https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5oGRyA_iatA
Monday, August 17, 2020
Trump is Trying to Destroy the US Postal Service. We Should Expand It
A completely politicized and manufactured crisis threatens to destroy the US Postal Service, our most important, successful and trusted institution by any measure. While the Trump Administration seeks to destroy it we must embrace and empower it.
August 15, 2020 Bhaskar Sunkara THE GUARDIAN
https://portside.org/2020-08-15/trump-trying-destroy-us-postal-service-we-should-expand-it
There is an American corporation that employs 633,108 people, handles 142.6bn pieces of product every year, and holds a 48% global market share in its sector. It constitutes a domestic retail network larger than McDonald’s, Starbucks and Walmart combined, one that spans even the most rural and isolated parts of the United States. It is an iconic brand tremendously popular with the American public. Even during a devastating pandemic, this firm has seen its total third-quarter revenue increase by $547m year over year.
Instead of trumpeting that 3.2% gain, however, the corporation’s CEO ominously warns that the company is “in a financially unsustainable position absent significant fundamental change” and threatens to start scrapping it for parts.
The notion is bizarre. Yet that is exactly what’s happening to the United States Postal Service (USPS). A completely politicized and manufactured crisis threatens to destroy one of the most important institutions in the United States.
The US Post Office Department was created by the federal government soon after the American Revolution with a mission to connect a geographically diverse country and avoid the state censorship that plagued colonial America. In the centuries that followed, it has only expanded that mandate, maintaining tens of thousands of far-flung retail offices and postal boxes, all at no taxpayer expense.
No surprise that 91% of Americans hold a favorable view of the USPS.
Contrary to common tropes of state inefficiency, the post office is both fulfilling a broad social service, far beyond what is expected of any private corporations, and doing so profitably. Those profits are disguised, however, by a 2006 law imposed by Congress that requires the USPS to create a $72bn fund to pay for its post-retirement healthcare costs 75 years into the future. It’s a requirement no other organization, public or private, has to fulfill.
Business leaders often worry about state intervention “picking the winners and losers” of market competition. But the decades-long campaign against the USPS is more like the opposite – the state undermining its own successful project in pursuit of ideologically driven cutbacks and privatization schemes.
The damage being done won’t just affect American consumers, particularly those in rural areas that rely the most on the USPS. It will also affect voters – during a pandemic when voting by mail is more important than ever – and hundreds of thousands of workers.
Postal employment is one of America’s most powerful engines of upward mobility. As early as 1861, the Post Office Department began hiring black employees and maintained that practice throughout the century of racial apartheid that followed the end of slavery. Today, a full quarter of USPS workers are black and the vast majority of them unionized. For these workers, and millions of others, stable public sector employment is the only viable route to union protections, job stability and a decent living.
Given the status of the USPS as one of the largest employers in the United States, a needless austerity program of any size would directly affect every community in the country. But the indirect effects would be just as profound. Collective bargaining influences pay and benefits across sectors, benefiting even non-union workers in private companies like FedEx. USPS unions, such as the American Postal Workers Union, have intervened more widely, too, in defense of social goods enjoyed by all working people and backing Bernie Sanders and his demands for new programs like Medicare for All.
However, rather than just trying to protect the USPS as it currently exists from Trump administration attacks, we should go further. Let’s expand the USPS’s mandate.
We can imagine, for example, the USPS using its unrivaled logistical reach to deliver food and other essentials to the poor and elderly
For example, we should consider resurrecting postal banking. Throughout much of the 20th century the Post Office Department operated a savings system, which allowed customers to make deposits. Today, numerous countries offer postal banking services, including France, New Zealand and South Korea. The return of the postal savings system could help the millions of American adults who currently don’t have a bank account, but may regularly access the more than 17,000 post offices in zip codes where there is only one or no bank branch location.
As private banks continue to operate in predatory ways and close local branches and “payday lenders” prey on workers without bank accounts, a viable public option is needed more than ever.
We can imagine, for example, the USPS using its unrivaled logistical reach to deliver food and other essentials to the poor and elderly, or expanding into the field of telecommunications by helping to improve access to broadband internet in rural areas. No single part of our government is going to be able to do everything well. But it’s worth considering expanding the scope of our best-functioning agencies to meet the challenges of the 21st century.
Despite our country’s tremendous wealth we’re failing behind our peers in the industrial world on a range of metrics such as poverty, hunger, life expectancy and infant mortality. Part of the reason is our refusal to invest in and develop our public sector and services. We’re failing ourselves and generations to come. Now is the time to double down on our most beloved and efficient public institution, not jeopardize its future.
Ma. Dems Help Orchestrate Anti-Morse Campaign
Massachusetts party leaders coached College Democrats ahead of the release of a letter outlining allegations against Alex Morse.
August 15, 2020 Eoin Higgins, Daniel Boguslaw, Ryan Grim THE INTERCEPT
https://portside.org/2020-08-15/ma-dems-help-orchestrate-anti-morse-campaign
As the primary in Massachusetts’ 1st Congressional District turned into a national story following allegations of misconduct against Holyoke Mayor Alex Morse, the state Democratic Party declined to weigh in, citing its policy to remain neutral in contested primaries.
But behind the scenes, the state party had been coordinating with the College Democrats of Massachusetts to launch those very allegations, according to five sources within the state party and connected to the CDMA, a review of messages between party leadership and CDMA leadership, and call records obtained by The Intercept. The documents show that the Massachusetts Democratic Party’s executive director Veronica Martinez and chair Gus Bickford connected the students with attorneys: among them was the powerful state party figure and attorney Jim Roosevelt, who worked with the college group on a letter alleging Morse behaved inappropriately.
The Intercept reported on Wednesday that at least two members of the UMass Amherst chapter had been planning in some form or another to leverage Morse’s use of dating apps in the Pioneer Valley against him and in favor of his opponent in the primary, longtime incumbent and influential House Ways and Means Chair Rep. Richard Neal. On Thursday morning, in the wake of the revelation, Politico reported that Bickford was calling for an investigation “to examine the conduct of College Democrats who leveled the allegations against Morse.”
“They turned to the state party to help them, they thought they’d protect them, but instead the state party is trying to destroy them,” one member of the Democratic State Committee, or DSC, told The Intercept.
Martinez reached out to CDMA members repeatedly by phone and text from at least late July up to and including Thursday, records show. In text messages reviewed by The Intercept, Martinez takes an active role in directing the group on the strategy behind the letter before and after its release, including coaching on how to interact with the press.
On Thursday, the College Democrats posted a statement that apologized to Morse, adding, “We wrote the letter to Alex Morse’s campaign on the advice of legal counsel,” but did not specify who that counsel was.
The grandson of Franklin D. Roosevelt, attorney Jim Roosevelt is a major power broker within the state and national Democratic parties and contributed to Neal’s campaigns in 2008 and 2016, giving $1,000 and $500 respectively, according to records filed with the FEC. He has a history of tangling with the Bernie Sanders-aligned wing of the party. In 2016, he chaired the Democratic National Convention’s credentials committee, rejecting Sanders’s formal request to remove Barney Frank as the chair of the rules committee, after the Vermont senator deemed the former lawmaker too hostile to Sanders and his agenda. A year later, Roosevelt publicly rebuffed the suggestion by Sen. Elizabeth Warren that members of the DNC had tilted the presidential playing field toward Hillary Clinton’s campaign. A former CEO for health insurance giant Tufts Health Plan, Roosevelt will once again co-chair the credentials committee next week at the DNC.
Asked if anyone from the state party leadership ever reached out to him about concerns being expressed by College Democrats, Morse said: “Never.”
Neal was first elected as a representative in 1988, and as chair of Ways and Means, has influence over nearly every piece of legislation that passes through Congress. Morse, backed by Justice Democrats and the Sunrise Movement, has challenged him on his fealty to corporate donors. If Neal falls, the progressive Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Texas, would be next in line for the committee gavel.
The would-be scandal broke into public view on Friday, August 7, when the Daily Collegian, UMass Amherst’s student newspaper, reported that the College Democrats had sent a letter to Morse barring him from future events, alleging that he had made students feel uncomfortable by abusing his position of power, making romantic advances, and engaging in sexual contact. Morse acknowledged in a statement that he had had consensual relations with adult students in the region in the past, defending his right to do so, while apologizing if any students felt uncomfortable. The mayor had previously been an adjunct professor at UMass Amherst, teaching a once-a-week course, and denied that he had ever slept with one of his students — behavior which is barred under the university’s policy. No allegation that he has done so has been put forward. (Today, UMass announced it had hired an independent attorney to investigate whether Morse violated university policies.)
The public condemnation was swift and fierce, but there was little evidence behind the allegations. No student has come forward to claim any form of harm. The College Democrats, which had claimed that Morse used their events to meet students, clarified this week that he had in fact only attended a single event throughout his campaign, which began in June 2019. That event was in October.
The allegations landed in part because there had long been rumors about Morse’s sexual life in Western Massachusetts political circles, the kind of vague insinuations that are often referred to as common knowledge, though without specifics. Earlier this year, a Capitol Hill Democrat who works closely with Neal’s staff on the Ways and Means Committee said they approached a senior Neal staffer to ask how serious the threat by Morse was to his boss. He wasn’t concerned, he replied, because the young mayor was known to have slept with college students and that information would emerge at the right time. That doesn’t mean, however, that Neal’s team played any role in surfacing those allegations, and he has denied having done so.
“I learned about the allegations against Mayor Morse the same way everyone else did, in the Daily Collegian last week,” Neal said in a statement Thursday. “I also want to be clear I will not tolerate my name being associated with any homophobic attacks or efforts to criticize someone for who they choose to love. That’s inconsistent with my character and my values.”
“Any implications that I or anyone from my campaign are involved are flat wrong and an attempt to distract from the issue at hand,” Neal added. “I have been and will remain entirely focused on the respective records of myself and Mayor Morse.”
It is undeniable, however, that the state Democratic Party was behind the emergence of the accusations.
The state party is supposed to be neutral in contested primaries. According to the organization’s bylaws, “no officer of the State Committee and no Chairperson of any subcommittee shall use their title or office to endorse and/or otherwise support any candidate prior to a contested Democratic Primary, and no staff member of the State Committee shall endorse or participate in any contested Democratic Primary campaign.” Martinez and Bickford’s decision to push Roosevelt on the group appears to be at odds with that rule.
A DSC member told The Intercept that in their view, the different roles Martinez, Bickford, and Roosevelt played in the development and release of the CDMA letter — as well as the ensuing attempts to cover up their involvement after the fact — make the state party’s hostility to Morse, a young gay man, hard to ignore.
“As a DSC member, it’s pretty angering that party resources and party staff were put into an effort to attack a gay candidate,” the member said. “I don’t know how we can have any trust with the LGTBQ community going forward.”
According to three sources with knowledge of the timeline, party leadership talked to the college group three weeks ago and then referred them to Roosevelt for assistance. The exact nature of that help, however, is a matter of some contention — details that could be illuminated by the forthcoming investigation. Bickford, according to Politico, said that the investigation would not begin until after the September 1 primary, so as not to influence the result.
“The Party was made aware of concerns of several members of organizations connected to the Party,” Martinez told The Intercept, claiming the party retained its neutrality in the contest. “We referred the individuals expressing these concerns to legal counsel and had no further involvement in the matter.” Bickford repeated this version of events to another source close to party leadership on Thursday afternoon, but did not respond to requests for comment.
According to multiple sources close to the state party and the College Democrats, who spoke on condition of anonymity, after Bickford and Martinez recommended him, Roosevelt took control of the process and led UMass College Democrats leadership in the letter’s composition. Reached by phone Thursday, Roosevelt told The Intercept he would not comment on work with clients.
Sources close to the college group told The Intercept that a number of members felt the best way forward was a private letter to Morse that would remain between the young mayor and the organization. Roosevelt dismissed that idea, telling the group that a public letter would be more effective. The leadership of the UMass Amherst College Democrats have denied privately that they leaked the letter, which was published on August 7, according to members of the chapter. Some of the leaders of the College Democrats were caught off guard when the article was published, according to the messages.
Some members of the group, however, had been trying to plant the story since at least April, when CDMA leadership began telling members of the high school affiliate about the group’s intent to sabotage the Morse campaign, according to three sources within the Massachusetts High School Democrats. Around the same time in April, Grace Panetta, a politics reporter at Business Insider, began to receive emails from a “creepyalexmorse@protonmail.com” email address. According to Panetta, the body of these emails contained the names and email addresses of three students involved with CDMA who could confirm the vague accusations against Morse, two of whom discussed a plan to sabotage the Morse campaign as far back as October 2019, as reported in The Intercept’s Wednesday article.
Panetta did not bite, sensing something off about the tip. A subsequent attempt to land the story in Politico in June also fell short. It wasn’t until the new strategy was developed — a private letter to Morse that solicited a response, both of which where published by the Daily Collegian — that the group was able to take long-running rumors about Morse and turn them into a potentially career-ending scandal.
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