What They're Feeding Me

Friday Occupy Portland will hold an open-to-the public Open House, at the new Occupy spaces in St. Francis church (1131 SE Oak St, Portland), with music, crafts for the kids, pies, coffee and workshops from the hard-working folks at Occupy Portland.

A press conference will begin at 5:30pm with a statement from the Occupy Portland PR Team on its new community space, followed by a question and answer session for the media.

The press will receive a guided tour of the new space and is invited to attend the consequent Open House at 6pm, with presentations on the evolution of Occupy, a panel discussion, workshops and entertainment.

The event coincides with the unveiling of the new OccupyPortland.org website and various 2012 actions & initiatives.

Program
5:30-6pm Press conference & tour
6-6:30 Mingling, food and committee tabling
6:30-7:15 Presentation on the evolution of Occupy, Videos and Occupier
discussion panel
7:15-8 workshops on non-violent resistance tactics & strategies, online activism, tiny-tent making, education, kids activities & more.
8-9 Entertainment

Public Event Invite:

Occupy Portland Open House

Come celebrate our new community space!

When: Friday, Jan 13 from 6-9pm
Where: St. Francis at 1131 Southeast Oak Street Portland, OR 97214
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/306012759438103/

Featuring a panel on Occupy, music, food, workshops, committee booths,
a raffle, door prizes…and fun!

Breakout session include tiny-tent making, non-violent resistance
tactics & strategies, online activism, kids activities and more! This
is a family friendly event.

Bring a can of food or a pie!

photo by Lauriel Arwin
January 8, 2012 – PORTLAND, OR Unions, workers’ groups and supporters held a march to Save The US Postal Service. Present were advocates for the National Association of Letter Carriers, Jobs With Justice, The Bus Project, and Portland Immigrant Rights Coalition, along with members of informal workers’ groups representing workers who are not in unions. The organizers of the march sought out Occupy Portland for an endorsement, who officially supported the action through the GA process.

The march began in Pioneer Courthouse Square, a large and visible city park where the Christmas Tree was just undergoing an unceremonious take-down. Private contract-workers chopped off low branches just as the crowd amassed. Estimates of the total crowd by the end of the march size ranged from 275 to 800 people. Portland Police were in light numbers, in t-shirts, and on bicycles for the city-block sized rally, in an apparent show of solidarity with the march. An officer would not give me his name (because I didn’t ask for it).

Mayoral Candidate Cameron Whitten was on hand for the occasion, making his rounds and joining the people to call for saving the US Postal Service. He stood proudly with an axe-shaped-sign that read “Jobs Not Cuts,” and pretended to cut my head off for the cameras. “We’re here to recall everybody,” he said of the next election. “Screw this government. Quote me on that.” Whitten said USPS was important and then railed against the private companies profiting while millions of Americans suffer. “The trillions going to the banks and investment houses is BS.”

Jim Cook, President of the National Association of Letter Carriers 82 helped explain the day’s plans to the waiting crowd. Speakers at the rally began lining up to help rouse protesters and make the occasion loud and memorable. Speaker Omar Gonzales said 41,000 jobs were created in the month of December in the US Postal Service. “We are the last, last stand-up Middle Class workers who have to say NO!” The crowd repeated back, “NO!” “We’re not gonna let it happen,” Omar continued. “The fight starts today, in Portland.” The crowd roared.

Other announcers spoke out about the currently-pending pieces of legislation H.R. 2309 and S. 1789. Congressman Darrell Issa’s HR 2309 would end Saturday delivery, cut 200,000 jobs, close thousands of post offices and fail to address the 2006 measure which causes the financial problems in the first place. S 1789 cuts Saturday service by tying it to profitability without fixing the accounting error which sucks most of the USPS revenues into pension over-payments uncommon in any industry.

Speakers were present from AFT 3571, US Association of Neighborhoods, and Jobs With Justice. Jessica Campbell from the Rural Organizing Project told the crowd about Deadwood, Oregon, where of the town’s 180 people, 164 were present at a rally to save their post office. “Congress bankrupted the Postal Service,” Campbell announced. “Rural Oregon will not pay.”

Amy Hertzfeld from Working America spoke about the reach of the organization, the community affiliate of the AFL-CIO. “We are in 10 states and have over 3 million members. … No other group puts boots on the ground and understands neighborhoods as well as letter carriers. Hertzfeld decried what she called “radical downsizing” of the Postal Service workforce.

David Jarvis, President of the mail-handlers’ union locally said that the plans under discussion in congress could cost 3700 rural post offices and 200 mail processing operations. Scott Murahashi if the American Rural Letter Carriers Association simply said “Darrel Issa,” and the entire crowd booed. Murahasi continued “…is a very rich man, who wants to get richer by eliminating jobs.” The crowd hissed again. “All of Oregon’s congressmen but one support us,” he said of the rally. Letter carrier Eric Matras, who was holding his son, yelled out “Where’s Waldo?,” a reference to Oregon Congressman Greg Walden who is absent on this issue. Jarvis finished by remarking that USPS delivers half of the world’s mail. “How do you tell your neighbors, ‘yeah, we’ll deliver it a lot slower’?”

Paul Prince, second-generation letter carrier, said a recent Oxford study of the Planet Earth rated the US Postal Service number one in the world. “Who would wanna screw with it?” Prince asked rhetorically, calling Darrell Issa “The richest man in Congress, who has been convicted multiple times for car theft,” and said Issa’s agenda was “all for corporate greed. … You know that voice when you hear a car alarm that says ‘Step Away From the Vehicle?’ That’s Darrell Issa. He called Postmaster Partick Donahoe (whose name also elicited boos and hisses) “Issa’s puppet” and said that not one penny in tax dollars goes to the USPS. “My bank trusts [USPS] enough to put my bank account numbers in [the mail]. Would they do that with a third-rate carrier?” Prince concluded “So to Mister Issa we have to say: ‘Step Away form the Postal Service.’“

Leader of the Oregon AFL-CIO Tom Chamberlain spoke about a current delay in closures to allow congress time to fix the problem. He declared, “This is the Army that’s going to change the country. There wouldn’t be a five-month moratorium [announced December 13th] without us.”

The rally then moved to the streets from Pioneer Courthouse Square. The parade route twisted down Morrison Street to 4th Avenue, down 4th to Burnside, up Burnside to Broadway, and down the North-east-bound half of Broadway to the Post Office on Hoyt. March Organizers wore bright-orange vests to distinguish themselves, surround the crowd, and guide the march on its path. They obtained a permit, and a police escort, which led to an orderly and police-repression free procession.

photo by Lauriel Arwin

The group marching were diverse and lively. They were young and old, disabled citizens, students, teachers, wheelchair-bound citizens, people of color, homosexuals, and many other diverse types of people, all of whom were unified in their support of the Post Office. The crowd seemed like it was just the right saize to be orderly without being sparse or boring. Chants rang through the streets, bells rang, drums were always clanging and banging along with the chants, and the footsteps. “Congress stalling, that’s appalling,” “Five Day No Way,” “Postal Service Yes, Privatizing No,” and “Hey hey, ho ho, union busters’ got to go,” were all enthusiastically repeated a few times each. The size and length of the march made each chant refreshing and new, and nearly all the participats in the march shouted along together, which at a larger march is impossible.

Red and Black flags waved in the sunlight, and Rumorz Cafe offerered free coffee to anyone marching by. “This march is fueled on coffee,” Rumorz’ barista Eli said as I grabbed a cup.

The march then gathered on the sidewalk in front of the Hoyt and Broadway post office, and after some rousing last chants of “for six day delivery, we shall not be moved,” the final speakers brought their cases. “2309 NO, 1789 NO” chants erupted from the crowd. Oregon’s Congressional delegation was thanked for supporting the passage of postal reform bills that allow continuation of service. The Legislative Director of the American Postal Workers Union, Patty Dewey, thanks unionists, activists and all the other participants in the march for working against Issa’s bill. Someone in the crowd yelled “Issa’s a liar,” and Dewey responded, “Issa is a liar. This is not a bailout,” referring to H.R. 3591 and S. 1853, bills which would address the accounting problems and mandates which have placed the USPS budget in a stranglehold since Congress enacted them in 2006.

The final speaker at the event was Isham Harris, a local activist who has been carrying letters for 35 years. “Scripture says if a man doesn’t work, he doesn’t eat. And all we want is to work, so we can eat.” Harris called the march “an enthusiastic and providential victory. Providence gave us great weather, and the timing was perfect.”

Jimi Cook, surveying the march his union organized, later said

“The Occupy Movement awakened America to the fact that each one of us has power. The Postal Service represents people power, power that goes back to the Revolution. We communicated our power door-to-door and neighborhood to neighborhood and we got a revolution.”

His parting thoughts were, “when the power goes out, remember the Postal Service.”

White is not a nationality. Many white people have never, in their limited experience, considered how limiting to their experience and understanding of the world is their identification with “white” as a nationality. Nobody who calls themselves “white” should continue to do so after being told this simple fact. White is not a nationality. The only people who should be adamantly defending the concept of a “white nation” are white supremacists. White racists. Any person who calls itself “white” is buying into the white nationalist frame of thinking that has poisoned America.

Because the upper classes wanted to divide the lower classes, they decided to perpetuate the idea that America was a nation of majority White people, and to lump the English, Irish, German, Swedish, Gaelic and many other ethnographic groups into the same census category, thereby creating a majority block which identifies with a construct of society rather than a common national history. While mingling, marriage, courtship and sex between White and non-White peoples became anathema, co-mingling of these diverse nationalities within the White subculture was only shunned internally (as by the nationalistic impulses of Irish versus Scottish people, or English versus German). The nationality category “White,” upon conception, birthed institutional racism in America. Its effects are still felt today.

White Americans do not acknowledge the national origin of their European and Caucasian ancestors. This is in marked contrast to the Americans of African, Latin or Native descent, who are at most times painfully aware of their historical origins, indeed shamed for them. It is unbecoming of any American one may describe as “White,” who is not actively racist, to describe their nationality so obtusely. It showcases an ignorance of family history, and a tacit acceptance of the benefits of Whiteness that society confers upon them. This is passive racism, a refusal to cast off the privilege of Whiteness.

this mis-identification makes just as little sense as a poor person identifying as a Capitalist. The ambitions do not match the possibilities.

Whiteness, upon its construction, divided the poor against themselves, and has prevented the poor from becoming unified in their refusal to perpetuate the capitalist system’s inequities. Capitalism is unsustainable; infinite growth is impossible and will inevitably approach maximums of resource allocation and population sustainability. The poor, however, cling to Capitalism, for the same reason that White people cling to the concept of Whiteness. The poor wish to have a chance to compete in a “free market” which does not exist, just as White people idealistically cling to a non-existent White nationality. If Whiteness did not unify a large block of the poor against other non-White poor people, they might begin to see their common shoddy situation as inherently tied to Capitalism. Instead, nationality is the most common scapegoat for poverty, with minorities labelled as the true perpetrators of inequality. Never in human history has a level playing field for economic competition existed. White people wish to be equally respected members of society, while conferring a title upon themselves rooted in oppression and dominance of other, true nationalities.

The transition from pre-modern feudalism to modern Capitalism did not happen overnight. Formerly-wealthy barons and kings did not suddenly find themselves equalized with peasant farmers by the imposition of Capitalist ideals. The feudal system underwent alteration and amendment but is still at its core an unfair system built upon ill-gotten gains. In feudal society the wealthy obtained wealth through war, economic and military domination, subjugation of minority and female populations, and slavery. The systems of war and oppression still exist, their conductors have simply shifted tactics to comply with a standard of “fairness” which is in no way fair. The poorest 400 families in Western feudal society were the ancestors of the poorest 4 million Westerners in modern Capitalism. There is some class mobility to speak of, but this is not usual, a “man bites dog” scenario, an aberration from the typical circumstance. Wealth begets wealth, and poverty begets poverty. Modern poverty is a direct descendant of ancient poverty, slavery and conquest.

This is why Native, Black and Latin Americans are not on an economic par with White Americans. By perpetuating the myth of Whiteness, the Capitalist upper class (directly descended from feudal upper classes) has maintained its dominance. The market has never been free, nor society fair, for the long-silent majority of poor people of all nations, from pre-modernity to present. A scant minority of Western patriarchs, plutocrats and warlords still maintains rule, passed down from long-established lineages of elites.

The refusal to acknowledge the historically-influenced reality of modern Capitalism is just as insidious as the refusal to acknowledge the historically-influenced reality of modern Whiteness. Any analysis of the current state of the market and society which does not draw these conclusions first is inherently biased against addressing the most-obvious flaws in the utopian thinking of social egalitarians and Capitalists. There is not a free market, nor a free and equal society, because the current market originated in undeniably unequal and unjust conditions, and the current society is an altered yet historically-unequal one. Modern, supposedly-free-and-equal markets and society arose from colonization, slavery and continued racial animus. Ignoring these facts will not make these problems go away. As a matter of historical record, refusal to start our analysis of our modern market and social problems from this historically-informed perspective is precisely why the society remains not equal, and the market not free.

A similar line of critical thinking exists which states unequivocally that the perpetuation of patriarchy is borne through a refusal to analyze historical male dominance, and which views the historical oppression of queers similarly as a requisite acknowledgement for analyzing and addressing the problems of homophobia, transphobia and queer-bashing. Women are to blame for over-population and homosexuals spread disease. Facts and history be damned. Oppression does not simply exist independent of modern society, but is rather a part of the fiber weaving the fabric of modern society. A world free of historically-derived oppression would not simply rework the current framework for economic and societal activity to utopian ends. It would replace the existing, Western, dystopian framework outright, as it is rotten to its core, a fact obvious with even the slightest scrutiny of Western history.

Capitalism, Whiteness, Patriarchy and Heteronormativity share a common thread, in that we can accept that we have them without critically analyzing their origins, and thus keep them intact and attempt to patch up issues borne of them. Alternatively, we can analyze the origins of these constructs first, and choose whether or not we want to keep them and the issues they create. There is no middle ground in the fight against this historic injustice.

This Sunday, January 8th, Occupy Portland joins a march to save the US Postal Service, put on by The National Association of Letter Carriers and the National Rural Letter Carriers’ Association:

Save Saturday Delivery & Door-to-Door Mail Delivery
Save Community Post Offices
March & Rally, Downtown Portland
Sunday, Jan. 8th, 2 – 3:30pm

Rally at Pioneer Courthouse Square
March to Portland Main Post Office (NW Hoyt @ Broadway)
*** FAMILY FRIENDLY, BRING CHILDREN ***

Congress is getting ready to vote on HR 2309 & S 1789
These bills would
1. End door-to-door and curbside delivery for 90% of postal patrons
2. End Saturday delivery
3. Close thousands of community post offices
4. Close half the mail processing plants
5. Force senior carriers into retirement
6. Eliminate hundreds of thousands of jobs
7. End overnite delivery of first class mail

TIME TO STAND UP AND SHOW UP!

more info: National Association of Letter Carriers 82, 503-493-5903
www.saveamericaspostalservice.org

Already under fiscal strain, the USPS recently announced it would no longer offer next-day first-class delivery of mail in the US. The change is likely to affect the bottom line of many American businesses, to the tune of $100,000,000 according to one study.

In addition, the Postmaster General announced that USPS will close 252 of the nation’s 487 mail processing centers, the facilities which sort and distribute mail to post offices. The delays in delivery service are expected to shift first-class mail from a one-to-three day delivery window to a two-to-three day window. The effects will be most prominent in lower population rural and suburban areas, whose mail processing centers bring in less revenue and were thus targeted for closure.

The Postal Service certainly does have a problem with its funding, though not simply from lack of business. USPS handled more than $67,000,000,000 worth of revenues in 2010. But this mail is not enough to meet a legally-required pension funding provision. USPS must fund its pensions 75 years in advance. This means that pensions for employees who aren’t even hired yet have to be fully funded by 2016, under Title VIII of the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006, signed into law by President George W. Bush. Public employee unions have long been a target of the anti-government right, for their supposedly-budget-busting pensions, so these “reforms” ensured that the egregious over-payments required under the new law would appear, to the casual observer, to be another sign of union excess. Attacking and bankrupting the USPS ensures more revenue for FedEx and UPS, among other private competitors of the government-managed USPS.

According to a report (PDF) from APWU,

apparent differences in the proportion of operating expenses attributable to labor costs in large part disappear when each organization’s operating expenses are adjusted to account for the larger international and domestic transportation services and related equipment that characterize the operations of UPS and Fedex as compared to the U.S. Postal Service
Private Mail.

That is to say that FedEx and UPS do not provide a smarter business model, as is often insisted to be the case in media outlets with an anti-government, anti-worker bias.

Take this example from Glenn Beck’s “The Blaze”:

Currently, labor costs represent 80 percent of the agency’s expenses (as opposed to UPS’ 53 percent and Fedex’s 32 percent) and costs continue to rise and grow with the help of such incredibly, unthinkably harmful provisions as the “no-layoff” clause in union contracts.

Moreover, it has been discovered recently that the USPS has overpaid an estimated $60 billion into its employee pension plans.

You read that correctly. $60 billion. Extremely generous benefits, employees that cannot be fired, and $60 billion overpaid in pensions. That would explain the 80 percent labor costs.

To read this, you’d almost come to believe that Glenn Beck’s media outlet was more concerned with making the union look bad, than the due diligence of determining that labor costs, as a percentage of operating expenses adjusted for the different types of transportation used within the three business models, shows a much different picture.

“In 2005, FedEx was among 53 entities that contributed the maximum of $250,000 to sponsor the second inauguration of President George W. Bush.” (wiki)
UPS spent $2,817,640 lobbying in 2005, their top issue being Postal reform.

This budget “crisis,” like so many in Washington, was intentional. Just as our nation’s full-faith-and-credit was used as a bargaining chip to extract concessions and budget cuts, this model of pension funding is the primary reason why the USPS has been losing money since 2006, as it slashes and burns in an attempt at meeting its legal obligations. The march in Portland on Sunday isn’t just about keeping post office employees working, or mail-sorting centers open. It’s about demanding that government work for people, and not against the interest of workers on behalf of private companies. As the USPS goes under, poor people lose service or are forced into more-expensive and less-convenient private options. And that’s what this fight, Occupy, has been about since the beginning: the undue influence of corporate money on our government.

For thousands of years, people have been predicting the end of the world. People in the Middle Ages were certain, 100%, that bad weather was a sign of the end times. Credit cards were the mark-of-the-beast. Rock and roll was the end of morality. Americans, a few at least, have called every President since Washington the Anti-Christ. Technocrats believed that Y2K would shut all the lights out for good.

The current apocalypse du jour involves the Mayan Calendar ending on December 21st, 2012. As Todd Armstrong puts it in his comedy routine, if the Mayans could predict the future, why couldn’t they see the Spanish coming?

Meanwhile, revolutions occur with regularity. A couple of hundred years is typically the life-span of a government, in particular one with a fiat currency. One Founding Father even famously declared that revolutions every so often were necessary… even while building a very strict framework for a government he would then defend with his life.

Fear of the end-times is paralyzing. It keeps people from advocating for changes. When you believe in imminent doom, every step you take makes you think “Am I going to cause it? Will my next foot-fall be on the button that launches WWIII?” So you do nothing. You stay home and worry. You zone out on the internet. You watch other people trying to make changes, and blame them for starting the inevitable decline of humankind. You see drastic switches and you tense up and reject the new, instead of casting away the old.

Revolution is a driving force in humanity. Sometimes we call it ingenuity, or self-examination (which invariably leads to personal revolution), or love (and the new humanity it creates through procreation), but humanity is defined by its stunning advances, its revolutions in thoughts and deeds. The American and French Revolutions weren’t just about starting a country, they were about showing the world that a country could be started if the people in a particular place decided to. We have advances in technology so lightning quick that you can’t own an up-to-date computer for more than a few days at a time. We conduct business meetings from our cars, now, so we don’t waste time in traffic. It makes us feel good to be up-to-date, but striving to stay up-to-date is a reminder that things haven’t always been this way, that we had to lose plenty of work-hours sitting in traffic before someone invented the teleconferencing and mobile networks necessary to solve the problem, that old-school computers were inadequate for modern communication, that a feudal state is incompatible with modern conceptions of rights. Every day in our pampered lives is a testament to the power and reality of constant human revolution.

Certainty in the present drags down the inevitable march of history from the past to the future. Despite our human lust for advancement we stop ourselves for fear of getting what we wish for, and because we just wish we could be comfortable and secure in what we have at the moment. The greatest operating principle in the conspiracy to prevent progress and revolution is to make people feel certain about the rightness and predictability of the now, with revelations of a certain end. Popular myths about the end of the world only serve to make people fearful of progress, more willing to work actively against large-scale change, as these apocalyptic myths are always tied to the idea that the present is fully explained in some way or another, in some ancient text, or a calendar artifact from a dead civilization.

Our collective certitude in the present manifests in a belief that every recent phenomenon is just a sign that prophecies of apocalypse have already come true. The more of us are convinced the world will end in fire, the more likely someone will be able to douse the planet in gasoline and light a match, unchecked, while we read our little books convinced the future has already been written. The idea of inevitability stops us from controlling our collective destiny. We’d do better to write it ourselves. The end-times have never happened, and revolutions against standing governments have, and will again.