Author: Larry Jones

The Postal Service is one of the finest institutions we have.

Personally, I think forty-four cents to mail a letter to anyplace in the country is the bargain of the century. And they will take that letter to any address, no matter how far out in the sticks it happens to be.

But have you noticed lately all the talk about how the Post Office is a basket case, inefficient, poorly managed, and unable to pay its bills? According to this drumbeat they have to shut down a bunch of offices and lay off tens of thousands of workers, and even then they will have to reduce services to make ends meet. They just can’t compete with the leaner, smarter, market-driven private delivery services.

But did you know that beginning five years ago during the Bush Administration, a law was passed requiring the Postal Service to fully fund its pension plan 75 years into the future, and that they are required to accomplish this feat within the next five years? In other words they have to be 100% ready to pay a pension to workers who have not yet been born. And this at the same time that UPS and Federal Express are lobbying strongly to be allowed to use their pension funds today as operating money, claiming that it will enable them to be more profitable, thus “saving” their pension funds.

Meanwhile, the “bankrupt” U.S. Postal Service is sitting on 47 billion dollars, much of which won’t be needed for decades, and instead of being allowed to use it, they are told to sell off property and fire workers.

Put those facts together with the fact the the Postal Service is the second largest employer in the country, with by far the largest unionized work force, and I don’t know about you, but I smell something fishy. The drive to crush the labor movement and decimate the middle class would certainly count it as a major victory to see the Post Office dismantled, its workers laid off, its union shut down, its buildings and equipment sold off and private, anti-union, companies taking over the delivery of mail in the U.S. The nonsensical requirement that it overfund its pension and medical benefits plans so far into the future makes it little more than a large beautiful animal with broken legs, unable to defend itself as the hyenas of greed eat it, bite by bite.

Make no mistake — if we lose the Postal Service, we lose a precious American institution. The centuries have shown that the delivery of mail is a proper function of government. Privatization would put us at the mercy of delivery services which would no longer have to compete. Prices would rise, and with no mandate to deliver the mail, services would surely be reduced — except for those who could pay for them.

One step toward saving our Post Office (and the union, and all those jobs and all that tradition, and all those services) is House Bill 1351, which reverses the 2006 law mandating the benefits plan overfunding. You can read the bill here (PDF) and see some TV coverage of the subject here. If you care, consider contacting your member of Congress and asking them to support this bill.

Jones’ Law Number 2: The superrich get their wealth in one of two ways. They steal it, or they inherit it from someone who stole it.

You can argue with the semantics, and you might even be able to point out an exception or two, but basically if you want to acquire great wealth in this world, you have to take it from someone who is weaker or stupider than you. This is what all the great wars and conquests of history have been about: the spoils.

So now in the 21st century, as the governments of the world morph into giant international corporation-states, we shouldn’t be too surprised to see that the pillaging continues. In the United States and around the world, elites live in regal opulence isolated in fortress-like security, many of them so rich they can’t remember how many homes they own. Bankers and hedge fund managers earn sums that are literally unimaginable. Corporate CEOs pay themselves hundreds of times what their average worker makes, often while the company tanks and jobs are moved overseas. Politicians have been “supported” by corporations for so long now that they have forgotten that they are being bribed, and they look the other way as corporate lawyers and lobbyists write bills legalizing the ongoing money grab. When this corruption occasionally brings down the house, as it did in 2007-08, the corporate-owned government uses taxpayer money to make whole the criminals who caused the crash, and when the bailout money runs out, severe austerity is imposed on the people, as in Britain, Greece, Argentina, and soon the United States. Meanwhile the superrich culprits skate.

Nor, it seems to me, should we be very surprised when people take to the streets in mindless rampage, trashing everything in their path and grabbing for themselves anything of value they can get away with. After all, isn’t this the example they have been seeing at the highest levels of society? When shady-but-legal Wall Street shenanigans have ruined the economy, taken the incomes and homes of tens of millions and wiped out retirement savings and college funds, what’s a few big-screen televisions or a whole boxcar full of tennis shoes? When the bankers have escaped to their mansions with all your money, why not torch the bank?

I am getting nervous about what seems to be developing in this country. Billionaires have usurped the government, leaving no force in its place to temper their greed. The economic and social distance between those at the very top and the rest of us has grown so great that there is no more communication. The story we tell ourselves of justice and equality for all is now mere myth. Some tea partiers have already shown up at Presidential events carrying guns. The violence in the human heart has been amply on display in past decades: the Watts Riots in 1965; in Detroit in 1967; back in Los Angeles in 1992; London just last week. Worldwide there have been literally hundreds of civil disturbances since the middle of the 20 century, with an increasing number of them in the United States.

Our government has not been effective in mitigating the current recession. Saying it’s over and things are getting better does nothing to calm the fear and anger of the common people, especially when unemployment and foreclosures are still at record levels while the upper echelons of society are clearly doing better than ever and seem completely unwilling to share in the burden of rebuilding the economy.

If your job is gone or you fear it might be; if your home has been taken away or you fear it might be; if your grown children are back living in your home because they are broke and unemployed after spending a hundred thousand dollars on a college degree; if you have sent out 500 job applications and got nothing back; if you are sick and can’t get medicine; if you are living in a shelter or a car; if your children are hungry; if your elected representatives bicker like children instead of working toward solutions — how much spark would it take to send you in a rage out into the street to take back what you thought was yours and to wreak vengeance on those who took it from you?

There are sparks every day in every city. At some point will the humiliated working class join the angry, armed tea partiers and the dispossessed Left and start to lash out blindly? I hope not. The people can’t win such a war, and neither can the elites.

As in all wars, there will only be losers.

Might as well add my two cents to this issue:

What’s going on in Wisconsin right now — the Republican governor and Republican majority in the state legislature attempting to cripple public employee unions — is not a political matter. It’s an economic matter. It’s another battle in the war on workers and the middle class that began in the eighties. It’s rich people and and rich corporations trying to get rid of labor unions and kill off the pesky middle class once and for all.

In the 2006 election the people of Wisconsin, like most voters nationwide, decided that the Democrats had had long enough to bring the economy back to life (two years), so they voted for Republicans instead. A lot of Democrats must have voted for Republicans, because Republican candidates can’t win with only Republicans voting for them. Whenever the voters do this, they live to regret it, although they rarely understand exactly how they got fucked.

Because the real constituents of the GOP — those rich people and rich corporations — don’t see anything wrong with the economy. They’re doing just fine, thank you, so what is there to “bring back to life?”

Understand, when I say “rich people” and “rich corporations,” I’m talking about unimaginable wealth. Unspendable amounts of money. Since Ronald Reagan got the ball rolling by destroying the air traffic controllers union in 1981, the working class in this country has seen their income stagnate or decline, while the upper class has taken most of that income and wealth for themselves. The top one hundredth of one percent of Americans now makes an average of $27 million per household, while the average income for the bottom 90% of us is a little over $31,000. Meanwhile, tax rates are currently at a 50-year low, and as billionaire Warren Buffet famously says, he is taxed at a lower rate than his secretary.

Yet these super rich don’t have enough. They have taken most of our jobs and sent them to countries where people are happy to work for a tiny fraction of what it costs to live in America, and now they say that American workers must “learn to compete in a global economy.” What they mean is we must learn to live on seven dollars an hour. In the future, even that seven bucks will be deemed too extravagant.

During most of the 20th century, the most prosperous century for the the most prosperous nation the world has ever known, labor unions have been the only protection the worker has had against powerful corporations, and so they are the natural enemy of the rich. The war has been going on for some time, and Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s plan to strip public employee unions of the right to collective bargaining is only the latest battle.

But it’s not really Democrats against Republicans. It’s the upper class trying to see if the time might be right — after two generations of misinformation — to turn workers against themselves. Recent polling seems to indicate that a majority in Wisconsin is not OK with this union-busting plan, regardless of how they may have voted in the last election.

The Republican majority in the state government may listen to this majority, or they may not. They are, after all, contolled by powerful corporate interests. Either way, judging from the massive protests going on in Wisconsin, it seems that the time has not yet arrived when American workers are ready to submit to this type of outrage.

But the American worker is in disarray, confused, divided against himself. We have been fed a stream of lies for such a long time that it has become difficult for us to see the truth. Most of us don’t want or need to earn a hundred million dollars a year. We want fair pay for honest work, decent working conditions, the ability to raise our families, go to the doctor when we need to, take a vacation every now and then, and live out our last years in dignity. It doesn’t seem like a lot to ask in this land of plenty.

Of course the upper class will fight us even in this modest ambition, because they and their corporations are programmed always to find ways to accumulate more and more money. They don’t “hate” the working class. But if the working class is comfortable, that means there is money on the table, and rich people will go after it.

They are well organized, smart, relentless and ruthless. I wonder if we are up to it.

Today would have been my mother’s 100th birthday.

When Ronald Reagan ran for governor of California, I thought it was a joke. When he won, I thought it was just Californians being their kooky California selves. When I found out my mother had voted for him, I was both horrified and confused. Were we not an enlightened, humanist, family of Democrats?! She was unable to explain her vote to me, except to say something like “Oh, I don’t know. I just like him.”

Yesterday was the first time I realized that Reagan was almost exactly the same age as my mom. I’ve always suspected that she married my father because, in a certain light and wearing a certain hat, he looked like Humphrey Bogart. Now I realize that she had another secret affair with Ronnie the dashing young actor who was not just of her generation, but whose entire life paralleled her own, if only chronologically.

Reagan has been a thorn in my side ever since he became governor and started cutting funds to education in California. When I graduated from a California state college it was his signature on my diploma, but I’m sure he would much rather have dismantled the whole college system rather than let freeloaders like me get a decent, affordable education. Then as President one of his first official acts was to fire all the air traffic controllers, who had a union and were striking for better wages and working conditions. Imagine!

Now that he’s dead there’s an entire industry in this country devoted to making him the “Greatest President of the 20th Century.” But let’s take a brief look at who he really was, and what he really did.

For one thing, he was a Democrat before he was a Republican. A staunch, hard-left liberal Democrat. And a union leader to boot. So much for loyalty and principle. When General Electric hired him to shill for them, the Democratic hat didn’t fit, so he changed it.

As for that whole tax-cutting myth, he raised taxes six of the eight years he was in the White House, including one increase that was the largest in history. I owned a small business during those years, and I was seriously gouged.

A law abiding man of honor? While President, he used his office to commit at least two felonies. He sent money to the Contras in Nicaragua to support their insurrection against the communist Sandinista government, an action prohibited by Congress under the Boland Amendment. And where did he get that money? From the sale of missiles and other weapons to — say it with me — Iran! Never mind that Iran was then (and now) under an arms embargo. Both of these actions were impeachable offenses, and even though Reagan admitted doing them in a televised speech, the investigation was impeded when his administration destroyed documents relating to the scandal. Reagan, as we know, skated.

I could go on. He kicked off his presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, using the veiled racist code phrase “states rights.” Gorbachev was already well into glasnost when Reagan made his grandstand demand for him to “tear down this wall.” Aren’t you sick of seeing that clip over and over? Then there was his totally made-up slur about the “welfare queen,” making baby after baby and driving to pick up her various entitlement checks in her new Cadillac. His wacky “Star Wars” missile defense system, which was supposed to shoot down Soviet rockets in space but has never worked and is still draining the budget 25 years later. And of course the ultimate insult to the American worker, his theory of “trickle-down” economics, which basically says that rich people should always get all the breaks and the rest of us should be happy with whatever money they happen to spill as they become unimaginably wealthier. Let us eat cake, brothers and sisters.

Reagan began a war on the middle class that continues to this day, and his obsession with getting government out of the way of big business leads in a straight line to the economic meltdown we had in 2008 and which is still robbing millions of ordinary Americans of their homes, their livlihoods and their dignity.

Was he senile and mentally incapacitated during the latter part of his term? Who knows and who cares? Maybe I can’t hold him directly responsible for all the damage that was done in his name in the eighties and beyond, but somehow that doesn’t make me feel any better.

Despite all this there is actually an organization whose mission it is to get a building or an airport or a monument named after Ronald Reagan in all 50 states. Actually, I don’t know if they’re still around. From the looks of things they may have reached their goal by now and settled into smug retirement.

So anyway, happy 100th birthday, Mom. I loved you dearly and still owe you big time. But you know you were wrong about Reagan, don’t you?