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GOP Goes Batty on the Postal Service
Will we let the Republicans destroy this most public of all public institutions?
In the next few days we may decide the future of the Post Office. The signs are not auspicious. President Obama has agreed to a plan to cut Saturday delivery. The Post Service’s management wants to close 2500 post offices immediately and up to 16,000 by 2020. Representative Darrell Issa (R-CA) has introduced a bill that could end free door-to-door delivery.
Republicans have been railing at the government post office for many years. But for most of us, it is a “wondrous American creation”.
“Six days a week it delivers an average of 563 million pieces of mail—40 percent of the entire world’s volume”, observes BusinessWeek. “For the price of a 44¢ stamp (the lowest postal rate in the world), you can mail a letter anywhere within the nation’s borders. The service will carry it by pack mule to the Havasupai Indian reservation at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. Mailmen on snowmobiles take it to the wilds of Alaska. If your recipient can no longer be found, the USPS will return it at no extra charge. It may be the greatest bargain on earth.”
For all you Constitutionalists in the audience, the Founding Fathers considered the Post Office so important they included its creation on the short list of powers they bestowed on Congress, along with national defense, taxation, coining money, and regulating commerce
A Public Institution With a Public Mission
From its beginning the Post Office was a public institution with a public mission.
One mission was to promote an informed citizenry. To that end, Congress allowed newspaper printers to send each other newspapers for free, facilitating the flow of information from national and international sources to rural villages. The 1792 law also provided for the mail delivery of newspapers to subscribers at the low rate of 1 cent for up to 100 miles.
In the 1830s Alexis de Tocqueville described the success of these policies, “nothing is easier than to set up a newspaper, as a small number of subscribers suffices to defray the expenses. In America there is scarcely a hamlet that has not its newspaper.”
The special rate for newspapers eventually was extended to other types of materials recognized as having educational and cultural benefits: periodical pamphlets, magazines, nonprofit publications, library materials, and books.
In the 1820s the Post Office stepped in to promote the general welfare by overcoming what in modern parlance might be called a “digital divide”. For a price, private firms began to provide a faster mail service to investors seeking advanced market intelligence. A ship docking in New York might bring news of a rise in cotton prices in Liverpool. Speculators dispatched messengers to southern cotton markets and made a killing purchasing cotton at normal prices in advance of the run up.
The Post Office responded by establishing its own express mail service to equalize access to market information.
Outraged private carriers prompted a government investigation into the propriety of public express mail. The investigation concluded, “the object of the Department was laudable and praiseworthy.” “(T)he Government should not hesitate to adopt means, although of an expensive character, to place the community generally in possession of the same intelligence at as early a period as practicable.”
Early on, the Founding Fathers realized the Post Office would find it difficult if not impossible to achieve its public objectives if private businesses could siphon off the most profitable routes, leaving only money losing routes and services to the Post Office. Thus, the 1792 law also prohibited private postal service “whereby the revenue of the general post-office may be injured.” Private firms found abundant loopholes. In 1843 Senator William D. Merrick expressed his exasperation at “these private expresses, which had been placed on all the most profitable routes…. (which deprived) the department of the greatest portion of its revenues and thereby disabled it from reducing the rates of postage…and from extending greater facilities to the more remote and sparsely populated sections of the Union.”.
In 1845, Congress closed the loopholes, enabling the Post Office to dramatically lower the price of postage and initiate free door-to-door delivery in cities.
In the 1890s the Post Office extended free door-to-door delivery to the two-thirds of America who lived in rural areas. Postmaster Generals like John Wanamaker, the founder of the Philadelphia department store, knew this would lose money in the short term but the nationwide infrastructure would become the foundation for new services. One of these would be package delivery. A full fledged parcel post would develop profitable routes that compensated for the unprofitable ones found in any system promising universal service.
Wanamaker got his wish when the handful of private companies that dominated package delivery began treating their customers badly. The companies refused to inform their customers about free delivery in areas beyond rail depots, sent shipments by circuitous routes to inflate costs, discriminated among customers, double charged and overcharged.
The post office stepped in. Parcel post began in 1912. Critics predicted the post office would be unable to compete. “(T)he Postal Department as now organized and operated would be utterly unable to compete with express companies upon purely a business basis”, one writer insisted. He was wrong. Tests comparing the private and public services found the government service generally faster. Within a year, express companies stopped competing with parcel post in many small towns.
Professor Richard B. Kielbowicz of the University of Washington describes how the financial panics of the late 1800s and early 1900s and the closure of hundreds of banks led the Post Office to promote the general welfare another way, by undertaking “an experiment in a new field of public benefits”: postal savings banks.
The banks fought back. They contended postal banks were unnecessary and would be “mismanaged, inefficient and costly and (would) serve the public less well than privately managed businesses.” The American Bankers Association spent $1 million to defeat the bill. It lost but did get the bill written in a way that severely restricted the ability of the post office to compete. Congress set the interest rate payable on deposits at 2 percent, half what private banks were offering, and set a maximum account balance at $500. Nevertheless, the postal savings system was by all accounts a success. At its peak in 1947 it had over 4 million accounts and deposits exceeding $3.3 billion.
In 1966, Congress voted to discontinue postal banks. With the advent of deposit insurance many argued, “the postal savings system had simply ‘outlived its usefulness’”. Perhaps. But twenty years later, hundreds of the nation’s newly deregulated private savings and loans collapsed, resulting in a $200 billion taxpayer bailout.
The New Postal Service Is Born
Historically Congress set postage rates. One result was that they were totally unrelated to costs. Capital investment shriveled even as mail volume soared. Finally, just before Christmas in 1966 the system collapsed. The Chicago Post Office, the nation’s largest, came to a virtual stop under a logjam of mail.
Congressional hearings ensued. In 1967 President Lyndon Johnson appointed a Commission to reorganize the Post Office on “a business basis”. In 1970 Congress transformed the Cabinet-level Post Office Department into the independent United States Postal Service (USPS). Taxpayer subsidies to the Post Office, which amounted to 25 percent of its budget in 1971 (about $16 billion in current dollars) were phased out.
Freed from some constraints and with a new capacity to borrow, the Post Office made major capital investments. Productivity soared. Today the USPS delivers 139 percent more mail to 89 percent more delivery points with just 2.5 percent more work hours than it did in 1971.
By the 1990s the USPS often generated a profit. As of 2005 it was free of debt.
So how is it that today the Post office is faced with a Sophie’s Choice: defaulting or putting itself in the hands of Darrell Issa, whose goal is to effectively gut it.
A Mess of Our Own Making
How did this happen? Here’s the story. The Post Office pays into several retirement and health funds. Almost everyone agrees that in the past it has vastly overpaid, some estimate by as much as $100 billion. One would think it a simple matter for Congress to allow the USPS to tap into these excess funds to pay current health benefits. One would be wrong.
Several times between 2002 and 2005 Congress did overwhelmingly approve such a strategy. Each time the White House nixed the idea because it would increase the deficit. Welcome to the wonderful world of Washington accounting.
The Post Office is self-supporting. It has overpaid into its health and retirement funds. But it cannot tap these surplus funds because the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) counts the surplus funds as part of the existing budget. Any use of them would therefore increase the deficit.
In 2006, the Post Office finally agreed to buy off the CBO. Budget neutrality over a ten-year period was achieved by requiring the USPS to make ten annual payments of $5.4-5.8 billion.
These payments, the Postal Regulatory Commission (PRC) observes, “transformed what would have been considerable profits into significant losses.”
The 2006 law also prohibited postal rates from rising faster than inflation. The economic collapse produced negative inflation. The law allows an “exigent” rate increase due to “extraordinary or exceptional circumstances”. In 2010, the USPS requested a 5.6 percent increase to raise $3.2 billion, twice as much, incidentally, as ending Saturday delivery will save.
The PRC agreed the Postal Service faces a crisis due in large part to an extraordinary economic contraction as well as the excessive burden of prefunding payments. But it unanimously denied the request, declaring the enormous debt was salutary for the post office!
Ironically, the law also requires mail prices to cover costs. In 2010 the same Postal Regulatory Commission determined that junk mail (standard mail) was being subsidized to the tune of $580 million a year, almost three times what the USPS says it would save from closing thousands of post offices.
The refusal of Congress to alleviate the prefunding burden coupled with the refusal of the PRC to allow a rate increase has led the USPS to embrace strategies that may save money in the short term but will undermine if not destroy the public mission of the post office in the long term.
The Folly of Closing Post Offices
Consider plans to close about 2500 post offices. Dean Granholm, vice president of delivery and post office operations maintains, “We’re not the only ones going through this trend. All sorts of retailers are trying to find ways to do this.” But the post office is not Starbucks or McDonalds or Walmart. It provides a public service and a significant part of that service is the ubiquity of the post office itself.
The closing of several thousand post offices, according to the USPS itself, would save the post office a paltry $200 million out of a budget of $55 billion, while costing thousands of communities and millions of people far, far more.
The USPS determines which post offices to shut using a cost-benefit methodology similar to that used by Starbucks and McDonalds and Walmart. It only includes half of the equation, the savings to USPS but not the costs to the community.
According to the post office economic model Marquette County, Wisconsin, population 15,000 and home to 7 post offices is significantly overserviced. Students at the University of Wisconsin undertook a proper cost-benefit analysis to determine if this were true. They chose to evaluate a post office that clearly would fail the post office cost-benefit test. They found that closing the Packwaukee post office would save about half a million dollars while costing the community, in increased travel time and related expenses, more than $700,000.
The Wall Street Journal carried an instructive story about the enormous unquantifiable impacts on Prairie City, South Dakota when its post office was closed. The closure saved the Postal Service $19,000 a year.
Prairie City postal clerks kept a pot of coffee brewing and posted birth and death notices. “That was the gathering place for people to come in the mornings, have a cup of coffee or a can of pop, and visit, but we don’t have that no more,” says Daniel Beckman, a recently widowed farmer. “All that’s left in the town now is just a church; it’s totally depressing.”
The area’s only major hospital and pharmacy is in Hettinger, N.D., 40 miles away and over the state line from Prairie City. Before, when an elderly person or farmer in Prairie City quickly needed an antibiotic or other medication, a pharmacist in Hettinger would rush prescriptions to the Hettinger post office, catching the mail carrier who each day traveled from Hettinger to the Prairie City post office. The closing eliminated that direct route, and now Prairie City mail is sorted and delivered on a rural route out of Bison, S.D., delaying the delivery of medicine from Hettinger by two or three days, says Dr. Brian Willoughby, of West River Health Services in Hettinger. “When they cut these services, there are multiple spinoff consequences for these older people out there in the middle of nowhere, but the bureaucrats sort of forget about that…
Eliminating Saturday delivery would save more money, $1.5-$3 billion a year, although one would hope that cutting service by 17 percent (one day) to reduce costs by 2-4 percent and eliminating some 50,000 full time, middle class jobs at a time when Washington sees as its primary mission the creation of such jobs, would seem to a nonstarter. Moreover, the strategy would slow delivery by two days for perhaps 25 percent of the mail and open the door to private firms to step in.
Unleashing the Post Office
Rather than cut back services, the USPS might revisit John Wanamaker’s strategy. Take advantage of its vast retail capacity. This has already begun. In 2010 it processed 6.7 million passport applications and issued over 120 million money orders. To these could be add all kinds of government services: state fishing licenses, renewing car registrations, applying for Medicare, voting registration.
Tragically, but not surprisingly, the 2006 law hobbles the ability of the USPS to offer new products. For example, it cannot offer a product that would “create an unfair or otherwise inappropriate competitive advantage for the Postal Service…”!
“The contradiction in the law is part of a pattern in effect ever since the USPS stopped receiving appropriations – Congress wants it to be self-sufficient but doesn’t want it to make money”, observes Elaine C. Kamarck of Harvard Kennedy School of Government.
For example, in the mid-1970s the post office was told to remove copy machines from post offices under pressure from lobbyists representing office equipment stores who feared that USPS was taking away its business. Later when the USPS initiated a “Pack and Send” service, the outcry from Mailboxes Etc. and other private packing stores successfully challenged the service. Years later, when Internet shopping took off, the delivery of packages to individual households should have resulted in a dramatic increase in USPS business. But parcel shipments were generated by large organizations and the USPS was not allowed to negotiate discounts and thus lost business. It was forbidden by law from lowering prices to get more business. This resulted in the entirely incredible situation in the 1990s where the United States Government negotiated an agreement for the delivery of U.S. government package services with Fed Ex because the USPS was not allowed to negotiate for lower prices!
The Republican strategy is clear. Reduce the post office’s presence in thousands of communities. Reduce the number of personal interactions with one’s letter carrier. Reduce service. Remove the post office from our everyday lives sufficiently so we will agree to its conversion to a private service supplied by profit making firms. What is the strategy for the rest of us?
Comments
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43 Comments so far
Show All"The Post Office pays into several retirement and health funds. Almost everyone agrees that in the past it has vastly overpaid, some estimate by as much as $100 billion. One would think it a simple matter for Congress to allow the USPS to tap into these excess funds to pay current health benefits. One would be wrong"
Corporations such as Verizon and General Electric tapped the money they had set aside for pensions so they could cover operating expenses. That seems to be legal, but Congress will not let the Post Office do the same.
Could the GOP move to gut the Post Office be another way to destroy a union?
"Could the GOP move to gut the Post Office be another way to destroy a union?"
Yes -- but the move is bipartisan. Both parties are out to destroy unions.
Let's recap: The Military Industrial Congressional Complex (MICC) has seen to it that we no longer coin our own money or regulate commerce, and now they're intent on abolishing our postal service.
So what Constitutional powers are left to Congress? National defense and taxation.
Sounds like MICC Nirvana to me.
I actually watched a Politician in the USA call for the banning of the National Weather Service because it unfairly competed with the Private Marketplace.
Apparently he felt a privately run model wherein people would have to pay a for their weather information on a subscription basis was a superior model and allowed more "Freedom and liberty"
These Libertarian types are absolutely bonkers. It a collective Insanity
That was Rick Santorum, who has receved -- surprise! -- large donations from Accuweather.
Funny thing is...AccuWeather has recently gone on record as saying they have no interest in doing much of what the NWS does and that they essentially need NWS data in order to do much of what they do. (I'm an NWS meteorologist). I guess they have yet to figure out how to make a profit from telling Joe Blow that a tornado is approaching. It will be interesting to see if the true believers among our elected officials force the private sector to perform a service that they actually don't want to provide.
Excellent piece of journalism Mr. Morris and this one goes in my permanent files. If these true "America haters" get their way we'll be one step closer to the banana republic they seem hellbent on creating.
A similar history of publicly owned municipal water systems could be presented and we can plainly see how well the for-profit high-speed internet providers have served rural and other "marginal markets."
The new motto of rapacious capitalism should be: "if it aint broke, then break it." Another iteration of disaster capitalism.
The Postal Service is constitutional, Article 1, Section 8, Clause 7. Right wing ranters used to talk about the Constitution as a holy document; I remember a Jimmy Swaggart video clip where he was pounding his Bible and yelling about "the Constitution of the United States, the holy word of God!"
They don't seem to be harping on the Constitution as holy word as much these days. They don't like it when you refer to the "well regulated militia" phrase of the Second Amendment. They like Free Speech when they feel the urge to express themselves, but would be perfectly willing to suspend it to keep from having to hear upsetting contradictions pointed out.
I believe it was Nat Hentoff who wrote a book titled "Free Speech for me but not for Thee."
I was gonna say something along those lines. How elected Tea Party radicals might rail against that commie radical Ben Franklin for throwing the postal service monkeywrench into free market capitalism.
I'm all aquiver waiting for that moron Michelle Bachman to wade into this one.
In "the house that Jack built...."
The economy was raped by 3 major items:
1. Tax cuts & loopholes to big money
2. Deregulation of Wall Street and the way it funded a housing bubble, only to bet on its collapse. Meanwhile "The Designers" peddled their fake "derivatives" throughout the global economy... as it now reverberates (if it doesn't tank, altogether).
3. War, war, and more war to feed war profiteers and the MIC
So with a LOT of $ gone missing, the privateers (libertarians/neocons) have created a Grover Norquist-style probable cause to aim at:
1. Acorn & missions that help the poor
2. Teachers & decimating public schools/education
3. Unions, in general
4. Homeowners "under water"
5. The Post Office
What's next? The great national parks? The Statue of Liberty? The Pentagon?
This is Disaster Capitalism cranked up to the Nth power.
Two other things will happen if the insanity of breaking US mail takes place:
1. More identity theft will take place as more transactions will, by necessity, need to be done on-line
2. More late fees, as less postal dates means the usurious credit card companies can crank up their added on costs
It's hard to say if the dark powers want to turn American into a banana republic or cull the popuation numbers... or both.
"It could happen here..." style
The United States Postal Service is another of the sinews that hold us together as a country.
Therefore, in the eyes of the oligarchs and multinational corporations who want nothing standing in the way of their complete dominance of the American people and our resources, the USPS has to be privatized so they have complete control over the way information--magazines, newspapers, mail-in ballots, etc.--is disseminated.
These GOP attacks on everything that holds us together as a country are so egregious as to border on treasonous.
"mail-in ballots,
Thought provoking point. The Post Office serves as a voting machine. Shall we trust private industry not to lose mail-in "votes"?
Fom the AP on 9/20:
President Obama said Monday the U.S. Postal Service should be allowed to reduce mail delivery to five-days-a-week to help cut its massive losses.
"While the post office has cut more than 100,000 workers in the last few years it needs to cut more, close offices and find other ways to reduce costs to keep operating."
Democrats had four years to fix the outrageous demands on the Post Office until the 2010 midterms. They didn't do anything cause they agree with Obama and his merry band of Republican thespians.
When Mr. Morris places blame only the GOP, it's is a bald faced lie..
Elected Republicans and Democrats may act similarly many times. However, I believe the people who "support" those parties differ dramatically.
The big financial support for both parties are the same people.
They don't care which party's in power. either one will do.
As far as the American people go, despite their differences in ideology, anyone believing that one party is better than the other is delusional.
Don't worry. Obama is just playing 11th dimensional chess with the Republicans....
bwa-haha!
Watch out Grand Old Pathology 'cuz folks may well go postal on you one of these days!
How can the title say the GOP is to blame, but the third sentence is this "President Obama has agreed to a plan to cut Saturday delivery"? How is it these pundits don't see the contradiction, time and time again?
The Republicans forced the USPS to be a self-sufficent business and then loaded it's board of directors with corporate toadies to ensure it's downfall for the benefit of UPS, FedEx EtC. Flushing the Board of Destructors would be a good start.
Old Guy---
The attacks on, and intentional mismanagement of, the Postal Service does not border on treason. It IS treason.
The way things are going in this country poor people will soon be reduced to communicating by smoke signals and relayed light signals and we'll all have to relearn Morse code. As it is, many rural communities where I live that used to have "general stores" with a gas pump and a town post office now have ONLY the post office. The towns are losing population because there are no local jobs and commuting costs to buy necessities or keep a job have become impossible. Houses are vacant and vandalized, teenagers are disgruntled (to say the least), etc. But for cable TV they might as well be living in 1930s Depression America. (Hell, at least in the 1930s they had Greyhound buses.)
The attack on the Postal Service IS a direct assault on the cohesiveness of the nation itself. Ole Ben Franklin knew this. Even John Adams knew this. (Next thing is to privatize the Bureau of Weights and Measures. A pint will be 14 ounces in Michigan, 12 in California, 18 in Nevada, etc.)
Seems like every day brings on some new SYSTEMATIC assault on the Commonweal. These enemies of the state are not "nuts." They are psychopaths and should be dealt with as such, for they are increasing the general sense of insecurity and destroying people's lives, slowly but surely. They have declared war on us and need to be confronted directly, by mobs if necessary.
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Do you know how many businesses will be destroyed as a result of the Uniparty dismantling this truly great institution?
And what's the projected loss that's allegedly the trigger for this necessary implosion? $10 billion? Ben Bernanke craps more than $10 billion after his morning bran muffin.
I'd be willing to bet the house that the new private post office(s) will be mandated by the government to inspect (open) every piece of "suspicious" mail to protect us from "terrorists".
Almost certainly every envelope we mail will be required to carry an I.D. number. You gotta know that the government hates that we can mail letters and packages anonymously.
I also anticipate that every letter will require scanning before it can be dropped in a mailbox.
I bet they're working furiously on how to blame this on Bin Laden.
There's a big problem in the framing of the article as the "GOP goes batty."
The source of the postal service problems is the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA) of 2006. The Act had the overwhelming support of both parties in both the House and Senate (400 to 20 in the House and a "voice vote" in the Senate).
The PAEA requires the USPS to prepay between $5.4 billion and $5.8 billion annually between 2007 and 2016 into a retirement fund. This represents 75 years of pension funding that Congress requires the Postal Service to fund in just 10 years. No other organization or business has to do that. Current postal workers are prepaying for benefits of people not even born yet. Removing the prepayment of this fund, as the American Postal Workers Union (APWU) claims, would allow the USPS to operate in the black.
To solve this manufactured crisis, Obama's Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe proposes to cut $20 billion of the $75 billion in annual costs by 2015. To accomplish this goal, he wants to close thousands of post offices, cut the number of sorting facilities by 60 percent and eliminate 120,000 postal worker jobs from its current 653,000.
How is this that different from Darrel Issa's "reform" bill?
Wake up! The attacks on postal workers and the postal service are BIPARTISAN!
We don't use the post office at all really, haven't for years. We do use the prepaid express mail boxes though since they are such a great deal. As long as you keep the package under 80lbs, your golden.
We do all our personal communications by email and electronically. We don't WANT the junk mail the USPS seems so very good at getting to us day in and day out.
If the USPS died or became a shadow of what it is now, would that really be a bad thing?
Not everyone has, or can afford, the hardware and internet connectivity for e-mail. Next question?
FWIW, my brother-in-law, who has been in thrall to his Precious iPhone for well over a year now, took exactly this supercilious tone when we went out to dinner last week.
Unlike everybody else at the table, he played the role of a would-be common-sense futurist, and declared that the Post Office and mail service had simply become obsolete. He thought that it was past time for it to go gently into the dustbin of history, like the Pony Express before it.
Who mails anything, nowadays? he asked rhetorically.
He's a decent guy generally, but he can really be obtuse and insufferable at times.
You should have just asked him when was the last time he bought something online, say with his iphone, and how that something arrived at his house.
Who is this royal "we"?
"We don't use the post office at all really, haven't for years. We do use the prepaid express mail boxes though since they are such a great deal. As long as you keep the package under 80lbs, your golden."
Right, so, you do find USPS useful. Yet you seem to think that it is a good idea to kill it.
And yes, it would be a tragedy if a publicly owned postal service dies, opening the way for more dominance of mail / parcel delivery by private corporations such as UPS and / or FedEx.
The history of the PO presented in this article has at least one glaring omission: its workers. For example:
The postal workers strike of 1970.* Over 220,000 postal workers were involved. The strike led to the establishment of the Postal Reorganization Act of 1970. "Under the act, postal unions won the right to negotiate on wages, benefits and working conditions" - that is, the right to collective bargaining. Before the strike, being a postal worker was a low paying, crappy job. Income for Postal workers was so low that they were eligible for food stamps. Many postal workers had to have a second job to get by.
By striking, postal workers were able to turn a job at the post office into a living-wage job with health and retirement benefits. This is exactly what postal "reform" is trying to eliminate. The manufactured USPS "crisis" and proposed "reforms" are simply another "Shock Doctrine" attack on working people.
*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._postal_strike_of_1970
Reform is bipartisan code for " trashing."
Starting with that shyster Clinton and his Welfare Reform, every " reform" legislation has been a disaster for the very people it was originally designed to help.
Then there's all the financial reforms. They deserve an honorable mention for their devestating effect on 98% of the population.
When you hear about the next new reform legislation that's gonna be good for the country, tell them to f__k off or go ahead and bend over.
GO USPS and stop the attacks. Oh! by the way they actually deliver the mail to millions of American Citizens all over the World. The attacks are home grown and need to stop. It seems like the GOP wants to attack anything in the United States that works. I am not trashing any other mail or package delivery service since these services can survive in harmony.
I am sure that a lot of the detractors use the USPS and then bash the USPS. Stop the charade just like the Health Care you receive but are against the public having the same thing.
Save the USPS.
Meanwhile, in the "Life's Bitter Ironies" category:
This month, the USPS issued a stamp in honor of Barbara Jordan.
I don't know what the CEOs of Federal Express and UPS make in a year. If their compensation is as bloated as that of other private enterprise CEOs, however, it's likely that they make 300-400 times as much as their average workers. Why is it, then, that the same people who rail against the "waste" and "inefficiency" of the public service post office are so quick to praise private enterprise mail delivery services that pay their CEOs such a gargantuan salary? How is it that we've been propagandized to believe that a public service that would never countenance such a disparity in wages is denounced as "wasteful" and "inefficient," while a private enterprise is praised for so overcharging its customers that it can generate "profits" sufficient to sustain such a disparity?
Barack Obama consistently sides with the capitalist oligarchs and against the interests of the people. What surprise can there be that he would put at jeopardy 100s of thousands of jobs of postal workers? What does he care about the post office. Wall Street will donate sufficient money to his campaign that he can propagandize himself in more expensive ways.
I read sometime back that the Bush administration had taken the money from the USPS retirement fund for the war; thus, we had the last postal rate increase.
Could it be all this pre-depositing of health/retirement benefits for postal workers not born yet is another ploy, this time by Obama, to grab deposited money? IOU's would replace the deposits and off we go again. 5 billion dollars, more or less, for ten years, is a chunk of change.
I agree with everyone: a skunk smells like a skunk, whether it's a repug skunk or a demo-rat skunk.
Thank you all!
Meanwhile, notice that in virtually all contests of any "legal" transactions, the "paper trail" is critical.
Do you have a dispute over your water bill, or your credit card account? You need a "paper trail." And there MUST be "integrity" in that "paper trail." Historically, that is what the Postal Service is all about.
Do you really want to surrender your SOCIAL TRANSACTIONS to a Privatized, Digitized, electronic system involving so many INTERMEDIARIES that no lawyer will represent you because the System has become TOO COMPLEX TO LITIGATE?
Isn't that what just happened to the MORTGAGE MARKET?!!!
(Worse---bankers falsifying the signatures of mortgagees to promote Credit Default Swaps involving "bundled" mortgages hiding utterly corrupted "obligations"...and who has gone to jail?)
The USPS is our last standing cohesive institution. Every postal worker knows it. (They all take a Civil Service exam: they ain't stupid...)
The Digital Revolution was supposed to create a "paperless revolution." How many of you have a computer without a paper printer? (To say nothing of the criminal conspiracy of the price-gouging ink-jet printing industry...!)
Anyone tried to buy an old typewriter ribbon lately? Anyone still have an old typewriter?
Test: Try writing in long-hand to your Congressman, via USPS. Watch what happens. They don't like you.
Paper Trail. Without it we are no longer a nation of Law...
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Tom Larsen
"Before the strike, being a postal worker was a low paying, crappy job".
My father and his brothers were all postal workers. ‘Civil Servants’- who were ,as permanent postal employees, paid on the same government pay scale as other like agencies. It paid well enough to raise our families at a time when moms did not need to work. They all were proud being postal employees and never considered what their position was or that they were civil servants as being crappy. Yes, there was a period in the 60's and into the 70's when many temp employees were hired at hourly wages and no benefits. Many were unhappy and even unqualified to do the work they were NOT ‘post office ‘workers’ but temporary help hired by the post office.
David Morris’s article is very informative and spot on as to the evolution of the present quandary. Like with Social Security and public education the demise of Postal Service and its unions are hot to trot issues that have been waiting to be dismantled for decades.
Siouxrose and Old Guy in both their responses provide well said remarks to add to the importance of the article. The attack on the Postal Service is also a direct assault on a wonderful part of American history and tradition. It is obvious erasing history is just as important as rewriting it for these folks.
Shade you ask -If the USPS died or became a shadow of what it is now, would that really be a bad thing? I ask you should free public libraries be allowed to die or continue to become a shadow of what they were, really a bad thing? I would suspect in both cases you would think so.
For me, given the alternatives that might replace either of them and the place both institutions held in my life I think it would be disastrous.
RE: David Morris’s article is very informative and spot on as to the evolution of the present quandary.
Hardly. Morris paints the picture that the attacks on the postal service originate with the GOP. The Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (2006) is the source of the "crisis" and that act was supported overwhelmingly by BOTH parties. See my post of 4:11pm. Morris' characterization that the Republicans are responsible for the crisis is not only wrong but dangerous as the Obama administration is just as keen on the postal "reform" agenda as the GOP.
RE: They all were proud being postal employees and never considered what their position was or that they were civil servants as being crappy.
I am not making the claim that being a civil servant is crappy. I am making the claim that being super-exploited is crappy. After the (illegal) 1970 strike postal workers gained the right to collectively bargain. They may have been proud civil servants, but after the strike they were proud union members too. (They ensured that for at least a generation or more, postal workers made a living-wage and benefits - no small accomplishment!) What organized postal labor achieved then is what is now under threat with the current "reform" hysteria in Congress and the White House.
Just like education "reform" is not about education, postal "reform" is not about the postal service. Both are smokescreens for a privatization agenda presaged on breaking the power of the last large sectors of unionized America. You don't get any of that from Morris' article.
"Early on, the Founding Fathers realized the Post Office would find it difficult if not impossible to achieve its public objectives if private businesses could siphon off the most profitable routes, leaving only money losing routes and services to the Post Office."
This reminds me of the modern health insurers scrambling to insure young healthy persons and shove seniors off onto the government. Das Kapital is nothing but a parasite, and this was well-understood even before the British East India company started plundering Indian labor to feed Chinese addiction, for 'bloody' profitz. What's important is that we continue to paint the most vile image of das kapitalist monster. Get to work, populist propagandists! Don't be afraid to raise your voice in, for example, local restaurants where Darryl Issa look-alikes dine! Make it uncomfortable for das kapital to 'rub elbows' with we the people! And remember the national parks are free! The universities are free! The public libraries are free! The postal delivery is free! Travel is free! The toll is taken only by das kapitalist! The tax is extracted only by das kapitalist!
Tom Larsen
Re:"Before the strike, being a postal worker was a low paying, crappy job".
"I am making the claim that being super-exploited is crappy". Really, that notion is from your words above …?
You seemed to have left out from Philip F. Rubio’s article that you cherry picked for emphasis to your rant : “I interviewed those who had worked before 1970, including those who struck. Above all, postal workers were proud of having a career serving the public and even before the wage bump that year; the job had afforded them a middle-class status and the ability to accumulate wealth.
For some reason you are intent on focusing your critique of this article because issues you are so anxious to point out were not gotten from Morris' article. Issues that most of the readers are already familiar with. You have underestimated the awareness of your audience – from the posters remarks today it seems to indicate they are already AWAKE and found the Morris article to their liking and appreciation.
RE: You seemed to have left out from Philip F. Rubio’s article that you cherry picked for emphasis to your rant...
You are making assumptions. Until a moment ago I had no idea who Philip F. Rubio was; therefore I didn't "cherry pick" anything from his article. I got my information by reading the PAEA itself and doing my own homework. Most coverage in the mainstream (NYT) and even progressive press (is the AJC progressive?) have been focusing on the GOP's role in the postal "crisis" - not the Democrats - just like Morris. So, assuming that "readers are already familiar" with this crucial fact is a bad assumption. As for my "rant", unlike you, I provide factual information.
If you have been following this subject of late have you seen anybody outside of Rubio mention the postal strike of 1970? I doubt it. Why is that important? Because the strike led to the most important reorganization of the PO in the last 40 years (up to the PAEA of 2006).
A well founded argument can be made that a primary goal of the PAEA is to undue the pro-worker legislation (collective bargaining) achieved in the Postal Reorganization Act of 1970. (Signed into law by Nixon, who, though no liberal, nonetheless, was the last US president to enact significant liberal policies: EPA, OSHA, Clean Air and Water Acts.)
And, Morris' "history" doesn't even mention it.
Incidentally, both Rubio and Morris' article present the "grand history" of the USPS without really pulling out one of its most significant elements: the struggle of its workers. The attacks now on postal workers thru the PAEA and postal "reform" a la Donahoe or Issa is most importantly an attack on working class people.
A few years ago I made an ongoing joke on a blog about starting a company that sold franchises for refrigerator boxes equipped with hibachis and those small two-wheeled shopping carts for the new homeless people to purchase as portable residences. Now, please allow me to add my newest service available for franchise--cheap transport to Somalia for the newly poor and homeless citizens of the US.
These sleazy bastards (most DC politicians) will not stop until everything is privatized, and that means if you cannot afford to pay for it, you go without it. Why do we have to pay any taxes at all when we get no or very few services from the government? The corporations, essentially owned by the wealthy, are paying for the politicians, so their collecting two salaries is not acceptable. Let them start paying taxes on the campaign contributions they receive. ENOUGH!!!
“If you have been following this subject of late have you seen anybody outside of Rubio mention the postal strike of 1970? I doubt it. I got my information by reading the PAEA itself and doing my own homework. Hmmm..really?
why is all this so important? As you point out“ the strike led to the most important reorganization of the PO in the last 40 years (up to the PAEA of 2006); The Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA) of 2006 had the overwhelming support of both parties in both the House and Senate; "postal "reform" is not about the postal service; are smokescreens for a privatization agenda presaged on breaking the power of the last large sectors of unionized America and most of all You don't get any of that from Morris' article. Golly, thanks for the enlightenment.
Postal Strike and Reorganization: Reinventing the System(http://www.postalmuseum.si.edu/AfricanAmericanHistory/p11.html) where In fact the grand history" of the USPS and the struggle of its workers is covered quite well –you might want to check it out.