Save the public sphere!(Comment) (Editorial)

• Author: Conniff, Ruth

Across the nation, treasured community institutions that bring people together, offer essential services, and form a cornerstone of our democracy are under threat, from the local post office to the neighborhood school. The people who seek to privatize these institutions are seeking profit and smearing the good work of public-spirited employees--teachers, postal workers, and other public servants.

Corporations and their allies in government have been pushing a propaganda campaign to claim, falsely, that our public institutions are no good, are inefficient and wasteful, and should be handed over to private business. (See the Bradley Foundation's $30 million campaign to promote the message that "public schools have failed." See also the manufactured crisis at the United States Postal Service, triggered by the disastrous requirement that it fully fund employee pensions for the next seventy-five years.)

But all across the country, citizens in local communities are fighting back.

As we report in On the Line this month, teachers in the Chester Upland School District in Pennsylvania voted unanimously to return to work without pay, so that their cash-strapped schools could open the doors to students in September.

A combination of unequal funding for poor districts, brutal state budget cuts, and a new law that siphons public-school funds to private charter operators pushed the district to the brink of financial ruin.

The scenes of celebration, with grateful parents cheering the teachers who went back to work with no pay, hit you in the gut when you consider how unnecessary it is to starve public education in the most affluent nation on Earth.

In a related story, Progressive columnist Jim Hightower devoted a whole spring issue of his Hightower Lowdown newsletter to the struggle to save the local post office in tiny Valentine, Texas.

That post office is famous for accepting thousands of love letters every February from people who want to send cards to their sweethearts with the Valentine postmark. Two employees work overtime to stamp all the envelopes and get them delivered by February 14.

When the feds moved to shut down the Valentine P.O. on the grounds that it was too expensive to keep it running, Hightower reported on the community revolt. It turns out closing the post office in Valentine would save a mere $60,000 at a cost of cutting the heart out of the town.

The fight to save the Valentine post office unfolded against the backdrop of a general...