A Bill to Save the Post Office Needs Your Help

Congress created the fake crisis that is killing the Post Office, and now finally a member of Congress has proposed legislation to reverse that stupidity.  

 

Annie-Rose Strasser at Think Progress:

Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR) has introduced legislation to try to save the US Postal Service from its incipient bankruptcy, and he is asking for the public to help him pass it. 

DeFazio’s bill would repeal the needless requirement — one no other business or entity must face — that the Postal Service pre-fund 75 years’ worth of employee health benefits. That requirement has hugely contributed to the USPS defaulting for the first and then second time in its history last year. Analysis from 2012 estimated that the USPS would have a $1.5 billion surplus without the benefit requirement.

But DeFazio recognizes that facts alone will not influence his colleagues to take up and pass the legislation, so he has also turned to the White House’s petition platform, We The People, to petition President Obama to take a stand against the health benefit requirement. He also points out many of the other flaws in how Congress has managed the postal service:

SNIP 

Some conservatives have made the argument that having a national postal service is frivolous in the age of private delivery companies and email, but that ignores the fact that rural Americans don’t enjoy those services with the same regularity that urban and suburban Amercians do. For the elderly and for rural Americans, closed post offices and slowed delivery mean less consistent communication. It can also mean more economic inequality.

Update

President of the National Association of Letter Carriers Fredric Rolando told ThinkProgress that he was happy with DeFazio’s efforts, which he called a fight “for meaningful comprehensive postal reform aimed at strengthening the Postal Service so it can continue to provide Americans with the world’s best and most efficient delivery service.”

 Go sign the petition right now, and send it to all your friends.

"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.

Killing the Post Office for Profit

Congress is doing to the U.S. Postal Service is exactly what Mitt RMoney did to all those companies he destroyed: strip their assets, load them up with debt, then fire all the employees and sell the empty husk to another vulture to exploit.

Read the transcript here.

Does your mail arrive six days a week despite how far off the beaten path you may live? Can you send a letter five thousand miles for less than fifty cents? How long do you think that will last when the first priority is profit, not delivery?

Privatizing public services always - always - has the same result: plunging quality of service at skyrocketing cost.

Saving the Post Office Is Easy - If Congress Wants To Do It

Big IF, of course.

David Dayen at Firedoglake on Wednesday: 

The US Postal Service will default on a $5.5 billion prepaid retiree health benefit payment today, and this will surely lead to calls for privatization or mass jobs cuts. But the default concerns the unusual way in which the USPS, unlike virtually any other company in the world, pre-pays its health benefits many years out. Rep. Elijah Cummings explains:

To pay for other parts of the (2006 Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act) and still make sure it remained revenue-neutral, Congress required the Postal Service to begin prefunding nearly 100 percent of its future retiree health care costs over a 10-year period.

While this may have made budgetary sense at the time, Congress did not anticipate the 2008 economic crisis and its exacerbating effects on the Postal Service’s finances, which were already struggling with declining mail volume as Internet use increased [...]

Though the Postal Service now has more than $45 billion in prepaid retiree health benefits funding, the law requires an additional $5.6 billion payment by Sept. 30, 2012.

In fact there are $11 billion in overpayments into that retirement fund. This is a ridiculous mandate on the USPS, which looks designed to send the postal service into default. This won’t immediately end mail service or anything, but it compounds the other challenges that the USPS faces from technological innovation. However, just ending this silly system of pre-funding would stave off the reckoning for many years.

Read the whole thing.

I don't have to tell you that as with every other public service, the people who will suffer from its elimination are the poor, the elderly and those living in rural areas. Ain't gonna be fun for already middle-income folks, either.

Rich motherfuckers will love it, of course.

"The Post Office Is Us"

It's ours. It's been the key to America since before the Revolution. And the privatization motherfuckers are trying to kill us, our democracy, by killing it.

Charles Pierce:

They really did it quite well, the privatizers and the deregulators and the people who simply believe that there is nothing we own in common, that every bit of what we own through our government is ultimately fungible. One of the most successful of their long cons seems to be coming to fruition in the next 24 hours, and they've got enough of the rubes in line to pretend that it's all for the good.

SNIP

Yes, technology has taken a whack at the Postal Service. People go out of their way not to mention it, but the USPS is in trouble because Congress saddled it with a preposterous regulation in 2006 regarding how it would pay out its pension and medical benefits. This was done deliberately, so as to cause the kind of default that we are seeing today, so that the public-sector competition would one day be eliminated. Let them succeed and watch entire swaths of the country lose mail service entirely.
Alas, we continue the death spiral....

Peter Nesvold, a financial analyst with Jefferies and Co., says the post office's financial future will depend on how Congress resolves its conflict over the mail agency's core mission. While the Postal Service is a business expected to stay afloat, it also has a legal obligation to provide uniform first-class mail service even to sparsely populated, far-flung areas of the U.S., all for the same price of a 45-cent postage stamp. UPS and FedEx don't deliver to those areas that are less profitable, contracting with the Postal Service to get the job done.

More to the point, and as I have said before, the Postal Service is something that is ours. It belongs to us as a people. Outside of the police, it's usually the most intimate connection we have to what is still, in theory, our government. That this does not matter a damn to those people who forced the current fiscal crisis is clearly spelled out in what has ironically become a pro-privatization argument presented by ostensible Democrat Peter Orszag, who essentially says that privatization is the right path forward because Congress — which is also part of what is still, in theory, our government — is dead-set against arriving at any other solution to the problems it went out of its way to create....

Read the whole furious thing.

Stamp Out Hunger Day - Tomorrow, May 12

From Wonkette commenter Barb:

Okay bitches! Tomorrow is Stamp Out Hunger Day in America.

I would appreciate it if everyone would go to their pantry and grab a few things and leave it for the letter carrier by your mailbox tomorrow, May 12th. You don't even have to put on pants to do this. Hell, I am going to do it pantless and my mailbox is on another street!

Still Time to Save the Post Office

My tiny rural town has one huge drawback and one huge advantage.

The drawback is that we are outside the service areas of the surrounding towns' cable systems and thus have no access to highspeed broadband internet.

The huge advantage is that we still have a post office. A post office that could easily erase that drawback, if only Congress would let it.

John Nichols at The Nation:

But even this progress is threatened as the postal debate heads to the less friendly House. Under pressure to act by May 15, when a moratorium on closures ends, the House could enact a worse measure. And much could be lost in the reconciliation process.

So this is the time to turn up the volume in defense of the PO, pressuring not just Democratic Congressional leaders but farm-state Republicans. Those Republicans need to feel the heat before their small-town constituents face the devastation caused by closures, which will further cut rural communities off from the rest of the country. There’s a large constituency for the USPS; more than 1 million Americans have signed “Save America’s Postal Service” petitions, and have held rallies across the country to resist cuts and closures. Americans “get” that the cuts are as unnecessary as they are unwise.

SNIP

The campaign message should not be one of mere defense, however. It must echo the call of Senator Patrick Leahy, who says, “The Postal Service needs a plan not only to survive but to thrive. To do that the Postal Service must listen to its customers, understand its market and play to its strengths.” Along with easing the prefunding burden, that plan should erase onerous regulations that have prevented the USPS from raising revenue.

But the USPS must do more than just compete with private delivery services. It should embrace the digital age by using post offices to help communities tap into broadband wireless communication. It should turn post offices into help centers offering a broad array of public services. And it should consider re-establishing the postal banking system the United States maintained until 1967, bringing basic financial services to underserved communities.

The USPS can continue to be what the founders intended when they established it in the Constitution: a vital public service that connects Americans and links America to the world. This is not a budget or regulatory question; it is a political one. Even Republicans are beginning to realize that the PO is popular; embracing and enhancing that popularity by making the future of the service a 2012 campaign issue would create the political will needed to prevent this treasure from being squandered in the name of austerity and privatization.

Grow the Economy By Growing the Post Office

David Dayen at Firedoglake notes that "by May 15 Congress must come up with some postal service reforms to avert mass closures of post offices."

Jim Hightower cuts through the lies with "The Post Office is not broke--and it hasn't taken any of our tax money since 1971"

From the gated enclaves and penthouses of the ueber-wealthy to the inner-city ghettos and rural colonias of America's poorest families, the US Postal Service literally delivers. All that for 45 cents. And if you've written the wrong address or your recipient can't be found, you'll get your letter or package back for no charge. The USPS is an unmatched bargain, a civic treasure, a genuine public good that links all people and commu-nities into one nation.

So, naturally, it must be destroyed.

For the past several months, the laissez-fairyland blogosphere, assorted corporate front groups, a howling pack of congressional right-wingers, and a bunch of lazy mass media sources have been pounding out a steadily rising drumbeat to warn that our postal service faces impending doom: It's "broke," they exclaim, the situation "is dire," USPS "nears collapse," it's "a full-blown financial crisis!" This is the year, they insist, that the whole shebang will implode: The PBS Newshour recently alarmed viewers about "a complete shutdown this winter," and even the current Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe, has added to the din by declaring, "we'll be out of cash next August."

According to this gaggle of gloomsayers, the national mail agency is bogged down with too many overpaid workers and costly brick- and-mortar facilities, so it can't keep up with the instant messaging of internet services and such nimble corporate competitors as FedEx. Thus, say these contrivers of their own conventional wisdom, the Postal Service is unprofitable, is costing taxpayers billions of dollars a year in losses, and is plummeting irreversibly into bankruptcy. Wrong, wrong, and wrong. I realize that the Powers That Be never allow truth to get in the way of their policy intentions, but--come on--three strikes and you're out!

Hightower demolishes all three Big Lies, and then goes beyond to show how very small reforms can not only save the Post Office but turn it into an engine of economic renewal and growth. He urges: Think Large

The biggest lie of all is that USPS is an antiquated, unnecessary, failing civic institution that simply must give way to electronic technology and corpo-rate efficiency. This is nothing but ideological hogwash spewed by private profiteers and political quislings. Obviously, the Postal Service is no longer the only player making the rounds, and it must make some major adjustments to find its proper fit and new opportunities in the marketing and public service mix. But this requires top management and polit-ical overseers to be a bit more creative and business- like than constantly cutting, closing, outsourcing, eliminating--and giving in to the bashers and slashers.

This is the time to innovate, offer new services and products--don't shrink, expand! Start with three phenomenal assets that USPS has: (1) that network of 32,000 retail outlets (many of them historic and even works of art) that form the most extensive local presence of any business or government in America, drawing more than seven million people into them each day; (2) an experienced, smart, skilled, and dedicated workforce of nearly 600,000 middle-class Americans who live in the communities they serve and are brimming with ideas and energy to move the Postal Service forward--if only those at the top would listen and turn them loose; and (3) the general good will of the public, which sees their local post office and its employees as "theirs," providing useful services and standing as one of their core civic insti-tutions (in a 2009 Gallup Poll, 95 percent of Americans said it was personally important to them that the Postal Service be continued).

Let's build on those big pluses. This is one government program that really works for the people, but it can work better and do more. Here are just a few ideas:

Go digital ....

Expand the store ....

Seven days ....

Bank here ....

America's postal service is just that--a true public service, a grassroots people's asset that has even more potential than we're presently tapping to serve the democratic ideal of the common good. Why the hell would we let an elite of small-minded profiteers, ranting ideologues, and their political hirelings drop-kick this jewel through the goal posts of corporate greed? This is not a fight merely to save 32,000 post offices and the middle-class jobs they provide--but to advance the BIG IDEA of America itself, the bold, historic notion that "Yes, we can" create a society in which we're all in it together.

That's worth fighting for, which means that you and I must add our voices and grassroots activism to those who're daring to confront the cants and greed of the privatizer elite. It means standing up to them, but most importantly standing up for ourselves, our values, our country.

Read the whole brilliant thing.

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.

Stop Repug Congress from Killing the Post Office

Yet more proof that repugs have no interest in the actual, reality-based Constitution, is that they are trying to kill the only federal program actually authorized in that original document.

John Nichols at The Nation:

Republican leaders in Congress are talking about dismembering the US Postal Service by cutting the number of delivery days, shuttering processing centers so that it will take longer for letters to arrive, closing thousands of rural and inner-city post offices and taking additional steps that would dramatically downsize one of the few national programs ordained by the original draft of the US Constitution. At the same time, supposedly “centrist” US Senators Tom Carper (D-DE), Joe Lieberman (I-CT), Susan Collins (R-ME) and Scott Brown (R-MA) are trying to build a “bipartisan consensus” for a death by slower cuts.

Their “21st Century Postal Service Act,” a supposed compromise now being weighed by the Senate, would still force the postal service to close hundreds of mail processing centers, shut thousands of post offices, cause massive delays in mail delivery and push consumers toward most expensive private-sector services. It is, says National Association of Letter Carriers President Fredric Rolando, “a classic case of ‘killing the Post-Office in order to save it.’”

Their rationale for making the bloodletting, much discussed in the media, holds that radical surgery is necessary because the postal service is in financial crisis.

The postal service, we are told, is broke.

There’s only one problem with this diagnosis.

It’s wrong.

The postal service is not broke.

At the behest of the Republican-controlled Congress of the Bush-Cheney era, the USPS has been forced since 2006 to pre-fund future retiree health benefits. As the American Postal Workers Union notes, “This mandate is the primary cause of the agency’s financial crisis. No other government agency or private company bears this burden, which costs the USPS approximately $5.5 billion annually.”

Now, however, we learn that the pre-funding requirements have taken so much money from the USPS that—according to the postal service’s own inspector general—it has “significantly exceeded” the level of reserved money that the federal government or private corporations divert to meet future pension and retiree healthcare demands. “Using ratepayer funds, it has built a war chest of over $326 billion to address its future liabilities,” acknowledges Postal Service Inspector General David C. Williams.

That, argues US Senator Bernie Sanders, puts “the rationale for postal cuts in doubt.”

Sanders, who has taken the lead in challenging cuts to the USPS and who requested the assessment by Williams, says that on the basis of information contained in the assessment, the Postal Service should be released from the “onerous and unpreh strategy, focused only on the short-term horizon, is a strategy for failure. It is a race to the bottom. The Postal Service needs a plan not only to survive, but to thrive. To do that the Postal Service must listen to its customers, understand its market, and play to its strengths, not trade its strengths away.”

Many years ago, Charlie Peters wrote in the Washington Monthly of the cultural importance of the U.S. Postal Service. He said that nothing so profoundly represents the highly evolved nature of American society as the inviolate status of the residential mailbox.

Everyone gets mail. If you never spend a dime on postage, you still get mailed delivered directly to your home, six days a week. That's public service. That's Big Government at work.

Destroying the United States Postal Service is destroying a foundation of American civilization and American Democracy. Which is, of course, why repugs are determined to do just that.

Save This "Human Side of Government"

Yeah, calling your congress critter seems like a waste of time, and on many things that's true. But this is one that is so deeply embedded in the heart of America - established by Benjamin Franklin no less! - that call pressure may actually work.

David Dayen at Firedoglake:

I’m a little labor-heavy today, but this caught my eye. We’ve been discussing the imminent demise of the US Postal Service, and the potential loss of 120,000 good-paying jobs. But most of the near-term funding “crisis” for the USPS comes from an unusual pre-funding mandate for retiree benefits. James Parks explains:

The USPS economic crisis is the result of a provision of the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006 that requires the Postal Service to pre-fund the health care benefits of future retirees—a burden no other government agency or private company bears.

The legislation requires the USPS to fund a 75-year liability over a 10-year period, and that requirement costs the USPS more than $5.5 billion per year. Guffey also pointed out that “the federal government is holding billions of dollars in postal overpayments to its pension accounts.”

All of the USPS losses over the past four years come from this mandate. You cannot find another organization in the world, AFAIK, that pre-funds 75 years of benefits over a 10-year period. And it’s not just the overpayments, it’s the opportunity costs of having to hold that much reserve capital that cannot be used when times are tough, or to invest in more attractive services. This results from a 2006 law that was one of the last time bombs of the Denny Hastert-Bill Frist Congress. That needs to change.

Today, rallies are being held from 4-5:30pm local time to support the postal service. The locations are available here. Just about every Congressional district in the country will see a rally.

Over time, the postal service could need some additional innovation, as mail volume reduces. I suggested they take on simple banking, and there are other ideas available. In the short-term, the pre-funding mechanism is the entire problem.
Hopefully the rallies will stick to this very simple message.

The rallies were Tuesday, but the matter is still before Congress. More details here.

John Nichols at The Nation:

When I started covering politics, Jennings Randolph was completing his tenure as the grand old man of Capitol Hill. The last sitting member of Congress to have arrived with Franklin Roosevelt in 1933 (as a member of the House), he was still sitting as a senator from West Virginia more than fifty years later. Perhaps as importantly, he had been born only a little more than a century after the Constitution was adopted.

Randolph recognized the connection between the Constitution and the New Deal, seeing in both an element of nation-building that focused on the affirmative role of government and the necessary role of the extension of the federal government that could be found in every hinterland hamlet and urban neighborhood: the post office.

Randolph was the great defender of the postal service that Ben Franklin had established and that the framers of the Constitution had seen fit to recognize as an essential project of the federal endeavor.

Randolph waxed poetic about the post office, respecting the local facility, be it a frame building at a country crossroads or a brick-and-mortar monument at the center of the largest city. It was, he said, more than a purveyor of packages and mail, more than a source of employment, more even than a meeting spot and focal point for community.

The post office, Randolph explained, was the friendly and honorable face of a government that could otherwise seem distant and, at times, ominous.

As a true Jeffersonian Democrat, and a faithful New Dealer, Randolph argued that those who understood the positive role that government could play in the lives and communities of Americans had better make the defense of the post office a high priority.

“When the post office is closed, the flag comes down,” he said. “When the human side of government closes its doors, we’re all in trouble.”

Liberals want to keep what's best about America, while improving what needs improving. Ben Franklin's postal service is a keeper.

Who needs a postal service, anyway?

Way back in April of 2010, I cited an article from The Nation about the need for Congress to save the Postal Service. In that post I wrote:

Now the brilliantly simple yet indispensable service Benjamin Franklin invented is on the verge of obliteration - far beyond the coming end of Saturday service.

Congress did nothing, and now it's a crisis.

Kenneth Quinnell at Crooks and Liars explains how the repugs destroyed the U.S. Postal Service:

The Republican plans to weaken the United States Postal Service are starting to get more and more attention, including Sam Seder's Majority Report, Thom Hartmann, Nicole Sandler's radio show and Allison Kilkenny's brilliant Truthout article:

It was only a few years ago that the USPS was considered not only stable, but thriving. The biggest volume in pieces of mail handled by the Postal Service in its 236-year history was in 2006. The second and third busiest years were in 2005 and 2007, respectively. But it was two events: one crafted during the Bush years and another supervised by House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, that would cripple this once great institution.

Perhaps it was its booming history that first drew Congress' attention to the Postal Service in 2006 when it passed the Postal Accountability Enhancement Act (PAEA), which mandated that the Postal Service would have to fully fund retiree health benefits for future retirees. That's right. Congress was demanding universal health care coverage.

But it even went beyond that. Congress was mandating coverage for future human beings.

"It's almost hard to comprehend what they're talking about, but basically they said that the Postal Service would have to fully fund future retirees' health benefits for the next 75 years and they would have to do it within a ten-year window," says Chuck Zlatkin, political director of the New York Metro Area Postal Union.

It was an impossible order, and strangely, a task unshared by any other government service, agency, corporation or organization within the United States. The act meant that every September 30th, the USPS had to cough up $5.5 billion to the Treasury for the pre-funding of future retirees' health benefits, meaning the Postal Service pays for employees 75 years into the future. The USPS is funding the retirement packages of people who haven't even been born yet.

We keep being told that email and the Internet have killed the Postal Service and it's simply not true. Adjusting for the economic downturn, it appears the USPS is busier now than it ever has been before. E-commerce has been a huge boost as all the items people purchase online have to get to people's homes and the cheapest way to do that is still through the Postal Service.

The more details that we find out about this law, the PAEA, the worse it sounds. It passed on a voice vote. Why weren't any Democrats or progressives in Congress asking questions as to the validity of this bill? Why didn't they do their homework on its effects?

And what about Postmaster General Tom Donahoe, who has been getting a lot of time on television in recent weeks, arguing for massive cuts to the USPS?

What empower meant was to starve the Postal Service and its union. Since that day, Donahoe has abdicated his responsibility as the postmaster general, according to Zlatkin. The APWU's collective bargaining agreements in the past have included layoff protections, which Donahoe immediately offered up as sacrifice to his Republican masters when he asked to bypass worker protection so he might obliterate 220,000 career positions from the workforce by 2015.

"All he's trying to do is appease that committee. He's violated a contract he's signed. He's violated labor law. From my understanding, by going to Congress and having them change the laws to change our contracts, he's violating the Constitution of the United States."

In fact, Zlatkin says his local union chapter is so disillusioned with the postmaster's behavior that they're putting out a press release to call for his resignation or termination. "He is either a well-meaning incompetent or a duplicitous front man for the people who want to privatize the postal service," says Zlatkin.

And, again, for those who don't recognize why this is so important, the Postal Service is a vital cog in the American economy and is constitutionally mandated. It particularly benefits the poor:

But as Marcy Wheeler explains, there are still tons of people who need the USPS's services: poorer people, people using a post office box, rural people who live outside delivery areas, eBay-type entrepreneurs, immigrants sending care packages to people from their country of origin and nonprofits.

"It's part of the class war and it's against the poor and it's a class war against working people," says Zlatkin. Of the 34 post offices the USPS is considering closing in New York City, 17 are in the Bronx. The South Bronx district ranks as the poorest Congressional district in America.

If the repugs succeed in killing the quintessential American public service - one that predates the Revolution - then it's game over for American democracy.

"The Robber Barons are stealing the post office from the American people"

The plan by the independent agency that runs the U.S. Postal Service to kill 120,000 jobs and eliminate universal mail service for thousands of rural communities is not a simple cut-costs equation; it's a massive attack on benefits and union rights for millions of public workers.

Zandar:

... the US Post Office wanting to lay of 120,000 workers is a huge story, possibly the biggest story of the year so far as jobs and the labor movement are concerned. Jobs and unemployment, being the number one issue with voters time and time again, are critical in order to get our total economy back on its feet, and you can't do that well if the Post Office wants to get rid of a hundred thousand plus jobs over four years. The true tale of employment carnage is much, much worse.

The financially strapped U.S. Postal Service is proposing to cut its workforce by 20 percent and to withdraw from the federal health and retirement plans because it believes it could provide benefits at a lower cost.

The layoffs would be achieved in part by breaking labor agreements, a proposal that drew swift fire from postal unions. The plan would require congressional approval but, if successful, could be precedent-setting, with possible ripple effects throughout government. It would also deliver a major blow to the nation’s labor movement.

In a notice informing employees of its proposals — with the headline “Financial crisis calls for significant actions” — the Postal Service said, “We will be insolvent next month due to significant declines in mail volume and retiree health benefit pre-funding costs imposed by Congress.”

Let that sink in. The Post Office wants to not only break its contract with labor unions to put 120,000 people out of work, it wants to kick nearly all of its employees out of the federal employees health care plan and pension plan and replace them with something less. Republicans like Darrel Issa want to know more about the plan and apparently have no problem with setting a precedent that will allow government to simply eliminate union contracts whenever it feels like it.

The fact of the matter is the USPS has already gotten rid of 200,000 plus jobs over the last ten years. Under the new proposals anyone with less than six years of service would be subject to losing their job, period. Postal unions are already vowing to fight these proposals, but you'd better believe the battle to weaken government unions and to demonize government employees at the state level was in preparation to gut the Post Office and eliminate all government employee unions as well.

I'll be keeping an eye on this one. The Constitution mandates a national post office. Imagine what Republicans would do to it if they got full control in 2012.

TPM has more detail of what's really going on:

One point that came up repeatedly in our discussion last night about the crisis in the postal service is that the USPS is apparently subject to a regulation that requires it to pre-pay pension and health care obligations 75 years in advance, something that is required of no other government agency. And a substantial amount of their budget shortfall is tied to that regulation.

TPM Reader SM notes these points ...

As a union organizer for SEIU, I have a distinctly labor perspective on the USPS crisis; and, I think that there are two HUGE pieces of information that are often left out of the "The USPS is an aging dinosaur" narrative often perpetuated by the mainstream media.

Firstly, the USPS is subject to a regulation forcing them to pre-pay retiree health benefits for 75 years in the future. This means that they are paying for health benefits for postal carriers who haven't yet been born. The cost of this regulation (a regulation not required of any other government or private entity) was about 5.5 billion dollars in FY 2011 and was even higher in previous years.

Secondly, the Postal Service has overfunded their pension system by about $75 billion dollars in recent years. Thus, there is money in a separate account that could more than handle the current shortfall in postal revenue ($0 of which comes from tax dollars).

Meanwhile TPM Reader DW notes the structural difficulties faced by the postal service since the USPS is mandated by law to service various localities and facets of the postal market that can't be done at a profit ...

I am a recent retiree of the USPS and have some thoughts on the Postal Service. The news blurb you read has to be viewed in the context of upcoming union contract negotiations. USPS management always makes it seem like the sky is falling right before they negotiate the contracts. That is not to say there are no problems at the post office. The truth is there is no profit to be made delivering mail when all the easily made profits are siphoned off by other package carriers. FedEx and UPS take the cream off the top, leaving the unprofitable business to the postal service which is legally obligated to deliver to every address six days a week. If anyone thinks FedEx or UPS wants to deliver packages to every house every day, they are mistaken. They do not want to waste their time driving to unprofitable rural areas or stopping at every house in a neighborhood. If the USPS disappears, I feel sorry for anyone living any distance from a large city who expects mail at an affordable rate. A lot of people don't realize that the postal service currently delivers some packages for FedEx and UPS that would be unprofitable otherwise.

There has been a slow "privatization" of the postal service over the last few decades. I've always assumed it was based on a back handed way to slowly get rid of union postal workers until there are so few of them they are no longer a political force. I could give many, but one example of what I mean by "privatization" is the discount large mailers receive for presorting their mail. The postal service gives a discount of what it would cost the USPS to process that mail using union postal labor. The businesses hire a mailing firm (or do it in house) to presort their mail with labor that is paid close to minimum wage, pocketing the difference between what the postal worker makes and what the minimum wage worker makes. It's just an example of another decent paying job being given to a lower wage non-union worker so that large businesses can pad their bottom lines at the expense of labor. An additional bonus for business and Republicans is that union postal workers eventually lose their jobs and their clout with Congress.

When an article like the one you referenced appears I am always amazed at the comment sections. The American public is always ready to jump in and say the most uninformed things about situations about which they know nothing. It always makes me realize that maybe I don't have a complete picture or understand everything about the businesses, customs, situations, etc. that I read about and maybe I should do more research before I jump in and comment.

As a final thought, I look at the neighborhoods in my town and see 4 or 5 different trucks delivering mail and packages to each neighborhood every day. The thought of all these different trucks driving around burning fuel to go to the same houses seems ridiculously wasteful and energy inefficient to me. The USPS goes to every address in the U.S. every delivery day. Why can't FedEX, UPS etc. handle getting the packages and mail to the cities and then have one delivery truck (USPS) make the final delivery. I can't even begin to calculate the fuel the U.S. would save daily. I guess I'm just a pragmatic dreamer.

John Nichols at The Nation:

Next to credit rating downgrades and stock market collapses, the threat by the US Postal Service to shutter at least 3,653 post offices (perhaps as many as 4,300) may not seem like a disaster in the making. But if the USPS goes forward with the plan, it will deal a blow to communities from coast to coast and further diminish one of America’s oldest public institutions.

In addition to providing employment—with an admirable record of hiring women, people of color and people with disabilities, and investing them with real authority—the USPS has kept reliable public facilities in small towns and city neighborhoods that have often been abandoned by chain stores and restaurants. Like public schools, post offices are sources of identity for communities that are otherwise neglected by big government and multinational corporations.

This is a benefit that’s hard to calculate. For decades there has been pressure to cut and privatize the Postal Service, which generally pays for itself but doesn’t return huge profits. In the current period of economic instability, the USPS has been losing money, in part because federal officials have pressured it to make huge advance payments to cover future pension costs. But its shortfalls—$3.1 billion in the most recent quarter—are negligible compared with Pentagon overages and bank bailout excesses. Rather than outsourcing work to private carriers like FedEx, the USPS should be allowed to compete with them. Postal unions are pushing back. So is a new website, savethepostoffice.com, which declares, “The Robber Barons are stealing the post office from the American people.” With smart pension reforms and an end to unnecessary outsourcing, thousands of post offices can be saved.

Demand Congress Save A Great American Institution

The first clue I had that my new home in the country was not going to be like my previous home in the city was the first time I walked into the tiny local post office. Before I could even introduce myself, much less show ID, the postmistress, with a big smile, handed me that day's mail, which she had just finished sorting.

When the rural carrier delivers a package too big to fit into the mailbox at the end of my very long driveway, he doesn't leave a little note telling me to pick it up at the post office myself. He brings it up to the house and leaves it on the porch.

Now the brilliantly simple yet indispensable service Benjamin Franklin invented is on the verge of obliteration - far beyond the coming end of Saturday service.

John Nichols in The Nation:

Americans do not often talk about the Postal Service as a crucial underpinning of the democratic infrastructure, but we should. At a time when 35 percent of all Americans and 50 percent of rural residents have no broadband Internet access at home, the Postal Service is universal. Its 596,000 career employees travel more than 4 million miles to deliver more than a half-billion pieces of mail each day. It goes to extraordinary ends to assure that no citizen or community is neglected; it contracts commercial planes to move parcels across the country in a matter of hours, yet it still sends bush planes into Idaho's River of No Return Wilderness Area and organizes mule trains to deliver mail, food and supplies to the Havasupai Indians on the floor of the Grand Canyon.

The Postal Service maintains a network of more than 35,000 retail outlets--the largest in the world, with more locations than McDonald's, Starbucks and Wal-Mart combined--which are visited by more than 7 million Americans each day. The postal workers they encounter in these offices and on their doorsteps are reflective of their communities, as the service has historically been and remains one of the surest sources of employment for African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Latinos, women and the poor. In short, the USPS forms a vital network of service, connection and community that provides the steadiest link between Americans and their government. As Postal Regulatory Commission (PRC) chair Ruth Goldway puts it, the service is "part of the fabric of the nation."

Unfortunately, the Postal Service is not profitable. That's a problem because, under the absurd constraints placed on it by successive legislative "reforms," the service must be "run like a business." And the businesspeople who run the USPS these days, though they may want to save the service, are so fixated on the bottom line that they cannot see the public good. So they have proposed a process of downsizing that could lead to the dismemberment of what should be understood as a core civic institution.

If the wrecking crews are not stopped, they will tear a hole in the fabric of the nation, further isolating Americans from one another, deepening the decay of urban neighborhoods and remote villages, hiking unemployment in our hardest-pressed communities and accelerating the decline of newspapers and magazines, drying up content for the Internet and curtailing civic and political discourse. "We need the Postal Service," says Illinois Congressman Danny Davis, a member of the House subcommittee that oversees the nation's post offices. Of course the Postal Service is going to change, Davis acknowledges. But Americans should start with the understanding that the Postal Service is "indispensable"--not with a debate about how much will be cut.

SNIP

Indeed, the post office is precisely where the federal government should be making smart infrastructure and job-creation investments, as part of a new approach that seeks to maintain a public asset and maximize its potential.

Such an approach might even renew one of the greatest of all postal services. From 1910 to 1967, the agency maintained a postal banking system that allowed citizens to open small savings accounts at local post offices. The system was so successful that after World War II, it had a balance of $3 billion--roughly $30 billion in today's dollars. Congress did away with postal banking in the late 1960s, but other countries--notably Japan--have maintained such systems. Today, Japan Post is, according to the Wall Street Journal, "the world's largest financial institution by assets, with $3.3 trillion on its balance sheet."

In the midst of the 2008 financial panic, Michael Lind, policy director of the Economic Growth Program of the New America Foundation, proposed that "a new postal savings system should be part of America's post-meltdown financial architecture." "When Congress created the postal savings system nearly a century ago, one of its goals was to encourage savings among the large number of low-income immigrants," Lind wrote. "A new system would help today's immigrants as well as the native poor. Banks are not interested in people with so little money, many of whom are preyed upon by payday lenders and credit card companies." The National League of Postmasters has started talking up the idea, and even Postmaster General Potter has hinted at openness to what Lind describes as a "simple" notion: "use the one government institution that can be found in most neighborhoods and rural areas--the post office--to encourage small savings and a habit of thrift." From that simple idea could, he suggests, come financial security for millions of Americans, an alternative to growing indebtedness of the country to foreign governments and financial institutions, and a vehicle to fund investment in public assets like sewer systems and bridges.

That's quite a payback for believing in the promise of the Postal Service. But, just as it did in Ben Franklin's day, the post office can still deliver for America in the twenty-first century.

Read the whole thing.