"A Miracle of High Technology and Human Touch"

A genuine national treasure. And Congress is deliberately destroying it.

Down with Tyranny:

This week, in Esquire, Jesse Lichtenstein has a remarkable look at the post office problem the GOP created and lays out the definitive explanation about why candidates pledging to support the U.S. Postal service need to be supported by the voters. Short answer: "The postal service is not a federal agency. It does not cost taxpayers a dollar. It loses money only because Congress mandates that it do so. What it is is a miracle of high technology and human touch. It's what binds us together as a country." Darrell Issa has twisted that up so much that few people understand any of it-- which is why it's so important to read Lichtenstein's whole article-- or at least these excerpts:

Today the postal service has a network that stretches across America: 461 distribution centers, 32,000 post offices, and 213,000 vehicles, the largest civilian fleet in the world. Trucks carrying mail log 1.2 billion miles a year. The postal service handles almost half of the entire planet's mail. It can physically connect any American to any other American in 3.7 million square miles of territory in a few days, often overnight: a vast lattice of veins and arteries and capillaries designed to circulate the American lifeblood of commerce and information and human contact.
...In mid-November, the postmaster general, Patrick Donahoe, reported that the post office had lost $15.9 billion for the year and was operating on just a few days' cash flow, having reached its legal debt limit. He all but begged Congress to take action. Mail was down 5 percent from the year before, and wages and benefits and other worker-related costs were an unsustainable 80 percent of the postal service's $81 billion operating expenses.
But nobody wants to hear that more than 70 percent of those losses were for extraordinary budget obligations mandated by Congress, or that the postal service posted its thirteenth-straight quarter of productivity gains. In a nation obsessed with cutting budgets and government fat, there is no better target than the federal postal worker who will have her route delivering paper mail for life, and then try to pass it on to her daughter.
Eighty-five percent of America's critical infrastructure is controlled by the private sector. We let private companies fight our wars; we have 110,000 defense contractors in Afghanistan compared with 68,000 American troops. We let private companies lock up 16 percent of our federal inmates and instruct 10 percent of our students. They provide our phone service and Internet access and air travel and hospital care. Surely, many believe, private companies can deliver our mail better and faster and cheaper than the federal government.
If you work with actual pieces of mail-- if you are a carrier, a handler, a clerk, but not an administrator-- it is said that you "touch the mail." The postal service has more than half a million full-time workers and a hundred thousand contract employees, the vast majority of which are mail touchers. ...That we're sending less mail is not debatable. Nor is it debatable that the post office as we've known it for the past forty years, one built for speed and brute force in sorting and distributing an ever-surging flood of paper documents, is outdated in our digital world.
This isn't a story about whether we could live without the post office.
It's about whether we'd want to.
SNIP

15% of all bill passed by Congress over the past ten years are actually bills naming post offices. Congress is happy to name 'em but unwilling to save 'em. In that time the House has passed no bills to help the postal system... not one has even managed to break out of the committee system. Democrats in the Senate passed a bipartisan bill last year, 62-37, that would end Saturday delivery and ease the absurd payment obligations but Boehner and Cantor, giving in to Issa's carping, decided to kill the bill-- part of their strategy to make America dysfunctional under President Obama.

Since the abomination of Reagain, repugs have been systematically dismantling everything that holds the American community together. The U.S. Postal Service is the last big piece, and Congress is about to throw it to the privatization dogs.