Post Office
see vote by mail, public bank =democ thus primary 420
see dejoy
vote by mail
aha
note spats wishlist hit list collective, gubmint bad, vs buffer, public bank, commons
early example of free mkt BS by bad comparisons to fedex etc, who cream profitable, sorta like charter schools
also bezos Wapo beef
https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/complete-bombshell-former-top-usps-official-reveals-disturbing-new-details-of-dejoy-selection-and-mnuchin-sabotage-of-mail-service
no lnx vid twt
"Complete bombshell’: Former top USPS official reveals ‘disturbing’ new details of DeJoy selection and Mnuchin sabotage of mail service
Written by Common Dreams August 21, 2020
In his first public remarks since resigning from the U.S. Postal Service Board of Governors in protest at the end of April, David Williams on Thursday offered a number of alarming new details surrounding the selection of Trump megadonor Louis DeJoy as postmaster general and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin’s efforts to exert influence over mail operations and finances.
Williams, the former vice chairman of the USPS Board of Governors with decades of federal government experience, testified to the Congressional Progressive Caucus that what he witnessed in his final months at the Postal Service was unprecedented, detailing how Mnuchin required members of the supposedly independent board to “come to his office to kiss the ring and receive his blessing before confirmation” and made “illegal” demands of officials.
“Corruption, plain and simple. Not only is Louis DeJoy a Trump crony and clearly unqualified to be Postmaster General but he also has significant financial conflicts of interest that make him eager to destroy the USPS altogether. We won’t let him.”
—Rep. Pramila Jayapal
“The Secretary has called over board members to provide instructions and requests and express his displeasure, which is really striking. I’m not sure I’ve run into that before, where one department is trying to run another department,” said Williams, who previously served as USPS inspector general. “Normally you would simply reject the effort and report it to Congress.”
Williams told lawmakers that the removal of USPS mailboxes in several states was specifically advocated by Mnuchin, a former Goldman Sachs executive who was reportedly involved in the recruitment of DeJoy for the postmaster general position.
“The blue boxes were maybe the most interesting of all,” said Williams, a Democrat who was appointed to the Board of Governors by President Donald Trump. “Those were not part of ongoing plans. To my knowledge, as a matter of fact… Secretary Mnuchin wanted that done. His study of the Postal Service asked that it be done.”
In response to Williams’ account of Mnuchin’s interference at the independent agency, Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) said the treasury secretary should be called—and, if necessary, subpoenaed—to testify before Congress.
“This hearing is a complete bombshell,” tweeted David Dayen, executive editor of The American Prospect, which first reported that Williams resigned from the Board of Governors in protest.
Williams also offered an inside look at the process that led to the Board of Governors’ selection and May appointment of DeJoy, a former logistics executive with zero experience working for the Postal Service.
Asked whether the board interviewed other qualified candidates for the postmaster general role, Williams answered in the affirmative and characterized DeJoy as uniquely unfit for the job, recounting that he had to be coached through his interviews. Williams said DeJoy’s appointment was pushed by John Barger, a board member and Republican donor who—according to Williams—helped DeJoy “finish a number of sentences where he got stuck” and “explained to the board what Mr. DeJoy meant during the presentation.”
Rep. Andy Levin (D-Mich.) called Williams’ description of the selection process “very, very disturbing.” Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said Williams’ testimony was “stunning.”
Williams’ revelations came just hours before DeJoy is set to appear before the Republican-controlled Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, where he is expected to face questions about his sweeping policy changes that caused massive mail backlogs across the nation.
A day after DeJoy vowed to suspend the operational changes until after the November election, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said in a statement that the postmaster general “frankly admitted” to her that he has “no intention of replacing the sorting machines, blue mailboxes, and other key mail infrastructure that have been removed and that plans for adequate overtime, which is critical for the timely delivery of mail, are not in the works.”
In a letter to the USPS Board of Governors on Wednesday, 90 House Democrats demanded the immediate removal of DeJoy for using his brief tenure as postmaster general “to sabotage the United States Postal Service.”
“Despite recent claims by Mr. DeJoy that implementation of certain changes may be delayed,” the lawmakers wrote, “he has already done considerable damage to the institution and we believe his conflicts of interest are insurmountable.”
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cf DN attacks by kochs go back to 1971
https://www.democracynow.org/2020/8/19/usps_louis_dejoy_privatization
After massive public outcry against cuts to mail service ahead of November’s election, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy has announced he will suspend changes to the U.S. Postal Service until after the election, when a record number of voters are expected to cast ballots by mail. President Trump has admitted he’s working to undermine the USPS in order to make it harder to vote by mail in November. We speak with Lisa Graves, executive director of the policy research group True North Research, who says Louis DeJoy is “the most partisan person, in 100 years at least, to head the Postal Service” and warns that U.S. democracy is at stake. “We need to really hold this Postal Service accountable...
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Lisa Graves, but can you lay out what’s going on and the deep concern that, yes, Louis DeJoy, who has, with his wife, something like $75 million to $100 million invested in competitors and contractors to the U.S. Postal Service, that already major changes have taken place? They’re just revoking the ones that were leading up to the election, though they say they’ll introduce them right after.
LISA GRAVES: Well, that’s right, Amy. And I think that we’re at a true crisis point in terms of our democracy and with our Postal Service. And that’s because we have the most partisan person, in a hundred years at least, to head the Postal Service, in Louis DeJoy, who has deep financial conflicts and deep personal ties to President Trump. This is also being pushed forward by Mike Duncan, who was a major fundraiser for Mitch McConnell for the Senate Leadership Fundand is aright-wing partisan who helped stand up American Crossroads, and also at the instigation, in essence, of Steve Mnuchin, who has tried to push additional pressure on the Postal Service, in essence, in my view, to accomplish what really is Charles Koch’s long-term goal of privatizing our Postal Service. So, we have a deep crisis in our country.
The announcement by the postmaster does not reverse the things that have already happened, that he’s already implemented, including the removal of many mail sorting machines. And so, we need to really hold this Postal Service accountable. Actually, I think Louis DeJoy needs to be removed. And we need to reform the Postal Service so we do not have two of the most partisan men ever at the helm of our Postal Service.
That Postal Service belongs to us, even though Charles Koch, as I documented with In the Public Interest and Bold ReThink, that organization has been targeted by Charles Koch for privatization since the 1970s. So, I’m hoping that the members of Congress will respond to citizens who are clamoring to protect our Postal Service, make sure we get our ballots on time, make sure we get medicines on time and checks on time, and really reform the Postal Service and get it the money it needs to survive and thrive in this corona crisis.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Lisa Graves, in the few minutes we have left, could you talk a little bit more about this hidden effort by Charles Koch to privatize the Postal Service, that has gone on almost unknown by most Americans for so long?
LISA GRAVES: Yes, I was really surprised that he really began staking the men, urging for the Postal Service to be privatized in the 1970s. And when he became the biggest funder for the Libertarian Party in 1976, its platform expressly called for the abolition of the Postal Service. Then, in 1980, when his brother ran for vice president, the Libertarian Party also called for the abolition of the Postal Service. Then he helped to stand up, with the Reagan administration, a privatization commission, with his right-hand man on it, which again called for abolition of the Postal Service.
And then they brought on board to Citizens for a Sound Economy, which is now Americans for Prosperity, the leading advocate of privatizing the Postal Service, who then George W. Bush put on the Board of Governors of the Postal Service in 2003. And that man, James Miller, helped push through the terrible law in 2006 that saddled the Postal Service with unprecedented debt to pay for decades of future retiree health benefits. And that’s the debt that has really hampered the Postal Service in its ability to have a better financial position, and it also limited the Postal Service from opening banks and offering banking services, as well as increasing the rates of first-class mail beyond a penny a year. And so, that really throttled the Postal Service. And that’s the long-term cause to basically prepare it for privatization, which is Charles Koch’s longtime goal.
AMY GOODMAN: Last minute, also, already, the effect — right now the Department of Veterans Affairs has been forced to find other ways to ship mail-order prescriptions to vets all over this country. And it’s not only vets. So many people rely on the Postal Service just to get medicine.
LISA GRAVES: Yes, it’s a true crisis. And I think that if Louis DeJoy thinks that he can issue a press statement and walk away from the damage he’s caused, he’s wrong. The American people are not going to tolerate the destruction of our Postal Service. Millions of Americans rely on it, in small cities and big towns, for medicines and checks. And we need it to work properly. We need it fully funded. We need it to have coronavirus relief just like other businesses and entities in America.
AMY GOODMAN: Finally, who Charles Koch is?
LISA GRAVES: Charles Koch is one of the richest men in the world. He’s one of the richest men in America. And he leads Koch Industries, which is one of the largest privately held corporations in the world, which has a long record of using its funds to advance his political causes.
AMY GOODMAN: Were you surprised that the Postal Service turned around to the extent it did yesterday? I mean, we’re talking about massive outcry. Even Donald Trump, whose bidding DeJoy was doing, tweeted out, ”SAVE THE POST OFFICE!”
LISA GRAVES: Yeah, they’re clearly hearing the heat. So, the question, as Nancy Pelosi said, is: Will they reverse the things that have happened, not just stop doing it? Stopping it, we already see the damage done. The question is, a true reversal to the status quo before Louis DeJoy became the postmaster general this summer.
AMY GOODMAN: Lisa Graves, we want to thank you so much for being with us. And we have to stop saying November is the election, because people who vote by mail are voting in the next weeks, and that goes on for more than a month. Lisa Graves, executive director of the policy research group True North, with a new report we’ll link to, “The Billionaire Behind Efforts to Kill the U.S. Postal Service.”
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ref
https://www.inthepublicinterest.org/the-billionaire-behind-efforts-to-kill-the-usps/
https://www.inthepublicinterest.org/wp-content/uploads/ITPI_USPSPrivatization_July2020.pdf
COVID-19 pandemic has pushed the already-struggling U.S. Postal Service to the brink of financial collapse. But the most trusted and popular institution in America hasn’t been struggling by accident. Since the 1970s, a concerted effort to popularize the fringe idea of privatizing the Postal Service has been advanced for nearly five decades with the support of one man: the billionaire and libertarian ideologue, Charles Koch, chairman and chief executive officer of Koch Industries. This brief traces Koch’s connections, influence, and ideological push to weaken and ultimately privatize one of America’s most essential public services—and, along with it, the jobs of hundreds of thousands of public servants. [Timeline]...
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...These are just a few components of Koch’s political empire, which also deploys front groups. Although Koch has used his PR team to try to distance himself from Trump, the reality is that the Koch network’s 2016 spending in swing states and Senate races helped buoy Trump in his bid for the White House. Koch’s efforts also helped ensure that Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), a key Koch ally, remained the Republican leader of the Senate. From this position, he’s helped Koch reshape the U.S. Supreme Court and the federal judiciary, stop a carbon tax, and thwart efforts to mitigate climate change and regulate industry in myriad ways. AFP’s latest attack on the Postal Service is part of Koch’s ongoing efforts to weaken the funding and capacity of our government. Koch’s network spent millions to win what Koch himself touted as a “once-in-a-generation opportunity” to cut taxes, the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which AFP helped push through and which further enriched Koch and his friends. Koch has also given millions to political campaigns, PACs, and other groups. For those who’ve been keeping score at home: To Koch, even though the Postal Service is vital to more than 300 million of his fellow Americans, helping the agency survive with $25 billion in aid should not be allowed. But tax cuts to benefit himself and his billionaire friends—which cost America more than $2.3 trillion—was a top priority for his political machine. AFP is not alone among Koch groups in trying to destroy the Postal Service. Other major Koch-funded groups, such as the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, and the Mercatus Center at George Mason University have also supported privatization. Even the Koch-funded American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which focuses on state legislation, has tried to weaken the Postal Service. For years it has pushed a bill to require that ballots from military service members be carried not by the Postal Service but by for-profit shipping companies, and it is funded by two of the biggest: FedEx and UPS. It has also long pushed for the future health care benefits of retired state government workers to be slashed or prefunded, like the Postal Service. It has pushed no bills to require private companies to do the same....
the agency would be in a much stronger financial position had Congress not passed the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA) in 2006, which “requires the Postal Service, which receives no taxpayer subsidies, to prefund its retirees’ health benefits up to the year 2056,” on a 50-year basis. (John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight did an in-depth show on this manufactured crisis earlier this year.) According to the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) in 2019: “If the costs of this retiree health care mandate were removed from the USPS financial statements, the Post Office would have reported operating profits in each of the last six years.” “[N]o other entity, private or public, has to make” such provision for future health benefits of current and future retirees so far in advance. Private companies also can change their health benefits without an act of Congress, unlike the Postal Service. “Current reserves of $47.5 billion could be used to pay expected pay-as-you-go retiree health care costs 10-15 years into the future,” IPS noted. The 2006 law also bars the Postal Service from obtaining other revenue by providing “nonpostal services,” such as offering banking services or opening cafes at post offices. And it also limits the ability of the Postal Service to raise rates beyond the rate of inflation. Who championed the bill that imposed this unprecedented financial burden on the Postal Service? Another Koch man, James C. Miller III...
Magency would be in a much stronger financial position had Congress not passed the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA) in 2006, which “requires the Postal Service, which receives no taxpayer subsidies, to prefund its retirees’ health benefits up to the year 2056,” on a 50-year basis. (John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight did an in-depth show on this manufactured crisis earlier this year.) According to the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) in 2019: “If the costs of this retiree health care mandate were removed from the USPS financial statements, the Post Office would have reported operating profits in each of the last six years.” “[N]o other entity, private or public, has to make” such provision for future health benefits of current and future retirees so far in advance. Private companies also can change their health benefits without an act of Congress, unlike the Postal Service. “Current reserves of $47.5 billion could be used to pay expected pay-as-you-go retiree health care costs 10-15 years into the future,” IPS noted. The 2006 law also bars the Postal Service from obtaining other revenue by providing “nonpostal services,” such as offering banking services or opening cafes at post offices. And it also limits the ability of the Postal Service to raise rates beyond the rate of inflation. Who championed the bill that imposed this unprecedented financial burden on the Postal Service? Another Koch man, James C. Miller...
no lnx many
The Real Backstory of Undermining the Postal Service
In 2006, Miller was advising Koch’s newly renamed Americans for Prosperity when he became
the Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Postal Service. That’s the year Congress enacted
the PAEA. Former Congressman Tom Davis (R-VA) said the idea to add the pre-funding
requirement came not from Congress but from the White House, supposedly to get a good
score on the cost of the bill from the Congressional Budget Office.
Miller and others celebrated with President George W. Bush when he signed the measure into
law, standing with Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) and other lawmakers looking over his shoulder.
In 2005, the year before the PAEA was passed, the Postal Service reported nearly $1 billion in
profit. Two years later—after the PAEA required it to transfer a $17.1 billion surplus into the new
50-year fund plus $5 billion per year—the agency was in the red. Meanwhile, two of its rivals,
FedEx and UPS, which charge customers exponentially more for even small packages, had
comparable revenue but profited without the heavy burden of the PAEA.
And this was on top of the fact that when the GOP took over the Senate during President Bush’s
first term Congress “shifted the costs of postal employees’ military service-related pension costs
from the U.S. Treasury to the USPS—a $27 billion obligation.” In the span of three years, 2003-
2006, the GOP saddled the Postal Service with tens of billions of debt.
How could this happen? The PAEA’s massive debt load-up was passed by Congress without a
recorded vote by name. It was not billed as that but was sold as a way to help the Postal Service
“modernize” mail processing. Who was at the helm of the ship? Senator Susan Collins.
inthepublicinterest.org | The Billionaire Behind Efforts to Kill the U.S. Postal Service 8
Collins chaired the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs, which approved the “reform”
bill in 2006. She also chaired the hearing and committee that approved Miller’s nomination to
the Postal Service’s Board of Governors in 2003. It was Collins who moved Miller’s nomination
forward even though she knew he had expressly called for the privatization of the very agency
he would be governing. Here is their exchange at the hearing:
“Chairman Collins: Mr. Miller, many years ago you expressed the view that perhaps the
private express statutes of the Postal Service, the monopoly, should be repealed. You also
spoke in favor of deregulating some of the Postal Service and allowing private companies to
compete in delivery of mail. Is that still your view?
Mr. Miller: If I have the same information, the same studies, same data, same analysis
that I looked at before, that would exactly be my view. I think anytime you take on a new
responsibility you owe it to yourself or whomever appointed you to that or are responsible for
putting you there, to give it your best shot, to take a new look at things. I will take a new look
at things and I will give you my best judgment.”
In 2006, the year Collins helped Miller (then the Chair of the Board of Governors) pass the PAEA,
one of her five largest donors was one of the five biggest shipping firms, UPS.
Miller used his Senate-confirmed post to help drive the Postal Service toward his dream of
privatization. As leader of the Board of Governors, Miller was responsible for fiscal oversight
of the Postal Service. He had to know that an agency with a net income of nearly $1 billion
the year before would not be able to absorb a new $5 billion expense per year without going
bankrupt—even if some members of Congress did not understand that or read through to
page A-2 of Miller’s “Strategic Transformation Plan,” where revenues were listed.
That plan only mentioned the word “privatization” once, and that was in a footnote to say that
very few stakeholders wanted either privatization or the closing of post offices. However, the
pre-cursor to Miller’s proposal to weigh down the Postal Service with extraordinary debt was
that getting future health liabilities fully funded would make the agency more attractive to
private investors. This plan was not masked in the initial “transformation” proposal issued by
President George W. Bush’s appointee for Postmaster General, John E. “Jack” Potter.
Who is Jack Potter?
Jack Potter—with an MBA from MIT and an economics degree
from Fordham University, whose business programs were led
by a disciple of Koch’s beloved Ludwig von Mises—parlayed his
role at the Postal Service into becoming a CEO now paid more
than $450,000 a year by one of the first entities privatized by
President Reagan, the Metropolitan Washington Airports
Authority. It had revenues of more than $963 million and
net income of a quarter billion dollars last year, funds that
would have been the public’s prior to 1987 when the Reagan
administration gave it a 50-year lease for Washington National
Airport, Dulles International Airport, and 13,000+ acres.
[inthepublicinterest.org | The Billionaire Behind Efforts to Kill the U.S. Postal Service 9]
That 500+ page proposal to “transform” the Postal Service detailed various paths to privatizing
America’s postal system—even though it admitted that there “is no clear mandate for full
privatization of the Postal Service.” It mentioned privatization 156 times. It recognized that
“retirement and health benefit liabilities” were rising costs. It noted that “[p]rivatization is not
a viable option at this time [because] [w]hile the assets of the Postal Service are great, so are
future retirement liabilities.” It also stated that potential retirement related liabilities would
adversely affect the “valuation” of the Postal Service for an IPO (initial public offering, that is, in a
sale to wealthy stockholders) or “commercialization.”
The proposal also said that “privatization would be more timely” after the Postal Service “honed”
its finances—even though the American people have “strong opposition to privatization.” That
report concluded that a major “private sector concern” would be to “leave all liabilities with
government.”
That’s what the 2006 PAEA was setting the stage for: a legally mandated form of “disaster
capitalism,” a term that would be described by Naomi Klein the following year in her book
“The Shock Doctrine.”
Senator Tom Carper (D-DE)
Sen. Carper later spearheaded a congressional effort in
2009 to provide some relief to the Postal Service “to restructure
the aggressive retiree health prefunding schedule that was
imposed on it in 2006,” although much damage to the agency
was already done by reallocating its reserve and taking
so much cash out of its revenue. As Senator Carper noted:
“That schedule has the Postal Service making enormous
payments of more than $5 billion per year through 2016 to
prefund its future health obligations to its retirees. This is on top
of regular payments of $2 billion or more for current retirees’
premiums.
The combination will be enough to sink many
businesses ….” However, the reform only allowed the Postal Service to
temporarily reduce the payments to $1.4 billion a year and requires it to
repay those deferred billions in payments as of 2016 or put them on its
balance sheet—adding to its debt and making it look insolvent.
The reality is that Miller had been advancing a kind of manufactured shock doctrine on the
Postal Service long before Klein popularized the term. At the 2014 hearing on his nomination
to a second term on the Board of Governors, he echoed Klein in saying “the stress of the Postal
Service brings forth opportunities.” He said he wanted the job because he had “unfinished
business” with the Postal Service. Miller also thanked Senator McConnell for recommending his
nomination to President Obama (who nominated Miller as part of a bipartisan slate to break
a logjam by McConnell, then the Senate Minority Leader, in confirmations to the Board.)
Miller also said:
“I think it would be best for the world, for the economy, and for the American people if
the Postal Service was de-monopolized and privatized.”
[inthepublicinterest.org | The Billionaire Behind Efforts to Kill the U.S. Postal Service 10]
Miller’s Effort to Kill the Public’s Postal Service Goes Back Decades...
https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/the-postal-service-scandal-doesnt-only-belong-to-donald-trump-heres-how-mitch-mcconnell-played-a-big-role/
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/paul-krugman-debunks-right-wing-myths-about-the-u-s-postal-service/
postal Service board member who resigned over Trump’s meddling to brief House Democrats
Kerry Eleveld / Daily Kos August 18, 2020
As Democrats step up their scrutiny of Donald Trump’s sabotage of the U.S. Postal Service, a former board member who resigned in protest of Trump’s handling of the agency is set…
https://www.mediamatters.org/voter-fraud-and-suppression/cbs-report-mail-voting-was-missing-key-details-making-it-easy-target
also sinclair
https://www.mediamatters.org/sinclair-broadcast-group/least-six-sinclair-national-segments-didnt-mention-trumps-sabotage-postal
salon matt r
https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/buying-stamps-wont-stop-trump-from-destroying-the-postal-system/
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/friday-night-massacre-at-us-postal-service-as-postmaster-general-a-major-trump-donor-ousts-top-officials
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/watchdogs-demand-investigation-into-voter-suppression-tactics-by-trump-donor-running-usps/
salon
Multiple government watchdog groups called for an investigation into newly-installed Postmaster General Louis DeJoy over concerns that his actions since taking over the agency could amount to “voter suppression tactics.”
DeJoy, a major Trump and Republican Party donor, has sparked widespread concern after pushing for an “operational pivot” at the cash-strapped agency. Advocates have expressed fears about a mail slowdown, while lawmakers called out DeJoy for reportedly planning service cuts in violation of federal law.
The watchdog groups Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) and Common Cause Wisconsin called on Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., the chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, which oversees the U.S. Postal Service (USPS), to investigate DeJoy’s actions since taking over.
“In his first month on the job, the postmaster general has already taken steps that could undermine efficient voting by mail in November,” the groups said in a letter to Johnson. “According to internal USPS memos, DeJoy directed USPS employees that overtime would be limited and that they were prohibited from making late trips in order to ensure timely delivery. DeJoy offered these changes as a way to cut costs, but USPS has acknowledged that they will likely result in delayed mail delivery.”
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The letter cited a recent report by the USPS Office of Inspector General highlighting problems “related to the timeliness of ballots being mailed to voters” in the Wisconsin primary earlier this year.
The groups called on Johnson to hold oversight hearings in “possible voter suppression tactics” by DeJoy, as well as the deployment of Homeland Security forces to cities like Portland.
“Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Chad Wolf’s decision to deploy federal officers to quell political protests raises significant concerns regarding the use of federal resources to repress the rights of Americans over the objections of many local elected officials who do not want federal help,” the letter said, adding that the agents “could be used to intimidate voters across the country in the upcoming election.”
The letter echoed concerns raised by other groups about DeJoy, who has no experience at the agency and is the former lead fundraiser for the Republican National Convention.
“We have an underfunded state and local election system and a deliberate slowdown in the Postal Service,” Wendy Fields, who heads the voting rights coalition the Democracy Initiative, told The New York Times, adding that Trump was “deliberately orchestrating suppression and using the post office as a tool to do it.”
Trump has repeatedly sought to sow doubts about mail voting, pushing debunked conspiracy theories alleging links to voter fraud and insisting, without evidence, that it would “lead to the end of our great Republican Party.” While lawmakers from both parties have rejected Trump’s false claims, even Republican officials are increasingly worried about how the changes at USPS will affect the expected mail-in voting surge.
“Election officials are very concerned, if the post office is reducing service, that we will be able to get ballots to people in time,” Washington Secretary of State Kim Wyman, a Republican, told NPR.
David Partenheimer, a USPS spokesman, told The New York Times that post offices have “ample capacity to adjust our nationwide processing and delivery network to meet projected election and political mail volume, including any additional volume that may result as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic.”
But the largest postal workers union argued that the changes would undoubtedly reduce service.
“The policies that the new postmaster general is putting into place — they couldn’t lead to anything but degradation of service,” Mark Diamondstein, the head of the American Postal Workers Union, told the outlet. “Anything that slows down the mail could have a negative impact on everything we do, including vote by mail.”
Democrats have been pushing to include a $25 billion cash infusion for the USUS in the next phase of coronavirus relief, which Republicans have rejected. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., argued that the Republicans want to “diminish the capacity of the Postal System to work in a timely fashion.”
“We are worried about new management at the Postal Service that is carrying out Trump’s avowed opposition to voting by mail,” Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., who heads a House subcomittee overseeing the USPS, told The Times. “I don’t think that’s speculation. I think we are witnessing that in front of our own eyes.”
Stacey Abrams, a potential running mate to presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden who faced her own battle with voter suppression when she ran for governor in Georgia, accused Trump of trying to “steal” the election by undermining the USPS.
“We will not be able to effectively count the votes of every eligible American because he’s doing his best to undermine our confidence in the process,” Abrams, who heads the voting rights group Fair Fight, told CNN, “but worst he’s doing his best to actually steal the vote by undermining the postal service.”
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trump fundraiser runs PO into ground, then problem cited as reason not to do mail vote:
https://www.mediamatters.org/voter-fraud-and-suppression/help-stephen-miller-fox-friends-uses-trumps-delay-election-tweet-lie
fox News continued Friday morning to provide cover for President Donald Trump’s tweet from Thursday, which suggested that America might “Delay the Election” rather than allow it to take place with expanded mail-in voting.
Previously, Fox News personalities ridiculed comments by Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, who said in April that Trump might attempt to put off the election. At the time, Fox News commentators called such accusations a “bizarre conspiracy theory,” “so dumb,” “an attempt to frighten people,” “a conjuring,” and other terms of derision.
But on Friday’s edition of Fox & Friends, the co-hosts used Trump’s tweet suggesting Election Day should be postponed as a springboard to attack the concept of mail-in voting itself, and insisted that Trump was really just trying to highlight such concerns in the first place.In so doing, they not only helped to spread further lies about the voting process, but they also suggested it would be unreliable because of budget measures that have been put in place by the Trump administration itself.
“Well, a lot of Americans don't trust the U.S. postal system, because they’ve had budget cuts, they’ve had so many problems in the past, you know, decade or whatever, however long it’s been,” said co-host Ainsley Earhardt. “And everyone knows if you go in-person to vote, you know your vote is counted. But if you try to mail something in, there’s a big chance that it's not going to get to the folks who are counting these ballots.”
Not mentioned, of course, is that the Trump administration has opposed measures to shore up the Postal Service’s finances during the pandemic, and it has also put in place new measures to slow down mail delivery. It is these acts that have election officials worried about potential problems with mail-in voting — but which Fox News and other conservative media will use as a reason to oppose the expansion of voting, rather than work to counter those harmful obstacles that have been put in place.
[pix?]
co-host Brian Kilmeade also invoked a scenario he has pitched before, imagining family dynamics resulting in voter fraud or coercion and urging viewers to “just use logic” about it.
“You sit in your house, there’s five ballots for your family. Three of your kids, 18 to 21, ‘I'm not going to vote, you can vote for me, you could send it in. When I get around to doing it, you click the box,’” Kilmeade said. “Domineering parent tells the kids how they’re going to vote. Or some kids will grab their parents' ballot and send it. Can't we just have this one moment to vote for one candidate every four years, and show up and put a ballot in without licking an envelope or pressing on a stamp? If you can shop for food, if you can buy liquor, you can vote once every four years.”
Later on, the program hosted White House senior adviser Stephen Miller to help spread false claims about mail-in voting.
Co-host Pete Hegseth — who in Fox’s earlier coverage helped to lay the groundwork for a reinterpretation that Trump was really intended to bring attention to the alleged problems with mail-in voting — asked Miller a softball question: “He took to the podium to use that reaction, to explain about the many problems we’ve seen with absentee ballots not being counted on time, fraud with mail-in ballots. Explain what the White House is attempting to do to ensure election integrity on November 3?”
“Here’s a shocking thing for your audience to consider. Nobody who mails in a ballot has their identity confirmed — nobody checks to see if they’re even a U.S. citizen,” Miller responded. “Think about that. Any foreign national — talk about foreign election interference — can mail in a ballot, and nobody even verifies if they're a citizen of the United States of America. Now, this would be happening on a scale of potentially millions of people.”
As pointed out by Bloomberg’s Ryan Beckwith, this claim from Miller is false and media outlets should not be reporting on it without that disclaimer.
“What can be done at the White House to pressure states to actually do validated, in-person voting,” Hegseth asked, “as opposed to allowing secretaries of states to say, ’Hey, we’re going to mail this one in?’”
“Well, one of the things that we need to do, first of all, is raise awareness, so that citizens in every state can put pressure on their local leaders and their governors to fight universal balloting,” Miller proclaimed boldly. “That's a critical issue. Obviously, the Department of Justice has a responsibility to look at all issues relating to voter fraud in this country.”
“But you want to talk about voter suppression, you want to talk about denying people their franchise — that's what universal mail-in ballots are all about,” Miller claimed. “Universal mail-in ballots are an attempt to dilute the vote of your viewers. It's an attempt to dilute the vote of Americans who want to have their identities verified, by allowing for massive, endemic fraud. That is scandalous.”
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https://theconversation.com/covid-19-exposes-why-the-postal-service-needs-to-get-back-into-the-banking-business-140895
an 420
trump calls US Postal Service a ‘joke’ as he demands four-fold price hike for customers
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pro publ 420
postal Workers Say USPS Isn’t Telling Them When Colleagues Test Positive for COVID-19, Despite Promising To
The CDC says people who have been exposed to COVID-19 should quarantine. Many postal workers say they have no way of knowing if that’s them.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/1144421/
team Trump threatened to kill pandemic relief bill if it included help for US Postal Service
Hunter / Daily KosApril 13, 2020
The rank malevolence of the Trump administration continues. The Washington Post reports that lawmakers fully intended to provide emergency funding to the U.S. Postal Service in pandemic stimulus measures, but the Trump White…
no lnx
Team Trump threatened to kill pandemic relief bill if it included help for US Postal Service
Written by Hunter / Daily Kos April 13, 2020
The rank malevolence of the Trump administration continues. The Washington Post reports that lawmakers fully intended to provide emergency funding to the U.S. Postal Service in pandemic stimulus measures, but the Trump White House made it clear Trump would not sign it. Why?
As with most things in the Trump administration, the logic behind such a bizarre move is somewhat of a mystery. The short answer, though, is that hard-right Republicans and their advisers have steadily sought to kill off and/or privatize one of the government’s oldest, most visible and most popular services, and Trump’s personal animosity towards Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, expressed in (yes, this is the sort of nonsense that our lives now revolve around) hostility towards the Postal Service for cheaply delivering Amazon packages, means those arsonists haven’t needed to try very hard to manipulate Dear Leader into their line of thinking.
The crux of the Post report is a quote from an (again) anonymous “senior” official who says the administration told Congress “very clearly that the president was not going to sign the bill” if money was included for the U.S. Postal Service. Senators were able to wedge a $10 billion Treasury Department loan into the bill, after Treasury Secretary StevenMnuchin told them they “can have a loan, or you can have nothing at all,”but adding $10 billion of debt to an essential government agency while Mnuchin demands an unfettered ability to dole out government dollars to private industry however he sees fit is, to put it mildly, a curious stance.
Whether Trump himself made it clear to his subordinates that he would rather see America burn down than save a service that rudely delivers packages for one of his many, many self-identified enemies or whether Mnuchin is the saboteur, using Trump’s name and pathologies for his own ends, is unclear. It’s always unclear, every time. It would be surprising if Donald Trump had enough interest in pandemic relief efforts to even know what might be included in the huge bill; it would not be surprising in the least, though, if Trump was obsessively following the bill’s progress explicitly to make sure nothing in it did a damn bit of good for anyone, anywhere who might have ever said a bad thing about him.
The U.S. Postal Service was established by the Constitution; Benjamin Franklin himself was the first colonial postmaster.Despite the existence now of private firms like FedEx and UPS, the Postal Service remains the only entity that delivers mail to all of the United States, rather than just the profitable parts. That makes it an essential service, still, but it may become even more essential in the months ahead.
There is a very good likelihood that social distancing measures will be in place in November, for this year’s national elections. There is a very, very good likelihood that each of the American states will be forced to conduct those elections primarily via vote-by-mail, sending out ballots and collecting them via the USPS.
If, that is, the USPS is still solvent and still sending out workers. That the White House seems either indifferent to or eager to sabotage the very framework of the upcoming elections is … curious? Bumbling? Insane?
Treasonous?
What are the words to use here? And is there any bottom to the bizarre half-incompetent, half-malevolent failures of this White House, fully aided by Mike Pence, by Mitch McConnell, by the money-grubbing Murdochs, and by every last Republican leader?
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/if-the-postal-service-dies-so-does-democracy/
no lnx
If the postal service dies, so does democracy
Written by Roxanne Cooper / The Washington Monthly April 11, 2020
There are two big stories this week about a subject that normally sounds painfully boring: the mail. Each is crucially important in its own right, but combined they presage a nearly apocalyptic threat to American democracy.
The first is that the Donald Trump and Republican Party are engaged in an all-out war against the expansion of mail-in voting in the era of COVID-19.The flimsy outward justification is concern about voter fraud, but of course there is no evidence of significant voter fraud surrounding mail ballots. In fact, the only major scandal in the modern era around mail-in voting was a corrupt scheme by Republicans in North Carolina–one that was quickly and easily discovered. Republicans aren’t exactly being shy about why they want to restrict the expansion of access to mail voting: they think the more people are allowed to vote, the better Democrats will do against them. It certainly doesn’t hurt that Republicans are far less concerned about the virus than are Democrats, and that in battleground states with Republican legislatures like Wisconsin, there are far more polling places per capita in red districts than blue ones, which means not only longer lines but more dangerous crowding at the polling places. It only adds to the Republican turnout advantage if most people have to vote in person.
The opposition to mail voting is amusing given that it has traditionally been advantageous to Republicans, and even now doesn’t much benefit one party or the other. But facing electoral calamity after four years of Trump plus a disastrous epidemic response and looming recession, Republicans clearly feel their best shot at keeping power is if as few people are allowed to safely vote as possible. It’s a fundamentally immoral stance at odds with the principles of democracy itself, but unashamedly taking baldly self-serving positions contrary to previously shared values of basic decency is a hallmark of Republicanism under Donald Trump. It’s not a bug; it’s a feature.
The second story involves the Post Office itself. The United States Postal Service is set to run out of money by September. The previous round of emergency coronavirus stimulus did not take the long-beleaguered Postal Service into account. Conservative policymakers have been eyeing the USPS with hungry privatizing chops for a long time, and have been hamstringing it with ridiculous provisions like forcing the USPS to take into account 50 years of pension payments in advance in its budget, which no other corporation or public agency has to do.
Donald Trump loves to talk about what a “great American company” FedEx is, and conservatives would love to eliminate the postal service and give all of its operations to private shipping companies and private equity. Of course, long gone would be the days of sending a letter from coast to coast in a few days for a fraction of a dollar–but since when was that sort of thing a concern for Republicans?As with libraries, if the Postal Service didn’t already exist and you proposed it, it would be considered a ridiculous and wasteful socialist fantasy. In the modern era Republicans would make sure it never came into being, and mainstream Democrats would means-test it so that everyone would have to fill out tax statements in triplicate to make sure that no one making over a certain amount got a free mailbox.
Are these two stories merely a coincidence? Perhaps. It is possible that just as Republicans are attempting to thwart vote-by-mail in order to reduce voter turnout in a pandemic, they also just so happen to be defunding the Postal Service.
But what if it’s not? What if the plan is explicitly to cripple the mail system itself as yet another argument against mail-in voting, providing them an excuse to force people to vote in person in a pandemic or not vote at all? It would be a villainous plot straight out of a James Bond film. That doesn’t mean it’s not real, especially given the current administration. Even if it’s not intentional, the combined effect of both acts of bad faith would certainly be convenient for deeply unpopular conservatives whose only chance of holding onto ill-gotten power is to thwart democracy itself.
Democrats would do well to act as if they were facing opponents with the depraved moral instincts of a Bond villain, and think proactively. Any future assistance on legislation to Trump and McConnell over the coming year should be predicated on both saving the Postal Service and ensuring access to mail-in voting across the country. An election in which one side is lulled into complacency about a pandemic and has lots of polling places available, while the other is rightfully concerned for the public good while also being crushed by long lines and crowded locations, is no true election at all. It’s a mockery of democracy and cannot be allowed to stand.
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Arizonans Love Postal Voting. But Even With the Coronavirus, Its GOP Lawmakers Don’t.
AJ VICENS MOJO 420
yikes
https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/voting-rights-roundup-us-postal-service-could-run-out-of-funds-and-cause-crisis-for-vote-by-mail/
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yikes re vote by mail 2020
https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/voting-rights-roundup-us-postal-service-could-run-out-of-funds-and-cause-crisis-for-vote-by-mail/
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One of our nation's most popular federal agencies is at-risk of being privatized by the Trump administration. In June 2018, the White House announced proposals to privatize the Postal Service. Now, with the current Postmaster General Megan Brennan announcing her departure effective January 2020 - the possibility is becoming increasingly more real.
With the imminent departure of the current Postmaster General, there is a growing danger that the Trump administration would jump at the opportunity to select someone to replace Brennan who is willing to take the initial steps towards privatization.
With the Postmaster General's wide powers to shape the mission of the USPS, Brennan's successor could hand over parts of the service to private, for-profit making corporations and prepare it for a wholesale sell-off.
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zuck facebook play?! 1019 secret mtg w/ trump?!
interesting that upstart punk nerds buy gravitas in architecture?
Apple, Facebook face off over posh NYC office space: sources
https://nypost.com › 2019/10/15 › apple-facebook-face-off-over-posh-nyc...
1.
Why postal banking is a surprisingly good idea that could help unite the country
Martin Longman / Washington Monthly
see Liz warren on how**debt (personal and banksters) creates systemic risk and instability.**
https://www.alternet.org/2019/06/what-the-us-postal-service-teaches-us-about-the-government-versus-private-sectors
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/congress-is-sabotaging-your-post-office-heres-how-to-save-it/
The Larry Doby Post Office is located at 194 Ward Street in Paterson, New Jersey, across the street from my congressional office. Dedicated on August 28, 1933, by the legendary Postmaster General James Farley, the structure was one of the many built by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration in the throes of the Great Depression. While it may not have one of the stunning murals created by Roosevelt’s Section of Painting and Sculpture, I still marvel at the managed grandeur of its deco buttressing, the green glow of the elevated banker’s lamps off the marble walls, and the banks of brass P.O. boxes. My hometown has bounced like a cork in seas of social tumult, but the Ward Street post office has endured as I’ve always known it.
There is a cynical trope that Congress spends too much time naming post offices, but I don’t view the matter as insignificant. Post offices are open gates to American history and markers of an optimistic past. Even as smartphones and electronic communication permeate every crevice of daily life, the United States Postal Service (USPS) forms a lifeblood circulatory system connecting every community in the Union. For this reason, my work to rename the Ward Street building for Doby, an African American baseball legend and favorite son of Paterson, remains a highlight of my career.
Unfortunately, when it comes to Congress and the post office, the problem isn’t too much affection. For decades, Congress’s attitude toward the post has ranged from neglect to hostility. As a result, the USPS is struggling. In November 2018, it announced a net decline of $3.9 billion, continuing a twelve-year negative run.
The agency has been subjected to withering criticism by a spate of congressional hearings and Government Accountability Office analyses. A recent task force created by President Trump labeled the Postal Service’s financial path “unsustainable,” and recommended changes that would push the post closer to complete privatization. Under mounting political pressure, the post office itself has endorsed draconian layoffs and proposed ending Saturday delivery, among other savage cuts.
What is causing all these troubles? Is the Postal Service hopelessly outdated and dysfunctional? No. While it’s tempting to think of it as a mastodon from the pre-internet era, the post remains one of the most impressive enterprises on earth.
The USPS handles 47 percent of the world’s mail, delivering nearly 150 billion mail pieces annually. It delivers more in sixteen days than UPS and FedEx, combined, ship in a year. The agency has roughly half a million career employees spread out across almost 31,000 locations. Post offices are tucked into every state, across far-flung Native American reservations, and in remote protectorates. If it were a private business, the post would rank around fortieth on the Fortune 500. And you can send a letter from coast to coast for two quarters and a nickel—less than the cost of a candy bar.
Not surprising, then, that Americans consistently rank the post office among the most popular arms of government. A February 2018 poll by the Pew Research Center, for example, found that 88 percent of Americans have a positive view of it. That’s higher than the approval ratings for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Federal Reserve, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
It’s true that technological change has affected the Postal Service’s fortunes. As people send fewer and fewer letters, the volume of first-class mail continues to tumble; between 2016 and 2018, it dropped by more than 4.5 billion pieces. This depresses the post’s revenue, forcing it to take on more debt, which in turn puts it under greater financial pressure. But as online shopping slowly replaces in-person retail, the post is sending and delivering more packages than ever before, which compensates somewhat for lost revenue. Lower mail volume is not the main issue.
In reality, most of the post’s wounds are politically inflicted. In the early 1970s, Congress passed legislation that shoehorned the agency into a convoluted half-public, half-corporate governing structure to make it operate more as a business. And in 2006, Congress required that the Postal Service pre-fund its health benefit obligations at least fifty years into the future. This rule has accounted for nearly 90 percent of the post’s red ink since.
For the most part, these harmful “reforms” have originated on the political right. To argue that the Postal Service needs to be privatized, conservatives need to show that it is dysfunctional, and there’s no better way to do that than by weighing the agency down with impossible financial obligations. It continues a generation-long pattern of institutional vandalism by Republicans across government. But ultimately, both parties bear responsibility. I should know: I was in Congress when we passed the 2006 bill. And, along with all my colleagues, I made the mistake of voting for it.
But the good news is that just as Congress put the Postal Service on its current dangerous trajectory, so can Congress put it on a sustainable path, bringing our cherished institution back to full health. In fact, I believe we can go even further. With its massive infrastructure network, post offices could revolutionize how the American people perform a variety of essential tasks, from voting to paying taxes to banking. Tapping into this network has the potential to revitalize both the Postal Service and our democracy. Instead of discussing how to cut the post office, we should be talking about how to expand it.
Arguments about whether the post should operate like a business date back to America’s founding. While debating the original Post Office Act, a group including Alexander Hamilton argued that the post should support itself and make money for the rest of the government. Others, including George Washington and James Madison, didn’t seem to care whether it turned a profit. Jonathan Trumbull, the speaker of the House of Representatives in 1792, observed that having the post subsidize the circulation of periodicals would be “among the surest means of preventing the degeneracy of a free government.” In the end, Washington and Madison won the day. The government allowed printers to ship their newspapers and magazines at a very low cost: one cent to destinations within 100 miles, and one and a half cents to destinations more than 100 miles away. This set off what one researcher called “the greatest explosion of newspapers in history”—and with it an explosion in literacy.
By the mid-nineteenth-century mark, the Washingtonian view of the post as a public good was deeply entrenched. An early congressional postal commission posited that the post office existed not for generating revenue but for “elevating our people in the scale of civilization, and binding them together in patriotic affection.” Legislation enacted between 1845 and 1851 codified inexpensive letter postage and further redefined the post’s place in public life. The ratification of these reforms signaled the full defeat of the idea that the post must be independent. It was entitled to government support, deficits be damned.
Over the ensuing hundred years, the post would usher in a second American revolution. Delivery of home mail precipitated road building and allowed Americans to fan out and settle across the nation. Postal contracts sustained the construction of transcontinental railways that would have otherwise been economically unsustainable. And it was the post office, not the military, that got the U.S. government to finally invest in aviation and help birth commercial flying.
The post has also been an agent of upward social mobility. For generations, African Americans were locked out of good government jobs. But as the federal bureaucracy began to desegregate, black workers joined the USPS en masse. Under the Harding and Coolidge administrations, black people made up between 15 and 30 percent of postal employees, making the agency one of America’s foremost incubators of the black middle class. The post also factored significantly into Roosevelt’s efforts to fight the Great Depression. Between 1932 and 1937, the government built more than 1,300 post offices. Many were enhanced with the beautiful murals FDR believed would bring art to the nation. The agency’s central role in America’s development was perhaps best summarized in the Postal Policy Act of 1958, when Congress declared that the post was “clearly not a business enterprise conducted for profit” but a public service designed to promulgate “social, cultural, intellectual, and commercial intercourse among the people of the United States.”
But, in the 1960s, that view began to change. After years of underinvestment relative to the rise in demand for its services, the post faced a huge mail backlog in Chicago. Ten million pieces of undelivered mail piled up in the city, and the Lyndon Johnson administration established a commission to look into the agency. It was headed by a former AT&T chairman and stacked with CEOs and business school deans. In 1970, the post office was wracked by a debilitating worker strike. The backlog and the strike spurred a political overreaction.
Following the strike and the commission’s 1968 recommendations, Congress passed the Postal Reorganization Actof 1970, which exiled the postmaster general from the president’s cabinet and downgraded the post office from a federal department to an independent federal agency. Ostensibly designed to modernize the post and free it from a history of patronage, the legislation proved profoundly shortsighted. It required that the post largely pay for its operations out of its own revenues, and it split leadership of the Postal Service between the postmaster general and a board of governors, the latter of which has been largely dominated by technocrats who see the post foremost as a business. At the same time, however, the post was still subject to congressional oversight. It’s hard to imagine any corporation that would agree to operate under this peculiar hybrid structure. Even today most Americans don’t realize that despite their reliance on it, our post is not a part of the government in the same way as the Department of Agriculture or the Pentagon, and receives effectively no support from the federal budget.
Unfortunately, the 1970 bill was only the first in a series of legislative blows against the post. From 1808 until 1995, Congress had a full congressional committee for the Postal Service. But as part of his war on government, Speaker Newt Gingrich relegated its duties to the present-day Oversight and Reform Committee, where they were assigned to a postal service subcommittee. In 2001, the Republican House majority disbanded the subcommittee altogether.
But the most destructive change of all was the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA). The bill has an unfortunate history. It was hurried to the floor during a lame-duck Congress weeks after Republicans were routed from their twelve-year congressional majority in the 2006 midterms. Committee leaders told us that the legislation was critical to “saving” the post, and we were rushed into voting for the bill without fully considering its motivations or long-term impacts. The legislation was passed by voice vote—without objection. It was a blunder, one of the worst pieces of legislation Congress has passed in a generation.
While the PAEA included some positive measures, including giving the post increased autonomy over its rates, the law generally tightened a noose around the USPS. It further narrowed the post’s charter and prohibited the Postal Service from engaging in new activities outside of mail delivery. The law’s most destructive section, innocuously labeled “Postal Service Retirement and Health Benefits Funding,” imposed an unusual requirement on how the post covers its employee health pensions. Prior to 2006, the post funded its pensions like all agencies: pay as you go. Now, however, the agency had to pre-fund the health care benefits of employees at least fifty years in advance. To meet this requirement, the post was obligated to place approximately $5.5 billion into a pension fund each year between 2007 and 2016, followed by additional large annual payments.
The measure has been a fiendish straitjacket, akin to making a prospective homeowner cover an entire thirty-year mortgage before the ink is dry on the deed. The provision is even more onerous given that the government requires the treasury to invest all postal workers’ retiree money in government bonds, guaranteeing miniscule returns. Unsurprisingly, the post has defaulted on all of its pre-funding payments since 2011, to the tune of at least $40 billion. In each of the last three years, the pre-funding burden well exceeded the post’s total losses. Overall, pre-funding accounts for almost all of its losses since 2006.
No other agency or department is subject to this requirement. So why is the Postal Service? The George W. Bush administration demanded its inclusion and used the savings it generated to try to balance the budget. Dutiful Republicans said it was necessary to ensure that the post doesn’t generate a “huge unfunded liability” that would require a bailout from the government, an absurd posture they still maintain. But the requirement’s main upshot has been to plunge the Postal Service into a perpetual fiscal crisis that in turn justifies further attacks from the right. Full privatization is still neither politically nor logistically feasible, but that won’t stop Republicans and their allies from trying.
Trump’s recent Postal Service task force fits into the gradual push toward privatization. The task force’s ultimate conclusion bore all the hallmarks of a far-right hit job. Rather than focusing on the Postal Service’s pre-funding
provision—which the final report actually recommended keeping—the task force emphasized the supposed need to lower Postal Service delivery standards and eliminate employees’ collective bargaining rights. The task force also recommended diluting the post’s universal service guarantee, which would wreck the agency’s functionality in rural communities. In a country where rural citizens already feel detached from the rest of the nation, such an outcome would only widen existing cleavages. Convened in secret, Trump’s task force was designed with the Orwellian purpose not to save the post, but to further weaken it.
I am heartened that Democrats routinely unite to oppose privatization. But merely saying that the post should not be privatized comes from a defensive posture. The solutions we pursue must be bolder.
Any serious reformation of our post begins with eliminating the odious pre-funding anchor. But that’s only the start. To really improve the agency, we need to fully reject the idea that it should be run like a business. There is a reason why the Founders made the Postal Service a federal department, and there’s a reason why it remained that way through the better part of the twentieth century. Policymakers wanted to make sure that Americans could affordably send and receive mail from anywhere. In pursuing that aim, the USPS has played a key role in developing our country. To that end, we should evaluate reviving the U.S. Post Office Department and making the postmaster general a cabinet official once more. It’s time that we again treat this agency like a public good rather than a private business.
Nowhere is this perspective needed more than in Congress. In the House and Senate, we have become hostages to a fiscal imprisonment outlook, viewing almost every question through the single calculation of whether it will raise or lower revenue. Republicans have used the specter of deficits as a cudgel to beat back funding increases for all departments and programs. Browbeaten, too many Democrats have gone along. But while deficits matter, the Postal Service isn’t running losses because it’s inefficient. It’s running losses because of political sabotage.
It’s time for Congress to admit that the hybrid structure it sanctioned forty-nine years ago is not sustainable. So long as the post exists half as a business and half as a public enterprise, forced to make money even as it is constrained by preposterous rules and counterproductive meddling, it will wobble and teeter. Meanwhile, privatization advocates will continue to chip away at one of the world’s most impressive agencies.
That doesn’t mean the Postal Service should be free of interrogation. The post, for example, must fix its deal with Amazon. The company ships perhaps two-thirds of its packages through the public mail, and its pricing and delivery terms are separate from those afforded to other businesses that ship through the post. This comes courtesy of a secret 2013 negotiated service agreement whose provisions have been hidden from even Congress. The secrecy suggests that Amazon is getting a deal other retailers don’t enjoy.
There is some logic for a deal between the post and Amazon. But if the world’s best delivery system is awarding Amazon a volume discount, it makes it more difficult for the company’s competitors to challenge Amazon’s prices. This sets a dangerous example for competition policy. The U.S. Postal Service is a public facility. It should not be used to further entrench the monopolistic power of a private company. Nor does it need to. Amazon does not have the post’s infrastructure, and Jeff Bezos’s vaunted delivery drones aren’t yet operational. The Postal Service’s biggest rivals, UPS and FedEx, simply can’t match the agency’s services. In negotiations, the post should take a harder line and force Amazon to pay more.
Congress can help spur the Postal Service into bargaining harder by using its hearing power to make the current Amazon deal public. Given that Congress has paid so little attention to the agency in the past, this kind of engagement is sorely needed. Currently, the House subcommittee that deals with the USPS is responsible for monitoring a mind-boggling number of other federal functions and agencies, including (but not limited to) government management and accounting; federal property; intergovernmental affairs, including with state and local governments; and the entire civil service. It’s no wonder the post has become of tertiary importance in the people’s house. Between 2005 and 2018, the House Oversight Committee held 417 hearings, of which just seven were related to postal issues. This negligence helps explain why legislation that kneecaps the USPS, like the 2006 Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act, glides through Congress before members really consider its consequences.
The two House members with the most control over postal issues, House Oversight Committee chairman Elijah Cummings and government operations subcommittee head Gerry Connolly, are champions of the Postal Service, and I believe they will dedicate attention to the issues facing the agency. But both of their bodies are swamped with other valuable work, including bringing needed oversight to the river of corruption flowing from the Trump administration. Over the next few years, Congress should therefore consider bringing back the full Postal and Civil Service Committee or, at the very least, creating an exclusive postal subcommittee.
To truly move beyond playing defense, however, Democrats need to reimagine what the Postal Service can do. It is, after all, one of the most remarkable physical systems ever created. With arms in every single zip code, from Key West, Florida, to Utqiagvik, Alaska, its expansiveness opens up a world of opportunity.
In many American communities, the post office was historically called the “federal building,” and it served as a one-stop shop for numerous governmental needs. (Tellingly, FDR wanted Social Security to be administered through posts to assure its accessibility.) In smaller towns and cities, for example, the post office was a focal point for immigrant registration, military recruitment, and distributing income tax forms. There is no reason that America’s post offices can’t again provide a variety of important governmental functions. Indeed, today’s post offices should have all tax forms readily available. The government should even consider stationing IRS adjutants at post offices around tax time, which would ease what is, for many Americans, one of the most stressful times of
the year.
The Postal Service could also expand on the passport assistance it already provides. Many post offices take passport photos and process some first-time applicants and renewals. Often, this is by appointment only. I believe that post offices should offer full passport services to any American who walks through the doors. In addition to serving as a gateway to America’s bureaucracy, the post could serve as a door to the rest of the world.
State governments should take advantage of America’s postal infrastructure as well, in particular by expanding the use of vote by mail, which when done right is proven to increase political participation. Turning mailboxes into voting booths would therefore be good for the engagement of our citizenry. The post could further weave itself into American democracy by allowing congressional representatives to station their district staff right in community post offices.
But perhaps the most promising service that post offices could provide is banking. Today, sixty-eight millionAmericans, more than a quarter of U.S. households, lack access to adequate banking services. Many are shut out by high fees tied to minimum balances, overdrafts, direct deposit penalties, and ATM charges. As a result, they are left to unregulated payday lenders and check cashers that level obscene annual percentage rates. The postal inspector general found that underbanked Americans spend $89 billion each year on financial fees. This closed system shackles families to poverty, further cementing the economic inequality tearing our country apart.
Postal branches could offer a range of banking services—including savings accounts, deposit services, and even small lending—at a 90 percent discount compared to what predatory lenders provide, according to a report commissioned by the USPS inspector general. This would give many families an average savings of $2,000 a year while putting nearly $9 billion into the post’s coffers.
Postal banking could even unite liberals and Trump supporters. Rural communities are America’s most bank starved: 90 percent of zip codes lacking a bank or credit union lie in rural areas. Bank branches are also sparse in poorer urban areas, and 46 percent of Latino and 49 percent of African American households are unbanked. The Postal Service is well positioned to help both communities. Some 59 percent of post offices lie in “bank deserts,” or places where there is no more than one branch. Where financial institutions close their doors to these communities, post offices remain open to anyone who walks inside. And this change wouldn’t even need the approval of Congress, requiring only the postmaster general’s consent. Pilot programs could then begin immediately—including in places like 194 Ward Street in my own city of Paterson.
Ultimately, these reforms would expand on the post’s democratic tradition. For centuries, the agency has connected far-flung parts of the country at little cost. Letting it help citizens pay their taxes, obtain passports, vote, and bank would better connect Americans with their federal government. In doing so, these reforms could help mend our citizenry’s chronically low confidence in the federal government. They could also make the agency’s contribution to public life—already enormous—more visible to the people it serves. And that would make it more difficult for anti-government zealots to tear the agency apart.
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richard wolff: 100 countries PO do banking
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ben franklin origin 1st WWW; storm lake local newspaper Pulitzer for busting koch and monsanto slush fund for lawsuit [tossed out] iowa ralph nader show 12/3/18 if lower rate and faster [rural?] delivery wd help; 200 bushel corn to fed hogs china does not want and ded zone size nj, LA shrimp going.
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https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/save-us-postal-service-heres-corrupt-scheme-privatize-precious-american
Unable to find a fatal flaw in our far-flung public mail delivery network, the anti-Postal Service forces manufactured a fake flaw. In 2006, then-president George W. Bush, congressional Republican leaders, the powerful "privatizer lobby" (including FedEx, UPS and Wall Street speculators) and Koch-funded think tanks and Astroturf front groups colluded to put a one-of-a-kind paper "debt" on the books of USPS. Congress enacted a postal-service "enhancement" provision requiring the public postal corporation to pre-fund the health and pension benefits for all postal-service retirees 75 years in advance! Think about that. This arbitrary, wholly unprecedented, legislated requirement to pay now for the retirement benefits of future employees (including those not even born yet) has piled a false cost of about $5 billion a year on the debit side of the agency's balance sheet.
By cooking the books with this false entry, the right wing has been able to wail that our Postal Service is broke and continuing to bleed money, endangering taxpayers with a massive bailout. As you'd expect, Fox News and the entire gaggle of alt-right media screechers keep flinging this falsehood far and wide. And this year, their most gullible fan and leader of the "free world" has joined the fling-fest, bloviating in serial tweets about "our money-losing post office" and, in the official text of his executive order to form a postal task force, rubber-stamped the Chicken Little myth that "USPS is on an unsustainable financial path and must be restructured."
Chances are that you, too, have been caught up in their lie, because supposedly responsible, mainstream news sources (Washington Post, AP, network TV channels, NPR, etc.) have swallowed it whole and routinely repeat it unedited and in unison. At the end of each fiscal year, when USPS is compelled by law to announce yet another multibillion-dollar "loss," mass media outlets report the dramatic number without explaining the bookkeeping hoax hidden in it.
This artificial, 75-year pre-funding decree is an absurd burden that no other corporation or government agency is forced to carry. Take it away, and voila! The Postal Service is a moneymaker. Since 2014, it has posted operating profits totaling $2.7 billion -- a healthy average of $900 million a year.
The assertion about the necessity of postal privatization is a fraud, but worse is the exorbitant price We the People would pay if they succeed. Surprisingly, Trump's in-house task force puts the public cost right in their restructuring proposal, apparently thinking they were writing a prospectus to attract property hustlers like Trump, rather than a document that we might read. They candidly presented privatization as a fantastic profiteering opportunity for a corporate cost-cutter:
"A private postal operator that delivers mail fewer days per week and to more central locations (not door delivery) would operate at substantially lower costs," says their proposal. "A private entity would also have greater ability to adjust product pricing in response to changes in demand or operating costs. Freeing USPS to more fully negotiate pay and benefits ... and allowing it to follow private sector practices in compensation and labor relations could further reduce costs ... (and) a privatized Postal Service would be more insulated from politics."
Let's review what that tells us:
- Instead of six-day delivery, you'd get your mail maybe three days a week, though you'd have to drive at least a couple of miles to collect it, paying an ever-rising monthly fee for the privilege.
- Delivery to "more central locations" also means abandoning the Postal Service's historic egalitarian principle of universal service, substituting the FedEx principle of "profitable service," which excludes wide swaths of rural and inner-city America.
- The "ability to adjust product pricing" means the cost of stamps and other postal services would (like today's prescription medicines) rise on corporate whim.
- Freeing a private operator to "more fully negotiate" employees' pay, benefits, working conditions, and rights means they would be based on the Walmart/McDonald's race-to-the bottom standard, rather than a civil-service scale of upwardly mobile, middle-class opportunities.
- And "insulating" a corporate mail service from politics means shutting out customers, workers, communities -- and, well, you and me, the Public.
Nothing symbolizes our fight for the democratic ideal of the Common Good more than our public post office. This essential, egalitarian, nationwide service literally is us: It was a unifying center of American life before the USA itself was formed, and it is the only agency enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. More profoundly, its 31,000 branches belong to us, not a handful of rich corporate investors, tangibly linking your mailbox and mine to all others. Our postal service is daily proof that we really are "all in this together." To save our public postal service, go to USMailNotforSale.org.
Populist author, public speaker and radio commentator Jim Hightower writes"The Hightower Lowdown,"
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http://www.alternet.org/environment/naomi-klein-dont-shut-down-post-offices-reinvent-them
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“Amazon.com, the e-commerce company based out of Seattle, Washington, has recently partnered up with the USPS to deliver packages on Sundays to its Amazon Prime customers.”
This rather benign sounding statement has been effusively thrown around the media circuit when discussing the arrangement that’s been made between these two organizations; oftentimes praising the USPS’s bravery in its time of embattlement, while also championing the cornering of another market (Sunday delivery) for Amazon.
But wait! There’s something missing from all these announcements! What has been ignored is the reality of what it means for the workers who are implementing this new, surprising arrangement.
See, I am a member of the USPS “underclass” that was created to help pave the way so deals such as Amazon Sunday delivery could be reached. I am a CCA, City Carrier Assistant, with the United States Postal Service. My hope here is to illuminate exactly what Amazon.com and the USPS’s program means for the cadre of employees who share this title; and more importantly what this means to the postal service as a whole.
Prepped for the Auction Floor
City Carrier Assistants are a brand new classification of employee within the postal ranks; we are the low-wage, non-career, complement workforce at the USPS. On January 11, 2013 this position was created by an arbitration board who settled the stalled labor negotiations between the National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC) and the USPS management. This set the terms for the National Agreement, which is in effect for the years 2011-2016.
CCAs weren’t always considered a low-wage workforce. Before the reclassification we were called Transitional Employees (TE) and made a respectable $23.52 hourly rate, only several dollars per hour less than what the average career employee made. But with the USPS management’s financial woes and the recently concocted, yet unused, Negotiated Service Agreements plan—discussed in the next section— a low-wage workforce was needed to help entice big business into choosing the postal service to partner up with. City Carrier Assistants now perform the same work they did when they were called a TE, but now they get to do that work for 31 percent less pay —TE’s who were reclassified as CCAs now make $16.68 per hour. What’s worse is that newly hired CCAs will make even less —starting at $15 per hour.
The stage was now set for postal management to undercut all other competitors and offer up the postal network —at a drastically reduced rate—to any takers.
Enter the Amazon deal.
The devil is in the details…if we could see them!
With the USPS being financially burdened by congressionally mandated pre-funding for retiree healthcare packages (paying 80 plus years in advance at 100% compensation —a burden no private company has had to nor could endure), it has looked to find different avenues to help increase its profitability and fight to stay viable in this ‘age of digital mail.’ To help combat this huge economic disadvantage —along with the decrease in first-class mail volumes— the USPS management has attempted to implement many different approaches to their problem. They’ve tried ending Saturday delivery, contemplated neighborhood cluster boxes, which would oust door-to-door delivery, and of course, there’s the tried and true elimination of positions, which the USPS has been engaged in since the unprecedented 2006 pre-funding mandate was established. Their latest solution is a relatively new business concept called the negotiated service agreement or NSA.
So what exactly is an NSA?...
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http://www.alternet.org/labor/how-we-can-push-back-privatization-assault-thats-destroying-postal-system
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http://www.alternet.org/economy/how-youll-get-screwed-if-conservatives-kill-us-postal-service
Reuters / By Helaine Olen [1]
Banks Throw Hissy Fit After Elizabeth Warren Endorses Idea to Allow Post Office to Offer Financial Services
February 11, 2014 |
The U.S. postal service inspector general put out a report last week suggesting an intriguing way to shore up the ailing institution’s finances: Let the mailman double as a bank teller [2].
The plan? The post office would offer services designed to appeal to America’sunbanked and under-banked [3] — the more than 50 million adults who either have no checking or savings account, or use high-cost, predatory services like payday loans to supplement traditional banking needs.
This sounds like a win-win. Americans — particularly low-income Americans — clearly need greater access to low-cost financial services. At the same time, many financial institutions have been complaining for years [4] that providing banking services to low-income Americans is costing them money. So much so that they can barely bring themselves to open bank branches in anything less than well-heeled neighborhoods.
Surely, they would embrace any plan that could help rid them of these undesirable customers, while offering a new-found opportunity to make money.
Not so fast.
The banking sector immediately threw a hissy fit. “This would be like the banking industry moving into running the airlines [5],” Richard Hunt, the president and chief executive of the Consumers Bankers Association told American Banker last week. Another executive compared the plan to the Ford Edsel.
What gives? Is it just that bank archenemy Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), whose relationship with financial services most resembles Batman’s with the Joker, said she liked the scheme [6] almost immediately?
Let’s take a look.
If the plan went through, in addition to selling stamps and processing mail, the post office would offer prepaid cards — one that would allow users to pay bills online, and withdraw money at ATMs. The post office would also develop services to let customers save and borrow money.
It’s not like the banks would be on the outside looking in. There is a continuing role for them in the inspector general’s plan. Not only could they handle the back office support for these new financial products and services, they could even buy the loans from the post office.
What could the financial services world possibly object to in this? Well, as I say to my children: Just because someone says something, doesn’t mean it’s true.
Turns out banks are not actually losing money on low-income Americans. In fact, the less than wealthy have turned into a nice little profit center for the big banks. If these customers want to stay, the banks make them pay.
The median overdraft charge is $34 at large banks and $30 at smaller financial institutions, according to a report from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau[7]. The result? Moebs Services, a financial research firm, estimated banks took in $32 billion in overdraft fees [8] in 2012.
That’s not all. Until a recent threat of crackdown by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, any number of banks offered something called “deposit advance products.” [9] These were, in essence, a payday loan available at the bank, with annual interest rates of more than 300 percent.
Moreover, many banks see their walk-in customers as an easy source of sales, pitching them on everything from auto loans to high-cost, less-than-well-performing mutual funds. [10] How much so? Well, the Los Angeles Times reported last month that Wells Fargo threatened to fire employees [11] who didn’t meet stringent sales goals:
“Wells Fargo [12] branch manager Rita Murillo came to dread the phone calls.
Regional bosses required hourly conferences on her Florida branch’s progress toward daily quotas for opening accounts and selling customers extras such as overdraft protection. Employees who lagged behind had to stay late and work weekends to meet goals, Murillo said.”
The result?
“Wells Fargo & Co. is the nation’s leader in selling add-on services to its customers. The giant San Francisco bank brags in earnings reports of its prowess in ‘cross-selling’ financial products such as checking and savings accounts, credit cards, mortgages and wealth management. In addition to generating fees and profits, those services keep customers tied to the bank and less likely to jump to competitors.”
This sort of borderline predatory behavior doesn’t exactly make for great customer service. It might, in fact, leave customers searching for alternatives.
As Felix Salmon pointed out [13], if the post office could somehow get congressional approval to offer up banking services, there is nothing to stop it from attracting a more financially fit crowd.
No wonder the banks don’t like the plan.
See more stories tagged with:
america [14],
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business [17],
Company Layoffs [18],
Company Location [19],
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau [20],
Consumers Bankers Association [21],
credit [22],
debt [23],
elizabeth warren [24],
felix salmon [25],
finance [26],
Financial economics [27],
financial services [28],
florida [29],
Ford Edsel [30],
ford [31],
loans [32],
los angeles times [33],
massachusetts [34],
Moebs Services [35],
overdraft [36],
payday loan [37],
Person Career [38],
personal finance [39],
Quotation [40],
Richard Hunt [41],
Rita Murillo [42],
san francisco [43],
USD [44],
united states [45],
Wells Fargo & Co. [46],
wells fargo [47],
add-on services [48],
advance products [49],
bank archenemy [50],
bank brags [51],
bank teller [52],
banking services [53],
branch manager [54],
executive [55],
financial products [56],
inspector [57],
leader [58],
open bank branches [59],
predatory services [60],
president and chief executive [61],
the Los Angeles Times [62],
wealth management [63]
Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/economy/banks-throw-hissy-fit-after-elizabeth-warren-endorses-idea-allow-post-office-offer-financial
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