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Ralph Nader on 'Preserving the People's Post Office'
(Excerpts from consumer advocate Ralph Nader’s introduction to "Preserving the People’s Post Office," by Christopher W. Shaw)
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… “Ever since President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed a commission to reorganize the Post Office on “a business basis” in 1967, the postal system has become increasingly frozen into a defensive posture, tied down in a manner akin to Gulliver in his travels by demands from such groups as major corporate mailers, competitive rivals, and partisan politicos. There has been no place for bold new ventures of the past, such as Rural Free Delivery, Parcel Post, Postal Savings, Air Mail, or even the ambitious, yet fruitless, Missile Mail experiment of the 1950s. If the Post Office Department had been responding to the profit-making demands of the market or to the political influence of large corporations none of these advances would have even been attempted. Parcel Post, lest we forget, was introduced in the face of corporate competitors’ opposition due to the fact that they were providing entirely unsatisfactory, oftentimes price-gouging, service to large parts of the nation.
“President Ronald Reagan called government ‘the problem.’ Was government the problem when the Post Office made open communications between the Continental Congress and George Washington’s army possible during the Revolutionary War? Was government the problem when the Post Office provided invaluable aid to the establishment of a vibrant national and local press by delivering periodicals throughout the land? How about when the Post Office Department constructed a national infrastructure for aviation? Is government the problem when letters and packages from home reach servicemen in distant parts of the world today? Or when citizen organizations are enabled or often made possible by a non-profit postage rate?”…
“Absence of an understanding of the Postal Service as a public service has allowed corporatists to obscure our postal system’s defining mission: ‘to bind the nation together.’ There are promoters of a corporate postal system who would ultimately like to steal the Postal Service from the American people by eliminating its public service function and privatizing (i.e. corporatizing) it. Operation of the postal system on ‘a business basis’ has helped make their case for them.
“In Preserving the People’s Post Office Christopher Shaw demonstrates how a patronizing attitude toward the individual postal patron — ‘Aunt Minnie’ — that accompanies a corporate mindset has caused service reductions for the general public, as the relentless pressure of corporate demands for receiving preferential services burdens the citizenry more and more. Instead of focusing on new ways for our government to serve its citizens through the Postal Service, service reductions — such as closing post offices, removing collection boxes, and ending door delivery — have shifted emphasis to business practices focusing on how much the traffic will bear, further diminishing the spirit of public service.
“A recent push for postal ‘reform’ legislation demonstrates the degree to which the public has been marginalized. Postal Service management, major mailers, corporate ideologues, business competitors, postmaster associations and the beleaguered postal unions have all been included in this legislative process, but there has been a noticeable absence — the consumer, who has been excluded from having a seat at the table. The bills which have gone through Congress reflect this absence. Instead of being discarded, as they largely should have been, the recommendations of the recent corporate dominated President’s Commission on the Postal Service, which were not public service oriented, are apparent in the legislation.”…
Ralph Nader
Washington, D.C.
November, 2006
