Save Your Local Post Office

John Nichols at The Nation:

POSTAL SERVICE—TOO BIG TO FAIL: When Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders convened a town hall meeting on the future of the US Postal Service (USPS) this past fall, the Montpelier High School cafeteria was packed. “Senator, you take this back to Washington,” said Bill Creamer, a twenty-four-year veteran of the post office. “Vermonters want their Postal Service.” Sanders has done just that, taking the lead in the fight to block the shuttering of post offices, mass layoffs of workers and deep cuts in services, which he rightly warns, “could eventually lead to the destruction of the Postal Service.”

Proponents of privatization—or of “reforms” that would amount to death by slow cuts—argue that the USPS is in trouble because Americans are giving up on snail mail and going digital. But Sanders points out that the service has been hamstrung by Congress. It’s not just the onerous requirement that the USPS pay forward health benefits for decades into the future. Restrictions placed on the Postal Service keep it from offering new services that would make it more competitive. To change this, Sanders, along with other senators and members of the House, is proposing a Postal Service Protection Act, which would free up the USPS to provide photocopying and print services, notarize documents, issue hunting and fishing licenses, and more.

“Clearly, we need changes in the post office so that it becomes a robust institution in the digital world,” said Sanders at an appearance in White River Junction on January 4. “But I believe we can make those changes without slashing jobs.” The senator is right, but he could use some help combating a bipartisan coalition that includes Senators Tom Carper, Joe Lieberman and Scott Brown, who want to slash postal services as soon as this spring. Postal unions are organizing. So are authors like Dave Eggers, Jonathan Ames and Aimee Bender, who, through the website The Rumpus, have started a push to revive the art of letter writing. A great Facebook campaign has also been launched under the banner “Save the U.S. Postal Service by Writing More Letters.”

But ultimately, what’s most needed is broad recognition that the fight to save the USPS is a fundamental struggle to maintain basic services and the framework of civil society, just like protecting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. We could use a lot more folks like the woman at the Montpelier town hall meeting who asked the crowd, “How many of you have a post office box? How many of you get delivery?” Hands went up across the room. Then she asked, “How many of you have an account at Bank of America?” No hands. “How is the post office not too big to fail,” the woman asked, “and Bank of America, who nobody is served by here, is?”

The answer is that the Postal Service is a whole lot more viable, a whole lot more valuable and a whole lot more necessary than the banks that Washington bent over backward to preserve.

Find ways to help here, at saveamericaspostalservice.org.