Corporate ideologues never cease blathering that government programs should be run like a business.
Really? What businesses would they choose? Pharmaceutical profiteers? Big Oil? Wall Street money manipulators? High tech billionaires? Airline price gougers?
The good news is that the great majority of people aren’t buying this corporatist blather. Instead, by a 2-to-1 margin, Americans stunned smug right-wing privatizers by specifically declaring in a poll last year that our U.S. Postal Service should not be “run like a business.”
Indeed, an overwhelming majority, including half of Republicans, say mail delivery should be run as a “public service.”
In fact, having proven that this nearly 250-year-old federal agency can consistently and efficiently deliver to 161 million homes and businesses day after day, it’s time to let the agency’s trusted, decentralized, well-trained workforce provide even more services for our communities.
How about “postal banking?”
Yes, the existing network of some 31,000 post offices in metro neighborhoods and small towns across America are perfectly situated and able to provide basic banking services to the one-out-of-four of us who don’t have or can’t afford bank accounts. The giant banking chains ignore these millions, leaving them at the mercy of check-cashing exploiters and payday loan sharks.
The Post Office can offer simple, honest banking, including small-dollar checking and savings accounts, very-low-interest consumer loans, low-fee debit cards, etc.
The goal of postal banking is not to maximize corporate profits, but public service. Moreover, there’s nothing new about this. Our post offices served as banks for millions of us until 1967, when Wall Street profiteers got their enablers in Congress to kill the competition.
We The People own this phenomenal public asset. To enable it to work even better for us, go to AGrandAlliance.org.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.
OtherWords columnist Jim Hightower is a radio commentator, writer, and public speaker. He’s also the editor of the populist newsletter, The Hightower Lowdown. Distributed by OtherWords.org.
Dear Mr. Hightower,
Thank you very, very much for this piece! In large efforts by right-wing political parties and movements in my country, Czech Republic, to translate and publish a piece like this, it means an important help in our struggle against provatization (and consequent “commodification”) of postal service, especially now, after recent general election in Czech Rep. to be won by right-wing political forces, with no left-wing representation in Lower House of our National Parliament, first time since fall of the socialism.
ours, sincerely
Vladimir SEDLACEK
lance journalist and International Coordinator of Trade Union Association of Bohemia, Moravia & Silesia