Washington Monthly - September/October 2014 - 17

TeN mIles sqUare

TN: And there's this interesting cultural divide, too. The franchisees are
usually Republicans. They in effect are trying to form unions of their own,
and the big fast-food companies are trying to prevent them from doing
that, sometimes making it contractually forbidden. That's a good example of what you are writing about in your book. What stands between
franchisees and minimum-wage workers-two groups that ought to be
natural allies-is nothing more than ideology.
RN: What's more conservative than freedom of contract? It's one of the
pillars of a free society. Both sides [should] get to negotiate a contract. It's
not just a take-it-or-leave-it deal from one side.
TN: You talk a lot about corporatism in your book, and it's never clear to
me whether you're talking about an actual ideology.
RN: [Large corporations] have one thing in common. To use their benign phrasing, they want predictability. To get predictability, they have to
have control. To get control, they have to try to control markets through
joint ventures, cartels, monopolization, all the techniques that are known
and permitted by our Justice Department.
What are the countervailing forces? Number one is government. If
they can control government as the principal challenger to corporate
power, both directly and how it can empower trade unions, consumer
groups, access to Department of Justice actions, they're at third base in
so many ways.
TN: So what you're describing is not really an ideology. It's merely the
exercise of power.
RN: It's a strategy that doesn't want to go to ideological levels visibly, because then it's more vulnerable. The one thing corporations have
learned is: Do not present a visible coherent strategy of domination, because then you'll provoke all sorts of counterforces, you make it easy for
people to go after you. What you do is you keep talking free market, you
keep talking free enterprise, you keep talking overregulation.
Corporatism inside the boardroom is the feeling that the people best
able to run the political economy are the rich and powerful. They got rich
and powerful because they are smart, they are goal oriented, because
their success is society's success.
TN: Final question: What's the best-run government program you
know about, either current or historic?
RN: You're dealing with somebody who has higher expectations than
normal. By the way, you know why government gets a bad rap? Because
the right wing beats up on it all the time, and the left is never satisfied with
the agencies, because they're so routinely succumbing to corporate pressure. So there's nobody praising government.
I can say the auto safety standards-the early ones-were very successful. I could say that we haven't had a thalidomide scandal since the
thalidomide disaster occurred in western Europe [around 1960]. You
know, something's working, given the proliferation of drugs. I can say
lead mostly has been eliminated from the environment-it's less present in your blood now, and in children's blood. Other agencies in the
top tier would be the Centers for Disease Control, the National Institutes of Health, the Coast Guard, the U.S. Forest Service (apart from
the pressures from the timber industry), the under-budgeted National
Park Service, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration-
to name a few.

We've got these cars recalled. We have less deadly toxic pollutants in
many rivers. You can actually fish in certain lakes. But let's face it: the companies never let go of these regulatory agencies, and they never let go of
the contracting agencies like Medicare and the Pentagon. And they never let go of the granting agencies like the Interior Department. So I have
to go segment by segment. Now, it may surprise you that one of the success stories, which is being seriously slandered, is the U.S. Postal Service,
throughout history.
TN: Success story prior to its being privatized?
RN: Prior and after. If it wasn't burdened with huge annual prepayments for retirement and health insurance-monstrous prepayments-
in the last two, three years it would have broken even, even with the
recession and the Internet. You're talking about getting buffeted by
UPS and FedEx, buffeted by the Internet and emailing, and buffeted
by the recession.
I know its warts, but consider this: it's the only giant corporation I know
of in America that is a creditor of the U.S. government. A net creditor. The
U.S. government owes the Postal Service about $60 billion. Now, the Postal Service has borrowed, because it's defaulted on the payment-they're
about $15 billion in the red. But if you set it off against what the government owes the Postal Service, it is a net creditor. Now show me any other company. Show me General Electric. They're all getting corporate welfare! Intel's on welfare, Cisco's on welfare, it's the R&D credit. They have to
pay them to do R&D! Boeing is on welfare, General Electric ... but corporatists are always slamming the Postal Service again and again. The morale must be pretty bad. Talk to your postal person. It's really low morale.
TN: Do you have a position on Saturday delivery?
RN: Continue it, because [otherwise] people won't post anything
on Thursday.
If they just were a little more revenue oriented-first of all, they're not
managed properly. It's what my sergeant said in the Army: "You know,
you guys, with all your bitching, let me tell you something about the
Army. It's a system devised by geniuses so that it can be run by idiots like
you." [Laughter.]
Corporate officials and privatizers dominate the USPS board of
directors-talk about conflicts of interest! And that's been under Democrats and Republicans. Number two, the head of the Postal Service,
Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe and his predecessor, it's like they
can't think of saying, How do you increase revenue? And one way is
better management at the local level so small businesses don't have to
wait in line so much; but the others are, for example, they can't deliver
beer and wine because Congress tells them they can't deliver beer and
wine. The USPS doesn't have much of a lobby on Capitol Hill. If it wasn't
for the unions, they would have virtually no lobby. So in spite of that,
you put a letter in the mail, and it goes to Seattle or Alexandria for the
same price, and it gets there! I think it's being subjected to extensive
preventable erosions-it's amazing, the system that was put in place,
starting with Benjamin Franklin.
Tim Noah is author of The Great Divergence: America's Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It. He writes twice weekly for
MSNBC.com. The full audio version of this interview is available at
washingtonmonthly.com.
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Washington Monthly - September/October 2014

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