Trump Set To Take Control Of Postal Service - Privatization Could Be Next

by Tyler Durden

Friday, Feb 21, 2025 - 03:00 PM

Continuing his government-reformation fiesta, President Trump is expected to issue an executive order dissolving the US Postal Service leadership and absorbing the organizaton into the Commerce Department. That bold move may be just a first step toward an even more ambitious and controversial goal: privatizing the perpetual money-loser. 

From leadership to rank-and-file employees, the USPS will most certainly mount intense legal and political efforts against both initiatives. The USPS governing board is already gearing up: On Thursday, the USPS board held an emergency meeting in which it hired outside attorneys and directed them to file legal challenges when Trump makes his first move, the Washington Post reported.   

The USPS Board of Governors, led by chair Amber McReynolds, has given outside lawyers orders to file suits to block any Trump moves

  

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Biden’s Claim To Be Ending America’s Longest War Misleading

By

Jeremy Kuzmarov

-

April 15, 2021

 

Special Forces, Pentagon Contractors and Intelligence Operatives Will Remain

On Wednesday April 14^th, President Joe Biden announced that he would end the U.S.’s longest war and withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan on the 20^th anniversary of the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks.

Over 6,000 NATO troops will also be withdrawn by that time.

“War in Afghanistan was never meant to be a multigenerational undertaking,” Biden said during his remarks from the White House Treaty Room, the same location from which President George W. Bush had announced the war was beginning in October 2001. “We were attacked. We went to war with clear goals. We achieved those objectives. Bin Laden is dead and al Qaeda is degraded in Afghanistan and it’s time to end the forever war.”

Biden announcing troop withdrawal on April 14th. [Source: npr.org]

Biden’s claim that he is ending the forever war is misleading. As The New York Times reported, the United States would remain after the formal departure of U.S. troops with a “shadowy combination of clandestine Special Operations Forces, Pentagon contractors and covert intelligence operatives.”

Their mission will be to “find and attack the most dangerous Qaeda or Islamic state threats, current and former American officials said.”^[1]

The Times further reported that the United States maintains a constellation of air bases in the Persian Gulf region as well as in Jordan, and a major air headquarters in Qatar, which could provide a launching pad for long-range bomber or armed drone missions into Afghanistan.^[2]

U.S. Air Base in Jordan [Source: enroyanews.tv]

Matthew Hoh, a disabled combat veteran who resigned from the State Department in 2009 in protest of the war, stated that a genuine peace process in Afghanistan is “dependent upon foreign forces leaving Afghanistan.”

Matthew Hoh [Source: nbcnews.com]

Further, Hoh said that “Regardless of whether the 3500 acknowledged U.S. troops leave Afghanistan, the U.S. military will still be present in the form of thousands of special operations and CIA personnel in and around Afghanistan, through dozens of squadrons of manned attack aircraft and drones stationed on land bases and on aircraft carriers in the region, and by hundreds of cruise missiles on ships and submarines.”

Mercenaries R Us

The meaninglessness of President Biden’s announcement becomes apparent when we consider that the Pentagon employs more than seven contractors for every serviceman or woman in Afghanistan; an increase of one contractor for every serviceman or woman a decade ago.

As of January, more than 18,000 contractors remained in Afghanistan, according to a Defense Department report, when official troop totals had been reduced to 2,500.

The Dogs of War: Mercenaries in Afghanistan. [Source: isiria.wordpress.com]

These totals reflect the U.S. government’s strategy of outsourcing war to the benefit of private mercenary corporations, and as a means of distancing the war from the public and averting dissent, since relatively few Americans are directly impacted by it.

Most of the mercenaries are ex-military veterans, though a percentage are third-country nationals who are paid meager wages to perform menial duties for the military.

One of the biggest mercenary companies is DynCorp International of Falls Church Virginia, which has received over $7 billion in government contracts to train the Afghan army and manage military bases in Afghanistan.

From 2002-2013, DynCorp received 69 percent of all State Department funding. Forbes Magazine called it “one of the big winners of the Iraq and Afghan Wars;” the losers being almost everyone else.

DynCorp International’s Afghanistan Operations team, which supports almost all its programs in Afghanistan. [Source: dyn-intl.com]

A blueprint for U.S. strategy in Afghanistan is the 1959-1975 secret war in Laos, where the CIA worked with hundreds of civilian contractors who flew spotter aircraft, ran ground bases and operated radar stations in civilian clothes while raising its own private army among the Hmong to fight the pro-communist Pathet Lao.^[3]

CIA officer Tom Poole with two Hmong soldiers who were trained as part of the CIA’s Hmong clandestine army. [Source: donmooreswartales.com]

The CIA and Special Forces have again attempted to recruit tribal elements in Afghanistan and, like in Laos, have become enmeshed in inter-tribal and sectarian feuds.^[4]  

American Special Forces under the direction of Jim Gant dress as locals in an attempt to recruit them for anti-Taliban operations. [Source: abcnews.go.com]

For years, U.S. Special Forces operatives have also been training Afghan security forces as a proxy army and running Phoenix-style snatch and grab and assassination missions, which are poised to continue—despite the formal troop withdrawal.

What Uncle Sam Really Wants in Afghanistan

Republican war hawk James Inhofe (R-OK) lambasted Biden’s withdrawal plan, stating that this was a “reckless and dangerous decision. Arbitrary deadlines would likely put our troops in danger, jeopardize all the progress we’ve made, and lead to civil war in Afghanistan—and create a breeding ground for international terrorists.”^[5]

James Inhofe [Source: defensenews.com]

Inhofe’s assessment is flawed because, among other reasons, the U.S. has not made much progress in 19 years of war—the Taliban, according to the Council on Foreign Relations, is stronger than at any point since 2001 and controls about one fifth of Afghanistan—and Afghanistan was never really a breeding ground for international terrorists. The 9/11 hijackers mostly came from Saudi Arabia and the Taliban agreed to turn over Osama Bin Laden to an international court after the 9/11 attacks, which they never supported.

Members of the Taliban in Laghman Province. [Source: nytimes.com]

The Afghan War will go on indefinitely not because of the threat of terrorism—which is accentuated by the U.S. military presence—but because the United States will not concede ground in the Middle East.

The U.S. has announced intentions to retain at least two military bases in Afghanistan after the official troop drawdown, and set up over one thousand bases during the war.

U.S. troops at one of many U.S. military bases in Afghanistan. [Source: ft.com]

Uncle Sam also covets Afghans mineral wealth. A 2007 United States Geological Service survey discovered nearly $1 trillion in mineral deposits, including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium, which is used in the manufacture of batteries for laptops and blackberries. An internal Pentagon memo stated that Afghanistan could become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium.”

In 2001, when the U.S. first invaded Afghanistan, it was in the process of expanding its military infrastructure in Central Asia. Afghanistan provided a key way-station to this new “oil dorado,” which holds as much as 200 billion barrels of oil—about ten times the amount found in the North Sea, and a third of the Persian Gulf’s total reserves. 

Afghanistan was further valued at the time as a key location for an oil pipeline that would transport Central Asian oil to the Indian Ocean while bypassing Russia.

Pipeline route. [Source: iakal.wordpress.com]

In the 1990s, the Southern California oil company, Unocal, began taking steps to build the pipeline, even courting the Taliban. In 2018, ground was broken on a new pipeline project backed by the United States that will carry oil from Turkmenistan to northern India.

The U.S. ruling establishment’s greatest fear is that a complete U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan might result in the U.S. losing a strategic foothold to its main geopolitical rivals, China and Russia, in Afghanistan

China has recently increased its trade and investment in Afghanistan—with which it shares a border—and has sought to cultivate better relations with the Afghan government and Taliban.

Chinese Premier Xi Jingping and Afghan President Ashraf Ghani in Kyrgyzstan in June 2019. [Source: gandhara.rferl.org]

Russia, meanwhile, reopened a cultural center in Kabul in 2014, rebuilt an abandoned Soviet friendship center, expanded its embassy staff, expanded economic investment, and provided 10,000 Kalashnikov rifles to the Afghan government. It also supported Afghan housing projects and took advantage of contacts in Kabul to renew ties with ethnic power brokers in the North while quietly courting the Taliban.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and his Afghan counterpart Salahuddin Rabbani shake hands after their meeting in Moscow, Russia, February 7, 2017. [Source: rand.org]

As a previous CAM article documented, the current Afghan government led by Ashraf Ghani is largely a creation of the United States. Its military is funded by the United States at a cost of around $4 billion per year. This support is going to continue—unless Congress cuts it off—alongside large-scale U.S. foreign aid programs that amount to nearly one billion per year.

The U.S. wants to keep Ghani in power, or replace him with another proxy that can help it win the geopolitical competition with Russia and China, which is little different from the 19^th century “great game” between Great Britain and Russia.

As long as the U.S. empire remains intact, the war as such will go on, and on—and on.

---

1. Helen Cooper, Thomas Gibbons-Neff and Eric Schmitt, “Biden Sets End Date for Nation’s Longest War,” The New York Times, April 14, 2021, A1, A13. ↑

2. Cooper, Gibbons-Neff, Schmitt, “Biden Sets End Date for Nation’s Longest War,” A13. ↑

3. See Fred Branfman, Voices from the Plain of Jars: Life Under an Air War, revised edition, with new foreword by Alfred W. McCoy (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013). ↑

4. See Ann Scott Tyson, American Spartan: The Promise, The Mission, and the Betrayal of Special Forces Major Jim Gant (New York: William Morrow, 2014). Gant promoted a strategy of “tribal engagement.” In Kunar province, he met with an Afghan chief, Malik Noorafzhal whom he nicknamed “Sitting Bull” after the Indian chief of the age of the 19th century Indian Wars. Jim Gant, “One Tribe at a Time: A Strategy for Success in Afghanistan,” https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/report/2009/2009_one_tribe_at_a_time.pdf ↑

5. Cooper, Gibbons-Neff, Schmitt, “Biden Sets End Date for Nation’s Longest War,” A13. Inhofe it should be noted is a war profiteer. He invested in Raytheon stocks at the same time he was calling for an increase in the defense budget as Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Raytheon is a leading arms manufacturer. ↑

 

Source: Covert Action Quarterly

https://covertactionmagazine.com/2021/04/15/bidens-claim-to-be-ending-americas-longest-war-misleading/

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Return the Railways to Public Ownership – Prosecute the Privateers

© AP Photo / David Azia

Columnists

17:29 GMT 31.01.2020Get short URL

by Tommy Sheridan

4301

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Former Prime Minister John Major is often portrayed as a nice Tory and different in substance to the rabid right wingers who occupy Boris Johnson’s cabinet and spew out reactionary statements and policies daily.

The truth is John Major and his closest advisers in 1993/94 should have been arrested and charged with serious fraud. The public was robbed of several billions of pounds that have been siphoned off into the pockets of fat-cat bosses and private dividend holders, who have all cashed in on the back of the disastrous privatisation of the UK Rail Network, British Rail, in 1993/94 which John Major presided over.
How moronic and preposterous the decision was is graphically illustrated by the decision the other day by the hapless Tory Transport Minister Grant Shapps to re-nationalise the massive Northern Rail franchise. This is the second re-nationalisation by the Tories, the party of the free market and privatisation, in less than two years. They took over the East Coast franchise from billionaire Richard Branson’s Virgin Trains East Coast in June 2018 after his company benefited from billions in public subsidy and then conveniently collapsed without honouring their promise to invest billions in return. He was widely accused of receiving a taxpayer funded “bailout” despite the efforts of his spin doctors to deny the ruse. Shady and shoddy indeed.

© AP Photo / Kirsty Wigglesworth

Britain's former Prime Minister John Major arrives to attend a service of thanksgiving for the life and work of Peter Carrington at Westminster Abbey in London, Thursday, Jan. 31, 2019

Tory Rail Privatisation Has been an Unmitigated Disaster

There are serious doubts that Southern Western Railway, TransPennine Express and West Midlands Trains franchises will survive much longer, and again the Tory government may be compelled to step in against their nature and re-nationalise those services as well.
The fact is the Tory privatisation of the railway services was a disaster from day one and is now unravelling at the speed of an express train. A thorough and criminal investigation should be organised urgently so the public can witness prosecutions of senior politicians like John Major and his senior officials for what amounts to an outrageous, stupid and wholly irresponsible privatisation that has sucked billions of public funds away from hospitals, schools and social housing into the pockets of rich parasites who lined their pockets on the back of this policy disaster.

© CC BY 2.0 / Alex S. Transport Photography / London Northwestern Railway Class

London Northwestern Railway Class

British Rail was broken up and privatised between 1994 and 1997, and since then rail services in the UK have been provided by private companies. There are more than 20 rail franchises in the UK, where the government gives train companies funding to run services for a certain period. The public was whipped up into frenzy after years of deliberate underfunding of British Rail inevitably resulted in increased problems with punctuality and reliability. Old stock was not replaced, services were often cancelled at short notice and carriages which did arrive were often too small to seat all passengers. It was a classic Tory strategy. Underfund an essential public service and then promote the idea that privatisation will result in incredible improvements. Fares will tumble, services will improve and less public money will be required to run the trains. What a cruel and deliberate pack of lies.

Rail Fare in UK Highest in Europe – Yet Service is the Worst

Since privatisation, the average price of a train journey has increased by 23.5% in real terms. And they've risen twice as fast as wages since 2009. Our staggering rail fares have got so high that in the UK we pay five times as much as proportion of salaries as our European neighbours.
If our railway was run in public ownership, we'd save £1 billion a year, enough to fund an 18% cut in rail fares. That's because we wouldn't be wasting money on shareholder profits, fragmentation and a higher cost of borrowing.
Many of our train companies are publicly owned, but by other European countries, who make millions of pounds a year in dividends from their British operations. For example, Arriva is owned by German national rail company Deutsche Bahn and Abellio is owned by the Dutch government. So public ownership of railway services is not unique, it is the norm across Europe and many parts of the developed world. It is an essential service. It should be run for maximum safety, reliability and quality of service, not private profit.
The numbers using trains have reached record levels, 1.7 billion train journeys in 2016/17, but the increased usage and fairs has not been invested in the service. Millions of rail travellers and regular commuters rely on trains to get to and from work but are sick of squeezing onto overcrowded trains. The private sector bosses have avoided investing in the railway service. Incredibly, the average age of trains is higher than it was in 1996, and any investments are usually underwritten by the government - for example, with the West Coast Mainline electrification. No wonder almost 2/3rds of the British public, 64%, support public ownership of the railways.

Public Subsidise Privatised Rail 3 Times Higher Than Publicly Owned Rail

A couple of years ago an audience member on BBC Question Time caused a stir when he claimed the level of public subsidy to the rail network since privatisation has been significantly higher, not lower than what it was under public ownership. People scoffed. How ridiculous a proposition that is? One of the main reasons promoted in support of privatisation was to save the public purse money. Less public funds would be required to support the apparently ailing service. Yet the Rail, Maritime and Transport (RMT) trade union and scores of research and transport groups unveiled the scandal within years that privatisation has cost the public more, not less but in a horrendous double-whammy. Not only billions more in public funding but thousands more in annual fare prices as well.
The BBC Fact Check team investigated the intuitively suspect claim by that audience member and the result was remarkable:

“I just wanted to make the point about the railways, in terms of my understanding is that the railway companies, the private ones, receive four times as much funding as British Rail did in the 1970s and 80s.”

BBC Question Time audience member, 11 May 2017

“This is the right order of magnitude. Figures we’ve seen indicate it’s now about three times what it was at the end of the 1980s, although these don’t include loans to Network Rail.

Britain’s privatised railways have been getting around £5 billion on average in government support over the last five years. In the last five years of the 1980s—the earliest period we have figures for before privatisation—it was an average of £1.6 billion in today’s money”.
So there you have it in black and white. The government retained control of the rail network through the establishment of a public company called Network Rail and then sold the franchises to run the rail services on the network to private companies. Excluding government expenditure in the form of loans to Network Rail, for instance, £5.7 billion in 2016/17 alone, the public purse subsidises the private rail companies with an incredible three times more public money than they spent on the publicly-owned British Rail. Since privatisation, the public purse has spent £5 billion a year to support a privatised service compared to £1.6 billion a year supporting the publicly owned one. It is so crazy, it is criminal.

The ROSCOs Scandal

As if this part of the rail privatisation story is not bad enough don’t forget what happened to the 11,250 train vehicles British Rail owned in 1993 before privatisation. Just under 90% of that rolling stock was gifted to three specially created rolling stock leasing companies (ROSCOS) who then charged the private franchise companies leasing fees for use of that stock. Talk about a license to create money? These newly created private rolling stock companies had a monopoly on the supply of stock and couldn’t fail to make money given the fact the stock was gifted to them by the government despite being paid for by decades of public funds invested in British Rail.
Detailed research by the RMT has revealed ROSCO’s revenues have risen steadily since they were created with nauseating sums generated in the five year period between 2012, around £800 million, to £1 billion in 2017.
So what have these ROSCOs done with the massive revenues? They haven’t invested in new stock as Department of Transport date shows the average age of rolling stock has risen since privatisation from 16 years old in 1992, the last year before privatisation, to 20 years old in 2017/18. So the cost of fares has rocketed, reliability of services has plummeted and the chances of securing a seat on busy routes are virtually nil because investment in more and modern carriages has dived. Yet between 2012 and 2018 the ROSCOs passed on £1.2 billion to their parent companies and owners in the form of dividend payments.

Tory Privatizations Must Be Reversed – Public Is Better Than Private

The story of rail privatisation is one of calamity and disaster for the public across the UK. They have been ripped off to the tune of billions of pounds and the clamour for full-scale re-nationalisation will continue to grow. Just like water, gas, electricity, bus services and mail the railway service is essential and belongs in public hands being run for maximum benefit to all of society not private profits for fat-cat private bosses.
Instead of piecemeal re-nationalisation, we need urgent wholesale re-nationalisation of the railway services and stock. Returning rail, mail, gas, electricity, water and many other services stolen from the public to state control and ownership is long overdue.

The views and opinions expressed in the article do not necessarily reflect those of Sputnik. 

Source:  https://sputniknews.com/columnists/202001311078192977-return-the-railways-to-public-ownership--prosecute-the-privateers/

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