Assault On the Post Office disguised as Defense Of it?

Some of Trump's arguments about Amazon avoiding taxes are perfectly legitimate, however like most of the times when he makes a rational argument against corporate interests, he manages to distort everything and mix it up with wild unfounded accusations. I've said repeatedly that if the mainstream media really wanted to prevent Trump from getting elected, they could have done so by simply not providing him with adequate media coverage to enable him to get the name recognition he needs to get elected or obsession coverage needed to manipulate the clueless with his demagoguery.

However, even without what some might consider a fringe conspiracy theory, the mainstream media is currently demonstrating how uninformed the majority of the public might be about the way the Post Office and some related businesses work and the basic fundamentals of out economic system.

One of the most fundamental principles of the so-call "free-market" system that we supposedly have, is that if consumers make informed decisions then the most efficient provider of products or services will get the most business and those that can't do as good a job will go out of business.

This is based on the false assumption that consumers are always rational and that they have access to accurate information to make those decisions, both assumptions, which are false.

Another false assumption that the mainstream media has been promoting for decades is that all regulation makes it harder for businesses to provide good or services, using this as a justification to eliminate protections for the environment, workers, consumers, and restrictions on consolidation which creates oligarchies. These regulations might also prevent deceptive advertising; and, when it comes to some businesses including utilities, the shipping industry, and the media, they even enable some business to consolidate to oligarchies and suppress small businesses. Even when it comes to retail they've enabled oligarchies to take over eliminating a real "free enterprise," which I'll get back to below.

In fact, if you watched the news coverage of this subject close enough you might have seen hints of the reason why consumers don't have accurate information to make informed decisions; thanks to trade secrecy laws the public is banned from having full information, even when it's the government running the business; they can negotiate secret deals that might give some unfair advantages to those with political connections.

Some of this is subtly indicated in the following article from the Washington Post, which even though it's owned by Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, provides a little more information than most of the mainstream media about the subject, although not enough:

Is the post office making or losing money delivering Amazon packages? 04/04/2018

It seems like a straightforward question: Is the U.S. Postal Service making or losing money on its package delivery contract with Amazon — you know, the one President Trump can’t stop tweeting about? To answer it, all you need to do is start with the Postal Service’s revenue from Amazon, subtract all the expenses associated with delivering the Amazon packages and — voila! — you either get a positive number (a profit) or a negative one (a loss). Accounting 101.

As with most interesting questions, however, this one turns out to be more complicated than that.

For starters, other than Amazon and the Postal Service, almost nobody — including Trump — knows for sure what the revenue from the contract is. Analysts have estimated that Amazon uses the Postal Service for 40 percent of its shipping and that the per-package cost works out to roughly $2, or about half of the standard rate charged by other big shippers. One reason the Postal Service is willing to give Amazon such a big discount is the huge volume of deliveries that the contract guarantees — a key factor in business with high fixed costs. Another is that Amazon performs a fair amount of the shipping work itself, arranging the packages by Zip code and carrier route and dropping them off on pallets at one of 20 Postal Service distribution centers across the country. (Amazon founder and CEO Jeffrey P. Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

.....

Indeed, under federal law, the Postal Service must not calculate only the incremental costs and revenue associated with any special contract or any of its lines of business when calculating costs. In setting rates, it must determine the full cost of providing the service by assigning an appropriate share of the common, or “institutional,” costs. ..... Complete article

Why doesn't anyone "other than Amazon and the Postal Service, almost nobody — including Trump — know for sure what the revenue from the contract" is?

It's almost certainly because what even deal they came to is almost certainly secrets, and anyone with knowledge about it probably signed one of those "non-disclosure" contracts we've been hearing so much about in recent sex scandals. These contracts are probably much more common in regular business dealings than they are with sex scandals, but even when it comes to a business that is owned by tax payers we're not allowed to know what is in the deals signed on our behalf; therefore we can't know for certain whether or not Amazon is getting a deal that most of us could never get enabling them to consolidate their monopoly and defend it from small competitors that might want to get into the market.

However there is enough propaganda to make it seem otherwise, including a recent conversation on Morning Joe that is part of the senseless gabbing to make it seem as if this secrecy is justified, mostly by quickly skipping over any hint that they might be negotiating deals to give some businesses an advantage over others.

Joe Scarborough ridiculed Trump by saying that Amazon pays the same rate the rest of us do; he made this claim in an excited way repeating it over and over but it doesn't appear to be true. Steve Ratner, seemed to know this and although he didn't call Scarborough out he hinted at it no more than a minute or two later by saying that if they negotiated a better deal they would be required by law not to sell below costs, which the article from the Washington Post seems to confirm. Then Eugene Robinson added that if the Post Office decided to charge them more they could take their business elsewhere, without reviewing the basic principles of the shipping industry or mentioning possible secret contracts, which the Washington Post hints at by saying that few people know what Amazon is paying.

Unlike an enormous amount of anti-regulation propaganda that the public has been listening to for decades the basic fundamentals of many industries, is almost never discussed in the mainstream media; if it was it would explain why competition doesn't work in many industries, which is why they were introduced as either government owned industries, or subsidized industries, with what we hope are reasonable regulation to look out for the best interests of the general public.

The law mentioned by the Washington Post article is cited as part of the evidence to indicate that they couldn't possibly be losing money; however that doesn't guarantee that they're not getting an unfair advantage over the competition; and a few other comments that were mentioned briefly by the media in the first day or two implies that they might just be doing that. Some of the pundits mentioning this law said mentioned the possibility that the amount they charge Amazon can't be below cost, they allowed for the possibility that it might be enough to cover all delivery costs, including as the Washington Post puts it "an appropriate share of the common, or 'institutional,' costs;" however the law doesn't require deals to provide their share of the retirement plans for postal workers. We have no way of knowing if this is the case since any contracts they might have made are secret; however if it is it could give them an advantage over the competition by shifting the cost of these retirement funds; or it could be used as part of an effort to slowly chip away at the retirement funds putting them into a crisis as happens in many 401 retirement funds.



Another example that the Post Office has been given to some oligarchies, including Amazon, is there recent advertising campaign where they promote themselves for providing services for other businesses by showing the postal worker lift their door with the Postal logo and close it with the logo of some of the most popular industries shipping their products through the mail. This is an obvious product placement ad which gives an advantage to the oligarchies over small businesses. Most people don't recognize this for one of the many seemingly small and subtle advantages the government gives to oligarchies.

This isn't the fault of postal workers, or customers, of course, but the decisions aren't made by them; they're made by politicians taking campaign contributions from oligarchies or those appointed by them.

The Post Office is one of the industries that don't work based on entirely competition, if at all, despite corporate propaganda to the contrary, others include utilities where start up costs are too high and businesses wouldn't go into it unless they got some assurance that they would be able to make a profit from the government, which they received in return for regulations protecting the public. It also includes the shipping, media, airplane, and space exploration industries, which have major advantages thanks to some of those regulations and in some cases, including electricity or cable television, especially, in rural areas or space exploration they never would have begun without some form of government subsidies.

These industries all have high start up costs so small businesses can never hope to break into the market and compete; and there are additional factors that the "market" can never handle, without reasonable regulations, including safety, pollution, or other forms of fraud, especially if they provide trade secrecy laws instead of disclosure laws to prevent the public from having access to the information they need to make informed decisions. This is especially important when oligarchies negotiate among themselves to give each other advantages that can put small businesses, that often provide better service or more innovation, out of business, or force them to support larger oligarchies to avoid anti-competitive activities.

One of the most important regulations that they should require is disclose laws that would prevent oligarchies that get advantages from the government or monopoly shares of the market to prevent them from participating in fraudulent anti competitive practices or hide human rights abuses or environmental destruction that we all have to pay for. Instead of passing disclose laws the government often does the opposite with trade secrecy laws!

This is especially important when it comes to the media, which controls the information we sue to make decisions. Robert McChesney explained a lot of this in The Problem of the Media and Rich Media, Poor Democracy.

One of the problems that McChesney pointed out is that when it comes to books or media stories they don't always respond to the market, as most economists try to claim, or at least imply, if they avoid direct claims. In many cases when there is greater demand for books that might educate the public about corporate fraud the media provides much less promotion for those books, while providing an enormous amount for books that provide deceptive propaganda, including "Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News," by Bernard Goldberg which I was able to find much easier when I first looked into the subject years ago, and Bernard Goldberg has gotten much more media coverage, mainly from Fox News than Robert McChesney, and on the rare occasions that McChesney is mentioned by the media he's often ridiculed as a "Communist" or something. When I looked at Gold berg's book I didn't even get past the first chapter before I realized how bad it was and tried another one on the subject from someone I had never heard of before, which was McChesney, "The Problem of the Media."

McChesney and other authors including Ben Bagdikian have documented how the corporate media lobbied for preferential treatment going back, at least to the 1920s when they first established regulations for radio that later extended to television. They reported on the history of how educators tried to get some requirements from the media to provide some good public education in return for their rights to use public airways without charging for it. They managed to get some concessions, although corporate interests with connections to politicians, kept them to a minimum from the beginning.

However starting in the eighties when they eliminated the "Fairness Doctrine," which required opposing views to have some air time, even if those opposing views were selected by the elites as well it was better than nothing; and the consolidation of the media began to escalate. This got even worse during the Clinton years, when he managed to get so-called liberals to support the same media consolidation they opposed when Reagan and Bush tried to push it though.

To make a long story short, all accountability has been eliminated from the mainstream media, now that the vast majority of it has consolidated into six oligarchies and the biggest remaining media outlets, like the Washington Post, are owned by billionaires, often with ties to other oligarchies, like Amazon and the CIA.

The truth according to the commercial media is treated almost like a commodity and they can negotiate secret rates with other oligarchies to give them advantages; but trade secrecy laws prevent the public from knowing about it. This has enabled the largest oligarchies to consolidate over the past thirty years so there is no free market, any more just propaganda repeated over and over again when the oligarchies that divide up the economy pretend to compete against each other.

Now in addition to giving Amazon an advantage, from the post office, the government, and the media, they're making Jeff Bezos look good by comparison by arranging for him to argue with the worst demagogue elected to office in recent memory, if not ever, without reminding the public that Trump never could have gotten elected if they hadn't given him obsession coverage instead of covering a much more diverse group of honest candidates that don't collect bribes thinly disguised as campaign contributions.



They've been using the same propaganda tactic to make blocking the merger between AT&T and Time Warner seem like political retaliation for what they try to portray as their brave coverage challenging the Trump administration. This propaganda is distracting from the obvious that the media has already merged way to much. The reason they created the First Amendment in the first place, as many of us were taught in school, is to prevent Kings, Emperors, or other small groups of corporations from controlling all the media enabling them to censor educational information they don't like, which is exactly what has happened thanks to consolidation that has already happened and the merger Trump is resisting is making it even worse; and at the same time the mergers, past and perhaps more in the present or future from corporations like the Sinclair Broadcasting Corporation are also adding to this.

Good investigative reporters have to struggle to get funds or find jobs working for some of the few, lower profile media outlets that occasionally report on some of the most important news, often buried in some of the best non-fiction books that get little or no promotional help from the mainstream media; including Naomi Klein and Stacy Mitchell, who have both reported on how slotting fees are used to ensure that large retail outlets only deal with other oligarchies preventing competition. Naomi Klein has also reported about how some of the clothing supposedly made by competing manufacturers have been made in the same sweatshops on occasion, often in so-called "free-trade zones," which are actually areas in the third world where they avoid taxes and prevent any protection of human rights for the workers.

When ever human rights advocates find these sweatshops they close up and move to where rights are not protect thanks to secrecy laws. Stacy Mitchell has also reported on an enormous amount of the anti-competitive practices used by Amazon or Walmart, among other oligarchies far more accurately than Donald Trump, who occasional mixes up accurate facts with lies, does.



One of the most outrageous things about the so-called "free-market system" that economists chosen by politicians and covered by the media is that these economists aren't subject to the market at all, despite all their propaganda!

Have you ever hired an economist?

If you did hire an economist would you hire someone that thinks growing subsidized cotton in the United States; and shipping it halfway around the world; so they can take advantage of sweatshop labor to suppress wages; before shipping it back through complicated distribution networks, instead of factory direct, is efficient?



If you had a choice and other economists at least pointed out the obvious fact that we can't have an economic system if we don't maintain an environment that sustains life would you pick the same ones the establishment picks?

Of course there are more details than that but most of us can't even have any say in how the economy at all; instead we're given a small group of people with the same ideology to chose from; and even if a small percentage of us object the majority accepts this absurd selection.

What the majority of the public may not be aware of is that there are better economists available and even some people with basic sense that don't have degrees in economics that do a far better job reporting on the problems of our economic system and ways to fix it like promoting a steady state economy like Bill McKibben has recommended. Some of these people point out incredibly obvious flaws like when you pay lobbyists and advertisers much more because they deceive the public than you do workers in manufacturing or providing services that improve quality of life there's something wrong with the economic system!



I Quit Working For Sinclair And They Sued Me. Here’s Why I’m Fighting Back. 04/06/2018