Two Hundred Berkeley Citizens
Gathered
Saturday 7/27
to say
"Our Post Office
Is Not For Sale"

MC Moni Law (Photo credit: Bill Woodcock)

Occupella (photo credit: Bill Woodcock)

Hannah Appel (photo credit: Bill Woodcock)

Poet Nina Serrano and her granddaughter (photo credit: Bill Woodcock)

(photo credit: Bill Woodcock)

(photo credit: Bill Woodcock)

MC Harvey Smith

(photo credit: Bill Woodcock)

Gray Brechin

(photo credit: Bill Woodcock)

(photo credit: Bill Woodcock)

(photo credit: Bill Woodcock)

Dorsey Nunn

(photo credit: Bill Woodcock)

Mrs. T. Bill Banks

Berkeley citizens respond to the failure
by Postal Service bureaucrats
to value community opinion

Over the last year hundreds of Berkeley citizens have made it clear that we want our almost 100-year old Main Post Office to remain a public space in federal ownership.

Berkeley's Mayor Tom Bates, the entire City Council, the California State Legislature and our Congresswoman Barbara Lee told the Postal Service that our Main Post Office is an anchor in our downtown and that to sell the historic, National Register-listed building would be a mistake.

On July 18, 2013, USPS Facilities Vice-President Tom Samra advised Berkeley that he considered public input but the community's concerns just aren't as important to him as the financial needs of the postal service.

• Mr. Samra's  "deliberations" were conducted in private with only members of the Postal Service allowed.
  
• The reports and recommendations that Mr. Samra used to make his determination are "proprietary" and are not available to the public.
• Mr. Samra asserts that his decision is "final" and the community has no recourse to "further administrative or judicial review of his decision."

A little over a week later we gathered at our post office to celebrate the 238th birthday of the Post Office with music, entertainment and birthday cake; to listen and learn from speakers; and, to support those in our community who were committed to a direct action that the Postal Service could not ignore.

Resisting Privatization, Saving Public Spaces,
Preserving Living Wage Postal Jobs, and
Working for the Common Good

Speakers and entertainers included:

• Norman Solomon, "Privatizing Our Future, What's at Stake and How to Stop It"
  
• Hannah Appel, "You Are Not a Loan: Debt Resistance and the US Postal Service"
• Gray Brechin, "Too Big to Name?"
• Occupella and Hali Hammer; Jac McCormick of the National Post Office Collaborate; poet Nina Serrano; Berkeley City Councilmembers Jesse Arreguin and Kriss Worthington; Jose Carlos Riquelme, a postal worker activist; Susan Hammer, APWU Shop Steward for the downtown Berkeley Post Office; Dorsey Nunn, Director, Legal Services for Prisoners with Children; and, Mrs. T. Bill Banks, humorist and our "conservative commentator."

Norman Solomon

“Privatizing Our Future. What’s at Stake and How to Stop It.”

We’re here today confronting government policy that is an inversion of policy that would serve the public.  We now face, embodied and symbolized by Senator Dianne Feinstein, a total turning upside down of what we deserve and what we demand in a democracy.

We now live in a country where, according to federal government policy, private citizen is an oxymoron. That is not acceptable. We need to and we will continue to fight for public space and the legacy of the New Deal just as we fight for the Fourth Amendment.

And I’d like to ask you to just mull over with me for a moment here this inversion of policy that is symbolized by Senator Feinstein. To Senator Feinstein, to most of the members of Congress, in terms of their action and inaction, to the President of the United States, to them public space is wasted space, to them this post office is wasted space until it is privatized. That is wrong. We believe that somehow the New Deal and the legacy of generations were fought for public government. The idea that the legacy of the New Deal should be destroyed is absolutely unacceptable and we will not stand for it.

Now the reality is that members of the House and Senate of the U.S. Congress, both Democrats and Republicans, all too often have been part of the execution of the public space and our heritage from past generations. The fact is that this assault on the post office has been bi-partisan. That is the reality. The fact is that when the Democratic Party for two years, in 2009 and 2010, controlled both houses of Congress and the White House, they did nothing to save the USPS. And that is shameful and we will not forget it.

The reality is that if you hear, as I have and as many of you here have heard, presentations from the management of the US Postal Service, we may as well have been hearing a presentation from the management of Wal-Mart. It is the privatizing mentality that has bought control of the post office and we do not accept that.

How do we go forward? We go forward the way people for generations have gone forward. The way people who established the New Deal, Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid we went forward then and we’re going to go forward now by organizing. We go forward by stating and acting with the clarity that leadership is not going to come from the White House or the Congress until and unless it comes from the grassroots. It is true when we lead only then will the leaders follow and provide new leadership.

The profiteering, the attitude that public space must be harvested for the profits of people like Richard Blum, the husband of Senator Feinstein, the idea that it is acceptable to plunder our public space for private millionaires and billionaires that is unacceptable.

We will not accept it.

Thank you very much for being here.

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Hannah Appel

“You Are Not a Loan: Debt Resistance and the Post Office”

I’m going to give a complimentary analysis to what we just heard which was spectacular. I’m actually going to talk a little about debt. You may be wondering what on earth does debt have to do with the post office. I’m going to try to spin you a story about that and I’m going to relate it to individual debt, etc.

So bear with me if I wax professorial for just a minute.

So medical debt, people unable to pay their medical bills, is the number one cause of bankruptcy in the United States. Today student debt is over one trillion U.S. dollars. This is greater than aggregate credit card debt and exceeded by only one category of debt.

Which category is that? Housing debt. So now I’m talking about individual debt right now. Housing debt. Across the country people continue to lose their homes in predatory lending and foreclosure schemes that disproportionately affect low income and black and brown communities. In other words, as individuals and families and communities many of us are drowning in debt for the basic things we need to live: housing, education, health care.

And at the same time each of these forms of debt: medical debt, student debt, housing debt, credit card debt, not to mention pay day lending, Each of these is a tremendous source of profit for the financial industry and those of us least able to pay, those of us who miss monthly payments or accrue late fees or penalties these are the most profitable debtors, the financial industry’s best customer.

So finance, I want us to remember for just a minute, does not make value out of nothing, as some people have said.

Rather the financial industry, Wall Street, makes value out of the income and debt stream of working class people and middle class people. Mortgage-backed securities, student loan, asset-backed securities, everything from your car loan to those of us privileged enough to have a pension becomes a manipulatable source of value for Wall Street.

So remember too, as the financial sector is profiting from our debt we are actually not the only ones in debt. In the wake of the financial crisis big banks were trillions of dollars in debt in the wake of their risky bets gone wrong.

But did they have to pay their debt? Were they told that contracts are sacred? You can’t break a contract. We are told that we have to pay our debt. And so people lose their homes while trying to pay for cancer treatment. Meanwhile, too big to fail financial institutions enjoy government bail-outs that subsidize their risky behavior. 

We are forced to pay our debts while banks are let off the hook.

We are told that contracts are sacred while banks break them and re-negotiate them, left and right.

So Strike debt—and there are many Strike Debt-ers here today —so Strike Debt is building a resistance movement to say “No more.” We are working to build popular resistance to all forms of unjust debt. Because we want to move debt from an issue of individual shame to a platform for collective action.

Debt as the banks know too well is political.

Right, so I’m coming to the post office. Trust me, trust me.

So whether or not an individual has any debt, we are all debtors. So what do I mean by that? The City of Oakland pays nearly twenty per cent of its annual budget in debt servicing while schools close and public services dry up.

The US Postal Service is forced to borrow money because of an unprecedented Congressional mandate to fund retiree benefits 75 years into the future. Crazy, crazy. Unprecedented. And you were wondering when I’d get to the post office, right? So here I go.

It was only after something called the 2006 Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act that the Postal Service started hemorrhaging money. Up until that point the Postal Service was self-sustaining and was not in any debt. Debt, in other words, is a tool through which the commons – this beautiful post office -- can be privatized. Can be stolen, can be privatized. Debt is a means of control. Debt is a transfer of wealth from the bottom to the top.

How? What do I mean by that?

Once the US Postal Service went into debt, their management “sees no choice” but to sell valuable assets like this historical post office in back of me and valuable real estate around the country as our comrades in the Bronx and Portland are also protesting.

So with debt as the mechanism public property, accessible to all, serving all, transfers into the hands of private individuals and corporations, real estate speculators, private equity firms like Blum Capital serving now to generate private profit rather than serve public good.

And it’s the same thing for students. Once a student goes into debt her choices are constrained. Maybe after college she wanted to work as a community organizer. Maybe after medical school, he wanted to open a free clinic. But debt constrains their choices. If they are “responsible” they have to make money. In fact they have to make enough money to pay off their loans and avoid the six plus per cent compounding interest. So these are a few examples of how debt serves to privatize the commons.  Which is what we are seeing going on with the Berkeley Post Office. How debt serves to constrain people’s choices and to transfer capital, assets from the bottom to the top.

Remember that underwater homeowners too could have been bailed out. In fact there were a handful of powerful people advocating for this. But partially because homeowners were considered “individual debtors” without the political power of big banks, homeowners received nothing but foreclosure notices, and bogus settlements.

But together, acting collectively as we’re doing today on behalf of the post office, we debtors are “too big to fail” and that’s what Strike Debt is working towards. And I think Save the Berkeley Post Office too if you believe my analysis about debt here.

“Detroit” somebody is shouting out. Another perfect example of how we are collectively debtors.

So we are working to build the collective power of debtors at all levels from individual debt, to municipal debt, to sovereign debt. We hold that we owe financial institutions nothing. Nothing. Whereas to our friends, to our families, and to our communities, we owe everything.

And that of course is why many of us are here today. Because the Berkeley Post Office is part of our community, accessible to all, serving all, loved by all, and we know intuitively that there must be some kind of alternative to selling it to Richard Blum or profit-hungry real estate investors. We know intuitively that not every entity has to generate profit. And, dare I say it, we know intuitively that not all debt has to be paid. These are the debts the post office incurred from the 2006 that does not have to be paid.

The banks know it. It’s about time that we knew it and stopped paying unjust debt.

So, Strike Debt Bay Area is really happy to have joined Save the Berkeley Post Office coalition in fighting for this Berkeley Post Office and fighting for our commons more generally.

Thanks so much for coming.

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Gray Brechin

We do not have a copy of the text of Gray Brechin's speech "Too Big to Name?"
However please click to view Dr. Brechin's article "Lost Buildings Mean Lost History: Sale of Main Berkeley Post Office building means loss of rich history"

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Welcoming

Peaceful

Information gladly given

"Write a letter!"

Orderly

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Movie Night (photo credit: Ted Friedman/ Berkeleyside)

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On Friday, 8/2, Postal Inspectors visited and verbally warned the campers to remove their tents.

Dave Welsh

Immediately following Saturday's Rally,
the Berkeley Post Office Defense
began an historic In-Tents Campout
on the Post Office steps

Excerpt from the Rationale for Direct Action
"In a political climate in which our government has through our taxes virtually unlimited resources and power, and is spending those not on the public services for which our taxes are intended but on diversion of our public wealth into private hands, such a fight cannot be a fair one, nor one all who care to can help with. Exercise of the power we have collectively is necessary. That is why we are here defending our Post Office with our physical presence."

Click to Read the entire "Rationale for Direct Action" document

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Letter from Dave Welsh on the 3rd Night
of Direct Defense of the Berkeley Post Office

Berkeley, California, July 29, 2013 -- On Saturday, July 27, after a "Save the Post Office" rally/fiesta of 200, local activists launched a direct defense of this historic post office. The action attracted broad support in the city, and some great media coverage.

    By Monday evening, about 15 campers were getting ready for their third night of sleeping in nine tents on the steps of the P.O. Hundreds of supporters stopped by throughout the day, volunteering to join the campaign to stop the sale of the building and defend the people's Post Office.  

    Protesters denounced the Postmaster General's decision to sell historic post offices in Berkeley, the Bronx (NY) and LaJolla (CA), close thousands of post offices and mail processing plants, end door-to-door and Saturday delivery, and lay off 100,000-plus unionized postal workers, in what they said was a "systematic plan to dismantle and privatize the postal service."

    Every evening features a delicious, freshly cooked dinner; music by local and traveling musicians; a 6 p.m. meeting to decide on strategy and tactics; and “movie night.” Opening night featured the great Italian-language film, Il Postino (the Postman).  

    The defense action is the latest in a year-long campaign. The entire City Council came out against the sale, as did both houses of the California state legislature. Many hundreds came out to demonstrate and pack the hearings, or gathered at the steps and in the lobby to sing songs celebrating the Post Office, including “Please Mr. Postman” with new lyrics.

    Legal action to stop the sale is under way, as well as a plan to rezone the P.O. as part of a historic district of public buildings, so it can’t be sold to private investors.

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October 2, 2013 letter from Ralph Nader to Senator Dianne Feinstein.