berkeley’s storm of opposition a week after the mayor received Donohoe’s
letter with a tart Notice of Approval to proceed with the sale.
The announcement came as little surprise to those who follow the website
savethepostoffice.com, for Berkeley’s experience repeats that of dozens of other communities around the U.S from
Ukiah, California to the
Bronx.
Postal customers find their wishes ignored and their historic downtown
post offices locked and thrown onto the market. Soon thereafter, the
once-public buildings if not
demolished
are converted to condominiums, real estate offices and restaurants
while the services they provided “relocate” to cheesy leased spaces
often less accessible to customers. The art they hold falls into limbo
or itself becomes inaccessible.
One doesn’t need an MBA to
understand that selling a tax-exempt building one owns to lease space
one doesn’t is not a good long-range business model —
unless
one is the real estate broker that has scored an exclusive contract to
sell the public’s property and advise on what to sell. That makes a very
good business model indeed.
Although the USPS has a
nation-spanning real estate portfolio estimated to be worth as much as
$110 billion, the press has, with few
exceptions,
taken little interest in how it is being flogged and by whom. The USPS
gave that remarkably favorable contract to the giant commercial real
estate firm CBRE in 2011. That CBRE is chaired and largely owned by the
private equity billionaire Richard C. Blum has likewise failed to elicit
much curiosity from the press; that Blum is married to one of the most
powerful U.S. senators, Dianne Feinstein, even less so.
Where such august institutions as the
New York Times and Feinstein’s hometown newspaper, the
San Francisco Chronicle, would not go the
La Jolla Light went. The
Light
has given extensive coverage to the pending sale of that town’s
downtown post office with its exquisite mural of the coastal landscape.
In one
article reporter Pat Sherman linked La Jolla’s resistance to Berkeley's, where Blum is well known as the Alpha Regent
restructuring the University of California. Sherman furthermore broached allegations of Senator Feinstein’s conflicts of interest
past and present.
Her office responded with its boilerplate disclaimer that “Senator
Feinstein is not involved with and does not discuss any of her husband’s
business discussions with him.” Ignoring California’s community
property laws, the senator’s office told the
Light that “Her husband’s holdings are his separate personal property.” That has satisfied most press outlets.
Despite
the failure of the U.S. press to report on or investigate the fire sale
of historic post offices and the uncertain fate of the art they
contain, resistance is nonetheless growing. Angry customers from
Redlands to
Chelsea in New York City have been confronting postal representatives.
One activist group in Berkeley continues to fight the sale of that town’s post office, while another — the
National Post Office Collaborate
— has been forging an alliance with other affected communities while
engaging the legal firm of Ford & Huff to appeal individual sales
and explore
further legal actions.
The California Legislature has passed a measure urging the USPS to
rescind the sale of the Berkeley post office and is considering further
action since the Golden State has been
disproportionately hit with post office closures and sales.
The
dismantling of the nation’s postal service and the sale of the public’s
property is yet another facet of Grover Norquist’s famous pledge to so
shrink the federal government that he can drown it. Norquist has also
expressed his admiration for another Gilded Age when men such as Stephen
Puter transferred the public domain into private fortunes. Senator
Jennings Randolph once remarked that “When the post office is closed,
the flag comes down. When the human side of government closes its doors,
we’re all in trouble.”
That is just the kind of trouble Norquist
and his congressional marionettes want. That we are getting it has as
much to say about the dereliction of the U.S. press as it does about
what Postmaster General Dohohoe is doing to liquidate the agency he
commands.
Gray Brechin is the founder and project scholar of the California Living New Deal Project.
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