“Mail is like oxygen. It’s there and you count on it, and you don’t get worried about it until it disappears. There is going to be concern by a lot of people if this goes away. The national concern is going to be enormous.” — Tonda Rush, president of the National Newspaper Association, commenting on the unraveling of the United States Postal Service

So here’s a radical idea for radical times: Nationalize the United States Post Office.

Just writing the words makes my eyes spin around in my head. The Ryan-esque view that it would un-American to un-privatize an operation like the United States Post Office is such a retromingent exercise in inverse reasoning that I regret not being clever enough to come up with a corporate flak-friendly name for it. Like right-sizing or blamestorming or activating synergies of scale.

Yet in the up-is-down, Bizarro World that is Washington, D.C., privatizing the United States Postal Service — Benjamin Franklin’s United States Post Office — makes Bizarro sense. Drape its coffin in a flag and watch right-thinking patriots salute as FedEx hauls it over to Arlington for burial.

There isn’t anything more core to what America’s founders thought government of, by and for the people is for than delivering the mail, except maybe raising an army. Both are authorized in the same article in the U.S. Constitution. (The tea party loves them some Article 1, Section 8.) Like the military, the United States Post Office is a public service as well as a public trust. And Republicans such as Congressman Darrel Issa (R-CA) want to privatized it because it doesn’t make a profit ? When did the U.S. Army ever turn a profit? This is how conservatives honor the founders’ vision? By dressing up like them and dismantling the country they shed blood to build?

Of course, Republicans (mostly) in Congress are hard at work on privatizing not just the United States Post Office, but the military, too, by diverting work traditionally done by GIs to for-profit, private contractors that can charge a tidy markup to cost-conscious American taxpayers. With hundreds of billions of public dollars on the table, the con is simple. More middle-man profit equals Freedom . No middle man profit equals Tyranny . It’s almost as if they want to dismantle the country’s core infrastructure, to strip America bare — like locusts — of every financial resource before moving on….

Speaking of tyranny, here’s Howie Klein at (Down With Tyranny):

There’s a lot of money to be made in privatizing the post office — not for us, of course, but Wall Street drools at the prospect. And, of course, Republicans and their Blue Dog allies are doing everything in their power to undermine and sabotage the post office for exactly that reason.

At the Huffington Post , Dave Jamieson examines what a post-post office America would look like. Take tiny Syria, Virginia, for example, where for over a hundred years the post office has resided in a walk-in closet-sized office inside Syria Mercantile Company, the village general store. Villagers faced with the closure of this resource may have to drive as far as 20 miles over back-country roads to mail a package or buy stamps.

The absurdity is the insistence by Congress that the United States Post Office operate as a profitable business or go “bankrupt.” As if a constitutionally authorized agency can? As if the Constitution or common sense requires it? Certainly the United States Post Office faces competition in major markets, and from the Internet, but what has that to

The spending binge that never was. (Courtesy of WSJ MarketWatch)

As you can see from the chart to the right, government spending under Obama, including his signature stimulus bill, is rising at a 1.4% annualized pace — slower than at any time in nearly 60 years.  The big surge in federal spending happened in fiscal 2009, before Obama took office. Since then, spending growth has been relatively flat. Here are the facts, via the Wall Street Journal:

• In the 2009 fiscal year — the last of George W. Bush’s presidency — federal spending rose by 17.9% from $2.98 trillion to $3.52 trillion. Check the official numbers at the Office of Management and Budget.

• In fiscal 2010 — the first budget under Obama — spending fell 1.8% to $3.46 trillion. • In fiscal 2011, spending rose 4.3% to $3.60 trillion.

• In fiscal 2012, spending is set to rise 0.7% to $3.63 trillion, according to the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate of the budget that was agreed to last August.

• Finally in fiscal 2013 — the final budget of Obama’s term — spending is scheduled to fall 1.3% to $3.58 trillion. Read the CBO’s latest budget outlook.

So this is great news, right? One of the primary attacks on President Obama turns out to be unsupportable by the facts. Woo hoo!

Sure, it’s great if all you care about is scoring a political point. But if you actually care about a healthy US economy and about a robust recovery which benefits all Americans, not just those at the top, it’s pretty dismal news. The lack of government spending following the deepest and most prolonged downturn since the Great Depression is a key factor in the painfully slow recovery.

How bad is it? As the WSJ piece points out, “Even hapless Herbert Hoover managed to increase spending more than Obama has.” The author goes on to explain that this is worse than it implies, because once you account for inflation and population growth, on a per capita basis, spending is actually down.  And the Democrats are gleefully prancing about, just about thrilled to death to have this vindication. sigh

This is just a rehash of what Michael Linden put together for the Center for American Progress. And it serves the same purpose – to “bust the myth” from conservatives that Obama has presided over growth in federal spending. But of course, that feeds another myth, that such restraint is a wise course in the midst of an economic recession. We know that the opposite is true, based on all the available evidence in virtually every country in the world. Just today, the head of the IMF is begging Britain to take advantage of their low borrowing costs and use fiscal stimulus to kickstart their economy.

Our borrowing costs are just as low. And so if you want to explain the sluggish recovery in the US, if you want to explain the suffering of millions of people through elevated unemployment going on its fourth year, you can use the exact same statistics and give the exact same answer – because under Obama, growth in government spending is “at the lowest level in nearly 60 years.” (David Dayen, FDL — emphasis mine)

Before I get a bunch of nasty comments about me undermining our beloved POTUS, I’m not laying all the blame at Obama’s feet. Certainly as leader of the both the nation and the party, Obama deserves blame; but the entire Democratic Party and their inability to move legislation that makes for tough campaigns but good policy are on the hook for this.

(Cross-posted from The Cassandra Files)

“We can almost speak in shorthand. … We share common experiences and have a perspective and underpinning which is similar.”

Thus does Michael Barbaro quote Mitt Romney in a New York Times article titled A Friendship Dating to 1976 Resonates in 2012. Of whom does Romney speak? Another Mormon deacon? Bain & Company founder Bill Bain? Barbaro explains.

… in 1976, the lives of Mitt Romney and Benjamin Netanyahu intersected, briefly but indelibly, in the 16th-floor offices of the Boston Consulting Group [headed by Bill Bain before he founded Bain & Company], where both had been recruited as corporate advisers. … That shared experience decades ago led to a warm friendship, little known to outsiders, that is now rich with political intrigue.

Not to mention controversy (emphasis added).

Mr. Romney has suggested that he would not make any significant policy decisions about Israel without consulting Mr. Netanyahu. … In a telling exchange during a debate in December, Mr. Romney criticized Mr. Gingrich for making a disparaging remark about Palestinians, declaring: “Before I made a statement of that nature, I’d get on the phone to my friend Bibi Netanyahu and say: ‘Would it help if I say this? What would you like me to do?’”

That even gives pause to Martin Indyk (one-time U.S. ambassador to Israel), no shrinking violet on Israel, who said “Mr. Romney’s statement implied that he would ‘subcontract Middle East policy to Israel.’” Barbaro on the bromance’s blossoming:

Mr. Romney, never known for his lack of self-confidence, still recalls the sense of envy he felt watching Mr. Netanyahu effortlessly hold court during the firm’s Monday morning meetings, when consultants presented their work and fielded questions from their colleagues. The sessions were renowned for their sometimes grueling interrogations.

“He was a strong personality with a distinct point of view,” Mr. Romney said. “I aspired to the same kind of perspective.”

Once they both switched to politics:

The men reconnected shortly after 2003 when Mr. Romney became the governor of Massachusetts. Mr. Netanyahu paid him a visit, eager to swap tales of government life [and] regaled Mr. Romney with stories of how, in the tradition of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, he had challenged unionized workers over control of their pensions, reduced taxes and privatized formerly government-run industries, reducing the role of government in private enterprise.

That both men are products of the same rapacious business environment is telling. On the other hand, that two such odd ducks — Romney wrapped as tight as a drum; Netanyahu in the grips of his obsession with attacking Iran — were able to find each other and become fast friends would be called heartwarming were the source of the heat anywhere but hell.

Cross-posted from the Foreign Policy in Focus blog Focal Points.

Coverage for pre-existing conditions would be cause for celebration were it part of a bill that actually did provide affordable care for all. You may be one of those lucky few whose employer pays the bulk of your premium, but that’s increasingly rare for the middle-class. Currently, for most of us, if your employer is providing you with healthcare insurance, you’re likely paying around $850 a month (pre-tax), and at least a couple hundred more if you’re self-insured. In our household that’s known as Second Rent.

In fact, the ACA is intended to “moderate premium hikes.” Never mind the future cost of premiums: many of us can scarcely pay our premiums today. How, one wonders, can the ACA be considered major legislation when it fails to deal with the central issue (deductibles and medical care that insurers won’t cover aside for the moment) — the cost of healthcare insurance this very minute.

On March 29 CNN Money reported:

… health care costs are continuing to eat away at consumers’ budgets. The cost to cover the typical family of four under an employer plan is expected to top $20,000 on health care this year, up more than 7% from last year, according to early projections by independent actuarial and health care consulting firm Milliman Inc. In 2002, the cost was just $9,235, the firm said.

In fact …

… even if the Affordable Care Act goes through, it will do little to lessen the financial burden for those who are already insured, Mayne said. “It will take other changes to really bend the cost curve and make substantial changes in health care costs,” she said.

Even though rejecting the individual mandate effectively amounts to “live free and die,” Americans don’t like to think they’re being coerced. Between that and the failure to address the cost of premiums, middle-class Americans wonder about the ACA: “Huh? What’s in it for me?”

Cross-posted from Scholars & Rogues.

But sociologist Darwin BondGraham, who is on the LASG Board of Directors, is in no mood to gloat about the victory. In an elegiac article for Counterpunch titled Starving the Real Beast, he writes

The war machine has begun to eat itself for the sake of preserving hyper-inequalities resulting directly from the less progressive tax code instituted a decade prior, and the multitude of shelters capital now hides behind.

See what he’s saying here? By paying minimal taxes, the rich and corporations are depriving the nuclear-weapons program and defense in general of funds (or forcing their reallocation from budget needs other than defense). In other words, BondGraham is providing progressives with a stunning talking point — one seldom seen (never, in my case). It might be worded something like this: When the corporate rich don’t pay their fair share of taxes, it leaves us more vulnerable to attack. (Not that we necessarily have to believe the last part.) BondGraham again (emphasis added):

Whether the Right realizes their folly at this point is not yet clear. After a decade of record breaking tax cuts for the wealthy, and economic deregulation … leading to explosive inequality and a historic crash of over-leveraged and debt ridden markets, the American plutocracy has not only [driven] millions into poverty, they have now gone so far as to undermine the budgetary and organizational basis of the military establishment upon which a larger global system of inequality, which they benefit from, rests.

Yes, you read that right. As well as putting the nation in harm’s way (theoretically) they’re undermining the security of their own enterprises. But less and less moored to the United States and able to afford their own security, perhaps that’s their plan.

Cross-posted from the Foreign Policy in Focus blog Focal Points.

The B61 is what’s known as a variable-yield bomb. First, it’s not one weapon per se, but a category of weapons based on one design. Second, some of the B61s come equipped with a dial. Bet you didn’t know that the destructive force of a nuclear bomb could be adjusted like an appliance.

The six settings range from A to F. Wonder what those stand for. How about: A for anti-personnel, B for bad news, C for cataclysmic, D for death and destruction, E for end of life on earth as we know it, and F for fail as in epic?

The executive director of the Project for Government Oversight (POGO), Danielle Brian, has just written a letter to Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta pointing out that, in fact, it’s U.S. taxpayers who are “bearing the increasing life extension costs of the approximately 200 B61 nuclear bombs deployed and stored in Europe.”

The issue of whether or not one objects to nuclear weapons on principle aside for the moment, POGO questions the military value, the security, and the cost of the umbrella deterrence which we extend to Europe.

The effectiveness first: “The situation at the U.S. base in Incirlik, Turkey, is particularly problematic: Most of the” approximately 50 bombs “are for delivery by US aircraft,” but requests to deploy a U.S. Air Force “wing there have been turned down by Turkey. … In a crisis, US aircraft from other bases would have to first deploy to Incirlik to pick up the weapons before they could be used. … Turkey’s F-16s … are not currently certified to carry out the mission of delivering nuclear weapons … In another example, Germany plans for its replacement fighter aircraft not to be nuclear capable. This could influence other countries to do the same—leaving the United States in a position where U.S.” aircraft capable of delivering nuclear weapons would need to fly in from elsewhere.

Second, the security:

A 2008 report by a U.S. Air Force Blue Ribbon Review states that security at the host-nation locations is varied and often does not meet U.S. nuclear weapons protection standards. Physical facilities such as structures, fences, lights, and alarm systems are not well maintained. In addition, host-nation military personnel charged with the security mission are sometimes conscripts [with] almost no specialized training [whose] reliability is questionable due to deficiencies in host-nation screening processes.

Third, the cost:

POGO has learned from government sources that, since POGO first raised the issue, the total cost estimate for extending the life (called a life extension program, or LEP) of B61s has grown from approximately $4 billion to $5.2 billion. The cost for the B61s deployed in Europe alone has grown from approximately $1.6 billion to approximately $2.1 billion.

Ms. Brian concludes:

If U.S. and European leaders really believe these nuclear weapons can be useful as a deterrent or that they remain essential to maintaining the political ties that bind the Alliance, the European members must agree to bear an increased share of the costs for these weapons. The U.S. should not be responsible for continuing to pay the majority of the cost to maintain a nuclear weapons capability in European countries, particularly given our nation’s financial constraints.

Washington and the military tend to be impervious to existential questions about nuclear weapons and their morality. Demonstrating their exorbitant costs and their lack of usefulness* in specific situations is, arguably, the best technique for effecting arms control and disarmament.

*As Ward Wilson of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies has often eloquently argued, especially in his Nonproliferation Review article The Myth of Nuclear Deterrence.

If you’ll recall, earlier this year, the New START treaty was held hostage by Senate Republicans under the direction of Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ). By way of ransoming it, the Obama administration forked over a proposal to spend $88 billion during the next decade on nuclear-weapon modernization. (As if to show the futility of that approach, while it was ultimately passed, Kyl still didn’t vote in favor of New START.) That figure represents a 20 percent increase above funding levels proposed during the Bush administration.

Equally as sad, as Hans Kristensen wrote at the Federation of American Scientists’ Strategic Security Blog:

… the treaty does not require destruction of a single nuclear warhead and actually permits the United States and Russia to deploy almost the same number of strategic warheads that were permitted by the 2002 Moscow Treaty [thanks, in part, to a] new counting rule that attributes one weapon to each bomber rather than the actual number of weapons assigned to them. [Even stranger, this] “fake” counting rule frees up a large pool of warhead spaces under the treaty limit that enable each country to deploy many more warheads than would otherwise be the case.

Indeed, the New START Treaty is not so much a nuclear reductions treaty as it is a verification and confidence building treaty.

Confidence building is nice and all. But it’s been 62 years since both the United States and the former Soviet Union (and then Russia) have possessed nuclear weapons, 25 years since the pivotal Reykjavík nuclear summit, and 20 years since the end of the Cold War. We’re still just trying to build confidence?

Meanwhile, what does disarmament look like when it’s not just pecking at the inside of its egg struggling to emerge? Regular readers of Focal Points know that we track the progress of the Los Alamos Study Group, a disarmament organization that monitors the Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratory (the heart of the Manhattan Project during World War II) and is today managed by a Bechtel-led consortium for the National Nuclear Security Administration.

In recent years, the mission of the Los Alamos Study Group (LASG) has been to halt the progress of a Soviet-era-sounding project called the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement Facility (CMRR), intended, in the words of the Los Alamos National Laboratory itself, to perform “analytical chemistry, materials characterization, and metallurgy research and development,” for the production of nuclear pits.

Upon first hearing the phrase, a nuclear pit might sound like a dump for nuclear waste and old warheads. But, as in the pit of a fruit, it’s an origin of life — where the chain reaction occurs in a nuclear warhead. You can be forgiven if you’re surprised that, in light of President Obama’s renowned Prague disarmament speech and New START, however watered down, we’re still creating these obscure objects of destruction. Especially considering that 14,000 pits have been recovered from warheads that have been retired.

Physicist and nuclear policy authority Frank von Hippel recently testified in a lawsuit that the LASG filed against the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).

The need for large-scale pit production has vanished. In 2003, the [NNSA] was arguing that the [United States] needed the capability to produce 125 to 450 pits per year by 2020 to replace the pits in the US weapon stockpile that would be 30 to 40 years old by then. . . . But, in 2006, we learned that US pits were so well made that, according to a Congressionally-mandated review of … pit aging, “Most primary types have credible minimum lifetimes in excess of 100 years.”

Of course, that’s as much bad news — these infernal engines will be around for another century unless they’re dismantled — as good news. Meanwhile, the CMRR project is now expected to cost between $4 and $6 billion. In order to halt or at least stall it, the LASG filed a case against the NNSA seeking a new Environmental Impact Statement (as mandated by the National Environmental Policy Act) to address, among other things, seismic concerns about the project. While that case was dismissed, the LASG is not only appealing it, but filing a second lawsuit toward the same end. In the latest LASG newsletter, Executive Director Greg Mello writes (emphasis added):

On December 15, House and Senate conferees issued their “megabus” appropriations bill for fiscal year (FY) 2012. [Passed in the Senate and House, though 86 Republicans defied Republican leadership and voted against it. -- RW] … the bill appropriates only 63% of the requested funds for the [CMRR], slashing $100 million (M) from the $270 M proposed spending level in the project. … CMRR and [a project in proximity to it] were the only NNSA Weapons Activities construction projects cut. … The proposed CMRR cut is 90% of the total proposed cut in new NNSA construction. NNSA’s other proposed massive project, the Uranium Processing Facility (UPF), slated to be built at the Y-12 Nuclear Security Site in Tennessee, was not cut at all.

We have no wish to slight the forces arrayed against the Oak Ridge, Tennessee project. But we can’t help but conclude that, along with current economic climate, the Los Alamos Study Group made the difference in slowing progress of the CMRR.

As Mello writes, the funding cut “can be fairly described as one of the few concrete policy accomplishments of the entire arms control and disarmament community in the United States over the past couple of years.” Never mind your garden-party treaties that are guaranteed not to offend — when the construction of a facility designated for the manufacture of nuclear-weapons components is blocked, that’s disarmament you can taste and feel.