Caution.

As the postal crisis unfolded recently, I kept reminding Democrats that they, too, have contributed to this problem via their bizarre eagerness to accept the gutting of public services.

Oh no, they replied.

Oh yes. Sorry to bug you,but it's true. This can be fixed. First, Democrats must stop agreeing with Republicans on voodoo economics. They might begin by listening to their own left wing.

It’s Not Just Trump: The Neoliberal Roots of the Postal Service Crisis, by Max B. Sawicky (In These Times)

We should defend the Post Office, both from Trump and the ideology of austerity that treats the agency “like a business.”

We’re cur­rent­ly get­ting a vivid, painful reminder of why we need a pub­lic sec­tor. The col­lapse of pub­lic ser­vices, in par­tic­u­lar the pro­vi­sion of pub­lic health, has tor­pe­doed the entire econ­o­my as a dead­ly pan­dem­ic rav­ages the coun­try. The end of the road in our cur­rent devo­lu­tion may be the assault on one of our old­est pub­lic insti­tu­tions — the ven­er­a­ble and very pop­u­lar U.S. Postal Service.

snip

From an eco­nom­ic stand­point, there is no rea­son a postal ser­vice must run a prof­it. As many com­men­ta­tors have point­ed out, this con­straint is applied selec­tive­ly, out of ide­o­log­i­cal prej­u­dices. Nobody requires the Depart­ment of Defense to turn a profit. (For this we should prob­a­bly be grateful.)

snip

The point here is that the spu­ri­ous notion that the U.S. Postal Ser­vice should be finan­cial­ly self-suf­fi­cient — which goes back decades — helped give rise to the abil­i­ty of Trump’s crony in charge of the Post Office, the con­flict-of-inter­est-rid­den Louis DeJoy, to cut ser­vices in the name of account­ing sol­ven­cy. For his part, Trump has acknowl­edged open­ly that his refusal to pro­vide nec­es­sary sup­ple­men­tary funds to ensure effec­tive deliv­ery of the mail is found­ed on his deter­mi­na­tion to frus­trate the vote-by-mail system.

In the wake of the uproar over mail sab­o­tage, pub­lic pres­sure has appar­ent­ly forced DeJoy to defer some ser­vice cuts until after the elec­tion. To make sure this pledge is hon­ored, we will have to keep a clear eye on the actu­al progress, on the ground, in prepar­ing for the elec­tion. For­tu­nate­ly, union­ized postal work­ers will be essen­tial allies in mon­i­tor­ing the integri­ty of Postal Ser­vice man­age­ment. Pend­ing the suc­cess­ful removal of the cur­rent admin­is­tra­tion, a forth­right reju­ve­na­tion of the U.S. Postal Ser­vice can com­mence, in which we final­ly cast off the unfound­ed account­ing imper­a­tives that crip­ple its operations.

Video: The Treuhand (1991-94), and how newly reunited Germany put capitalism back together again in the former GDR.

(Video at link below.)

November 9, 2019 will be the 30th anniversary of the Berlin Wall's obsolescence. Communism's collapse was followed by a period of intense politicking, resulting in the unification of the two German states on October 3, 1990.

It was said at the time that while the planet had numerous examples of how to turn an economy from capitalist to communist, no one yet knew how to flip it the other way around.

The video explains how Germany did it.

In many respects the process wasn't pretty, although it bears recalling that for better or worse -- maybe bits of both -- East Germany was the only East Bloc nation to have a "West" half capable of absorbing it.

Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia and the others had their own privatization procedures, and controversies. When it came to figuring out how to return seized assets, these nations often had to extend the verification period into the 1930s to account for both Nazi and Communist expropriations.   

It's the stuff of history geeks, but some readers will enjoy this video as much as I did.

East Germany and the difficult legacy of the Treuhand (Deutsche Welle)

The word 'Treuhand' still triggers stronger reactions in eastern Germany. For millions of former East Germans, the change from a planned to a market economy meant unemployment - and an affront that still rankles today.

As President of the Treuhandanstalt, the agency charged with privatizing the old East German economy from 1991 to 1994, Birgit Breuel pushed ahead with painful privatizations and the closure of thousands of companies - and became the hated symbol of the transition to a market economy. After decades of silence, she returns to this chapter of her life and talks in detail about a time when everything was running full speed ahead and rational decisions to completely rebuild a country needed to be taken. How did she make her decisions? How does she rate them in retrospect? And what motivated her to take on such a mammoth task at all? How much leeway did the Treuhand have? Were there any other ways to turn the former East German economy around? The filmmakers interview managers, politicians and experts about the work, goals and challenges of the Treuhand, diving back into the heady years from 1990 to 1994 and illuminating the backgrounds and consequences that still have an effect today.

Monbiot on neoliberalism: "The freedom we were promised turns out to be freedom for capital, gained at the expense of human liberty."

I'm happy that Monbiot made it through his illness. His frequent contributions toward the excoriation of neoliberalism are much appreciated as well as being valuable reminders that both Democrats and Republicans have worked together to foist this idiocy on America.

Neoliberalism promised freedom – instead it delivers stifling control, by George Monbiot (The Guardian)

Creeping privatisation is rolling back the state to create a new, absolutist bureaucracy that destroys efficiency

My life was saved last year by the Churchill Hospital in Oxford, through a skillful procedure to remove a cancer from my body. Now I will need another operation, to remove my jaw from the floor. I’ve just learned what was happening at the hospital while I was being treated. On the surface, it ran smoothly. Underneath, unknown to me, was fury and tumult. Many of the staff had objected to a decision by the National Health Service to privatise the hospital’s cancer scanning. They complained that the scanners the private company was offering were less sensitive than the hospital’s own machines. Privatisation, they said, would put patients at risk. In response, as the Guardian revealed last week, NHS England threatened to sue the hospital for libel if its staff continued to criticise the decision.

(snip)

The dominant system of political thought in this country, which produced both the creeping privatisation of public health services and this astonishing attempt to stifle free speech, promised to save us from dehumanising bureaucracy. By rolling back the state, neoliberalism was supposed to have allowed autonomy and creativity to flourish. Instead, it has delivered a semi-privatised authoritarianism more oppressive than the system it replaced.

Workers find themselves enmeshed in a Kafkaesque bureaucracy, centrally controlled and micromanaged. Organisations that depend on a cooperative ethic – such as schools and hospitals – are stripped down, hectored and forced to conform to suffocating diktats. The introduction of private capital into public services – that would herald a glorious new age of choice and openness – is brutally enforced. The doctrine promises diversity and freedom but demands conformity and silence.

(snip)

 ... The bureaucratic quantification of public administration goes far beyond an attempt at discerning efficacy. It has become an end in itself.

Its perversities afflict all public services. Schools teach to the test, depriving children of a rounded and useful education. Hospitals manipulate waiting times, shuffling patients from one list to another. Police forces ignore some crimes, reclassify others, and persuade suspects to admit to extra offences to improve their statistics. Universities urge their researchers to write quick and superficial papers, instead of deep monographs, to maximise their scores under the research excellence framework.

As a result, public services become highly inefficient for an obvious reason: the destruction of staff morale. Skilled people, including surgeons whose training costs hundreds of thousands of pounds, resign or retire early because of the stress and misery the system causes. The leakage of talent is a far greater waste than any inefficiencies this quantomania claims to address.

And we arrive at the overarching point.

The freedom we were promised turns out to be freedom for capital, gained at the expense of human liberty. The system neoliberalism has created is a bureaucracy that tends towards absolutism, produced in the public services by managers mimicking corporate executives, imposing inappropriate and self-defeating efficiency measures, and in the private sector by subjection to faceless technologies that can brook no argument or complaint.

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Democratic mayoral candidate David White understands that change begins with a whole lotta scrubbing, and NA Confidential advocates just such a deep civic cleansing. 

After eight years on the job, Mayor Jeff Gahan's list of stunning "achievements" is long, indeed: tax increases, budgetary hide 'n' seek, self-deification, daily hypocrisy, public housing takeover, non-transparency, pay-to-play for no-bid contracts, bullying city residents and bullying city employees. Eight years is enough. It's time to drain Gahan's swamp, flush his ruling clique and take this city back from Gahan's Indy-based special interest donors. 

NA Confidential supports David White for Mayor in the Democratic Party primary, with voting now through May 7. 

Preaching and privatization: School choice as an effort to dismantle public education.

I might agree, but who are you, and why the anonymity?

Worth reading in its entirety, although the ultimate stakes are summarized by these two words: "Socializing Children."

The Privatization Prophets, by Jennifer Berkshire (Jacobin)

For years, millionaires and religious zealots have teamed up to preach "school choice" in an effort to dismantle public education.

SNIP

Unfettering the markets is only part of the vision. Control over the process of socializing children, the near-monopoly domain of a system that is both secular and, as the libertarian right deridingly characterizes it, collectivist, is another prize. And if there is some money to be made along the way, well, there’s nothing wrong with that.

"The Indiana Toll Road and the Dark Side of Privately Financed Highways."

The legacy of Saint Daniels stretches on, and on, and on ...

The Indiana Toll Road and the Dark Side of Privately Financed Highways

by Angie Schmitt and Payton Chung

This is the first post in a three-part series on the Indiana Toll Road and the use of private finance to build and maintain highways. Part two takes a closer look at how Australian firm Macquarie manages its infrastructure assets. Part three examines the incentives for consultants to exaggerate traffic projections, making terrible boondoggles look like financial winners.

"It is common for developers to argue that they are creating new public spaces where none existed before."

As Jeff reminded us last week, if the River View development comes to fruition, not only will it result in a prime piece of downtown "public space" being transferred to private interests, but the long-promised "public plaza" component of River View will have been much reduced, and lack a view of the river itself.

River View? Not from this development.

Why is it that the project's supporters, from Develop New Albany on down, never address the privatization-of-public-space angle of this proposal?

Public spaces in Britain's cities fall into private hands; Projects such as London's new outdoor space, Granary Square at King's Cross, favour business over community, say critics, by Jeevan Vasagar (guardian.co.uk)

 ... Politicians of all stripes acknowledge the importance of making people feel part of a functioning community. Boris Johnson has spoken of putting "the village back into the city".

At a public meeting last year, the mayor of London said: "It's not a concept that I find people readily grasp but what I want is an atmosphere of trust and neighbourliness and a village atmosphere in parts of our city."

But villages always included commonly owned public land, Heath said. "In the archetypal feudal village there was always that space of common land where everyone had the right to graze their pigs and behave in a sensible way. There wasn't the sense this was the feudal landlord's land. This was common land."

Open thread: Mayor rolls back stormwater privatization, drops hints.

On Tuesday, Their Man Mitch received a mandate to continue starving local governments of cash. Meanwhile, City Hall struck a blow against privatization.

New Albany ends stormwater deal, by Daniel Suddeath (News and Tribune)

Environmental Management Corp. will relinquish services for New Albany’s stormwater utility effective Jan. 1.

Mayor Doug England made the announcement during Monday’s City Council meeting, saying the decision will be finalized when the Stormwater Board votes to end the contract at its next meeting scheduled for Nov. 13.

To break the contract, the board will pay EMC $200,000. EMC will continue professional services for the city’s sewer utility despite losing the stormwater agreement ...

… Stormwater and Sewer Board Chairman Ron Carroll said EMC had been “falling behind” on duties …

… England opposes privatizing services, saying there could be a review of other contracts, including trash pick-up.

Readers, your thoughts?