Funny, isn’t it — the extravagant tricks required to preempt something that’s supposedly stillborn and/or self-destroying and/or a road to serfdom, if not simply impossible?

One might also wonder if the case of the model telecom legislation pushed by the American Legislative Exchange Council will also be taught as part of another of ALEC’s efforts — an attempt, on behalf of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, to plant state laws “requiring that all high school students take a class in ‘free enterprise’ as a condition of graduation.”

Why not put 2 and 2 together, and demand that the United States not only stop the euthanasia, but reverse course and develop a robust, modernized postal system?

We know the USPS used to be permitted to open and maintain savings accounts, and that national postal services still do so in other nation-states.

We might also observe that the reason everybody states for tolerating the further erosion of the USPS — the rise of email, fax, SMS/text, and internet messaging, and the attending decline in paper-based letters and volumes — is merely a new form of the human process the Post Office was intended to encourage. Why permit the overclass to enjoy making the first half of the point without pressing them on the second? Why not fuse reason and radicalism, on a topic that few could dispute is of deepest importance?

So, Occupiers, why not occupy Post Offices and insist that the USPS be reinvigorated and launched into the business of building and maintaining a modern communications infrastructure, as well as maintaining some appropriate amount of snail-mail delivery? Why not use the USPS to compete with the corporate squatters who are now allowed to suppress public enterprise while sucking money-for-nothing from the patchy, over-priced, for-profit, advertising-intensive, second-rate telecom system in this country? Why not insist that the Postal Service build a modern, universally-available national internet, with lower prices, minimal marketing overlay, and no place for payouts to private investors? Why not out-compete the cell phone oligopolies and their pathetic but hugely expensive war over meaningless market shares? Why not insist that junk mail and corporate marketers pay first-class or even first-class-plus rates to use the public’s physical mail system?

While we’re at it, in our moment of deserved but dangerous bankster bashing, why not also press to restore the banking function to the Post Office? A 2% savings account sounds pretty good right about now, doesn’t it? And the deposits could be used to finance the USPS’s modernization and universalization of the means of citizen-to-citizen communication.

Why not insist on preserving and expanding a major public enterprise that provides decent jobs to people who do honorable, vital tasks? Why not stick it to the Man — and in some vital organs, for a change?

We live in a kind of digital feudal economy these days. We live on land we don’t own, and we provide the masters of the realm (Facebook, Google, etc.) with unlimited free access to our data and behavior, which they monetize for billions of dollars. We get to keep our little plots of digital land for free and are otherwise pretty much at the whim of the feudal masters.

Of course, the masters are actually corporate capitalists, and the corporate capitalists at Facebook and Google are, as their founders now admit, 100 percent in the advertising business, meaning their product is both harvesting data and delivering eyeballs, eardrums, and mindshares to other corporate capitalists, who use those products to plan and execute marketing campaigns.

Nonetheless, the analogy to feudalism is apt. Surrendering corvée to exploiting overlords is the price of admission to almost all internet activities in the United States, including the basic search engine services mediated by Google.

Of course, there is no technical reason why the internet could not include first-class, not-for-profit, data-secure search engines and other services. It’s just that the overclass won’t permit such possibilities to be discussed, let alone implemented.

Problem? The USPS was mortally wounded in 1967, when it had to stop opening savings accounts due to government restriction of both the size of deposits and its ability to pay interest rates competitive with those then offered by private banks. A second severe blow came in 1971, when Nixon pushed it to the very edge of the public sector in retaliation for a postal union strike. Eleven years later, the death-blow was delivered — of course — by the Reagan Administration, which ended meaningful public subsidy and required the post office to survive by selling its own “postal products,” which — also of course — were not to include things like savings accounts or insurance policies or anything else that might compete with the so-called private sector, despite the common practices of the rest of the supposedly free world.

More recently, mainstream politics have further strangled the USPS, including by the method about which Nader now complains, the amazing requirement that the USPS pre-pay its workers’ pensions to the government.

Why do I mention all this, apart from its obvious relevance to the TCT theme of the private sector’s reliance on the maiming of public-sector competition? (How attractive would a USPS savings account paying even the measly 2% rate that killed the practice back in the 1960s look in our age?) The answer can be seen here, at Deliver magazine.

What is Deliver? Published by the USPS,

Deliver magazine, is [a] resource for mail marketing strategies brought to you by the United States Postal Service.® What We Do: Deliver magazine arms marketers with research, news and commentary impacting their industry.

That’s right. Deliver magazine is a public-sector enterprise that advises capitalists on how to prepare and send junk mail! Now, there’s an activity that doesn’t need to be regulated by the supposed representatives of the people!

Go take a look at Deliver‘s website. There, you will discover such shining examples of the public spirit in action as this piece, “Power in the Mailbox”, by spammer-marketer Steve Cuno (who also happens to post apologies for his trade at randi.org, where they hold to the view that capitalism is rational and honest):

Time for a disclaimer before I proceed. I’m not attacking e-mail marketing. I shall contrast it with direct mail only to bring out some of the latter’s advantages. E-mail has advantages, too, but that’s another column for another day.

A number of unique factors work in direct mail’s favor. One is what your English literature teacher called “willing suspension of disbelief,” our ability to set aside reality and lose ourselves in a story. When a direct mail letter shows up in a personally addressed, stamped envelope, part of us wants to believe that someone took a moment to compose, print, address and post it, just for us. All the better if the letter calls us by name and bears a signature in fountain pen–evoking blue. A good writer can make an e-mail blast sound personal, but there is no electronic substitute for the look and feel of a signed letter in a stamped, addressed envelope.

Willing suspension of disbelief knows no demographic limitations. Consider my publisher friend. A technologically savvy marketing insider, she knows my shop, understands digital printing, publishes my articles and, on occasion, pops for lunch. Had she paused to analyze, she would easily have seen that the letter in her hand was direct mail. But — and this is the point — she chose not to pause and analyze. Nor did other recipients. Remember, these were high-balance customers, not exactly the intellectual dregs of society. Of those who replied, 80 percent willingly suspended their disbelief and thanked the bank president for writing them.

The near-overnight appearance of spam laws and filters provides another. No sooner had e-mail blasts arrived than the public demanded laws restricting them, servers blocking them, and junk filters dispatching them.

By contrast, laws governing physical mail are far less restrictive, despite more than 200 years of opportunity to enact them — and for good reason.

Yes, in America, we don’t regulate the mail. We merely cripple and prostitute its deliverer.

So, it’s really not very surprising that North Carolina legislators are presently strangling public, not-for-profit provision of internet services.  Clearly, the reason is that such services are a mortal threat to corporate revenue streams.  The simple fact is that telecommunications services can be more efficiently, effectively, and cheaply provided by the public than by capitalists.

So, the North Carolina legislature is simply going to pass a law that artificially imposes all the irrationalities — and more — of the private sector on the public sector.

Remember this the next time you see some wanker talking about the supposed naturalness and glory of “private enterprise.”

Sorkin’s film is, of course, silent on the ulterior purpose of Facebook, which is to deploy what appears to be just a new way to stay in touch with friends but is actually a huge, screamingly invasive and profitable engine for marketing research, a.k.a. corporate spying.

Here is a snip from today’s Advertising Age on Facebook’s latest advance:

This month — and for the first time — Facebook started to mine real-time conversations to target ads. The delivery model is being tested by only 1% of Facebook users worldwide. On Facebook, that’s a focus group 6 million people strong.

The closest Facebook has come to real-time advertising has been with its most recent ad offering, known as sponsored stories, which repost users’ brand interactions as an ad on the side bar. But for the 6 million users involved in this test, any utterance will become fodder for real-time targeted ads.

For example: Users who update their status with “Mmm, I could go for some pizza tonight,” could get an ad or a coupon from Domino’s, Papa John’s or Pizza Hut.

The real story of Facebook is that, as “social networking” software, it was a moderately clever idea and minor technological breakthrough. The government, if it were ever allowed to compete with private enterprises, could sponsor or directly develop an excellent substitute for that in a month, and make it non-commercial and secure. But that wouldn’t serve the corporate overclass, would it? They are looking — and paying — for exactly what Zuckerberg and his buddies are providing: new ways of gathering free information about the details of people’s off-the-job activities.

None of that makes it into Sorkin’s sly, product-placing paean to privileged whoredom.

In the United States, where public insurance is more aggressively opposed by the overclass, publicly provided automotive coverage is entirely unavailable.  Consequently, the insurance is inferior and the premiums higher.  And the record profits of U.S. insurance companies, which Advertising Age reports “reached $26.7 billion in the first nine months of 2010″ — where do those go?

Largely to folks like Warren Buffett, whose Berkshire Hathaway empire owns Geico.

The basis for all those private-sector profits?  Sheer waste:  To promote brand awareness, Geico and its “competitors” engage in saturation advertising of their private monopoly-protected inferior product.  According to Ad Age, advertising expenditure by insurers more than doubled between 2000 and 2009.

The overall sales strategy in pure Pavlov.  With few differences between companies’ policies and no competition from the public sector, repetition-implanted name recall is everything:

[T]he average shopper can name just four insurance brands off the top of their head, according to J.D. Power. And the way to get on that list is to advertise — all the time. “There’s enormous overlap between the companies that advertise a lot and the companies that are growing faster,” Mr. Shields said. “It seems very much to work.” (Ad Age, February 21, 2011)

Such are the glorious “efficiencies” of capitalism.

As always, Beck is too uninterested in reality to lay his hands on the bulk of the problem he thinks he sees:  His version is that government regulators are the main choice architects, and that governmental rules are the main venue for the imposition of elitist choice architecture.

Of course, the real story is that corporate marketing campaigns remain far and away the largest source of secret, cynical, heedless, and often sociopathic behavioral engineering.  In intentionality, tools, experience, funding, and ill effect, private-sector choice architects simply dwarf their public-sector counterparts.

This reality is, of course, a forbidden topic in Beck’s re-canned and over-heated version of the ruling ideology.  There, capitalists are nothing more and nothing less than servants of freedom.  Any fact or thought suggesting otherwise is treason, to such well-indoctrinated stooges.

Meanwhile, if Beck ever bothered to remain open to understanding his own sources, he might’ve noticed that the main connection between private-sector choice architecture and public authority is Obama-buddy Cass Sunstein‘s rather silly careerist effort to convince government bureaucrats to take it seriously and start hiring from the stream of students he and his business school-based co-author are casting upon our troubled waters.  Indeed, an iota of thinking attention to their work confirms that big business marketing provides a very large share of the examples of the “libertarian paternalism” techniques they would like to see adopted as a tool in the public sector.

Meanwhile, have you ever wondered about the actual relationship between public rules and public welfare?  (If you read this blog, I assume you have.)  It isn’t quite what the capitalists and “libertarians” would have you believe.

Consider this description of 19th century English bread-selling regulations, from Bill Bryson’s newest book, At Home:

Because bread was so important, the laws governing its purity were strict and the punishments severe.  A baker who cheated his customers could be fined £10 per loaf sold, or made to do a month’s hard labor in prison.  For a time, transportation to Australia was seriously considered for malfeasant bakers.  This was a matter of real concern for bakers because every loaf of bread loses weight in baking through evaporation, so it is easy to blunder accidentally.

Beck and his fellow market totalitarians would be forced by their own ideology to insist that the results of this draconian state regulation must have been the utter collapse of bread-selling in Britain.  In fact, the result was this:

[Because of the harsh laws], bakers sometimes provided a little extra — the famous baker’s dozen.

"Anchors," indeed!

One look at PBS or listen to NPR screams the answer.  There are corporate sponsors on which the “public” endeavors are made to rely.  These sponsors run ads in the “public” media they sponsor.  In a nation of immense class and race polarity, where illegal wars, the world’s highest incarceration rate, and mass unemployment never end, we get Antiques Road Show and Nightly Business Report and the stuffedest of stuffed shirts mimicking corporate TV news on the one and only “public” television network?

In any event, the obviousness doesn’t mean there aren’t reasons to analyze the beast’s behaviors.

Toward that end, take a look at this from FAIR.

Yet even as vital signs weaken — plunging home sales, a bleak job market and, on Friday, confirmation that the quarterly rate of economic growth had slowed, to 1.6 percent — a sense has taken hold that government policy makers cannot deliver meaningful intervention. That is because nearly any proposed curative could risk adding to the national debt — a political nonstarter.

Translation: The overclass, as always, prefers Great Depression to a pro-labor shift in the distribution of power. This society remains entirely capable of employing all its able-bodied workers and thereby ending the present economic cliffwalk. What it lacks is a left coherent enough to demand what the elite won’t mention.