Justin's Political Corner

The United States Postal Service said Wednesday that it would delay its plan to cease delivery of first-class mail on Saturdays, rescuing for now a service that it says is costly but that many Americans rely on.

The USPS said in a statement that restrictive language in Congress’ continuing resolution to fund government operations has forced it to postpone the move until “legislation is passed that provides the Postal Service with the authority to implement a financially appropriate and responsible delivery schedule.”

The USPS said that while it is disappointed, it will follow the law but will continue to support the new schedule, which it says would save the cash-strapped service about $2 billion a year.

“It is not possible for the Postal Service to meet significant cost reduction goals without changing its delivery schedule – any rational analysis of our current financial condition and business options leads to this conclusion. Delaying responsible changes to the Postal Service business model only increases the potential that the Postal Service may become a burden to the American taxpayer, which is avoidable,” said the UPS statement.

In February, the USPS announced that it would be ending delivery of first-class mail on Saturday beginning August. It said it would continue to deliver packages, mail-order medicine, and express mail on Saturday, but not letters, bills, cards, and catalogs.

The 2006 bill by the GOP is responsible for the USPS’s fiscal problems.

h/t: NBCNews.com

The financially struggling U.S. Postal Service announced Wednesday that it plans to stop delivering mail on Saturdays — but will continue delivering packages — starting Aug. 1.

Unless forbidden to do so by Congress, which has moved in the past to prohibit five-day-a-week delivery, the agency for the first time will delivery mail only Monday through Friday. The move will save about $2 billion a year for the postal service, which has suffered tens of billions of dollars in losses in recent years with the advent of the Internet and e-commerce, officials said.

“The American public understands the financial challenges of the Postal Service and supports these steps as a responsible and reasonable approach to improving our financial situation,” postmaster general Patrick R. Donahoe said at a news conference. “The Postal Service has a responsibility to take the steps necessary to return to long-term financial stability and ensure the continued affordability of the U.S. Mail.”

The postal service plans to continue Saturday delivery of packages, which remain a profitable and growing part of the delivery business. Post offices would remain open on Saturdays so that customers can drop off mail or packages, buy postage stamps, or access their post office boxes, officials said. But hours likely would be reduced at thousands of smaller locations, they said.

The Postal Service said that it suffered a $15.9 billion net loss for fiscal 2012, which ended Sept. 30. That’s three times the loss recorded a year earlier.

The Postal Service has pushed to cancel Saturday mail delivery for years. It announced the decision on Wednesday without congressional approval, even though lawmakers have argued their consent is necessary in order to make the operational change. Postal officials are expected to argue that they do not need congressional action in order to halt Saturday delivery.

In the past, Congress has included a ban on five-day-a-week mail delivery in its appropriations bill. But the Postal Service is currently operating under a temporary spending measure, rather than an appropriations bill, and the agency is asking Congress not to reimpose the restriction when the spending measure expires on March 27. 

A majority of Americans support ending Saturday mail, according to national polls conducted in recent years, and President Obama has proposed halting deliveries as part of his budget-cutting proposals. Though the Postal Service is a quasi-governmental, self-funding entity, its worker compensation and retirement plans are tied to the federal budget.

Lawmakers have tried unsuccessfully for years to enact a significant overhaul of the Postal Service, hoping to reshape the agency as a leaner organization that delivers mail less frequently and operates fewer post offices across the country.

The Senate last year passed a bipartisan measure that would have permitted an end to Saturday mail delivery only after USPS conducted two years of feasibility studies. 

Opposition to significant changes rests mostly with lawmakers from far-flung rural communities, who fear that a change in schedules could jeopardize low-cost delivery of medicines and medical supplies to elderly customers. The publishing industry also has complained that any changes would force quicker magazine publication deadlines and require some publishers to seek private delivery options instead, likely raising newsstand prices.

h/t: Washington Post

WASHINGTON (CNNMoney) — Without help from Congress, the U.S. Postal Service is likely to default on a big bill due Wednesday to the federal government — $5.5 billion to prepay health care benefits for retirees.

Postal officials have said they’re bracing for default on the payment. They also don’t have the money to make a $5.6 billion payment due Sept. 30.

Congress alone has the power to help the service. The Senate passed a bill to help the service back in April, but the full House has yet to consider the issue.

The service is in a financial bind, having reported several quarters worth of multi-billion-dollar losses due to the recession, declining mail volume and the congressional mandate to prefund retirement health care benefits for future retirees.

While default would be a first for the Postal Service, it’s largely symbolic. Postal officials have pledged that employees and subcontractors will continue to be paid and mail will be delivered as normal.

h/t: fox2now.com

The United States Postal Service is not broke.

It does not need to be downsized. Post offices do not need to be closed. Sorting centers do not need to be shuttered. Saturday service does not need to be scrapped. And hundreds of thousands of jobs in rural regions and urban neighborhoods do not need to be cut in a time of economic instability.

Yet, this week, the US Senate is debating about whether to advance a scheme that would begin a process of downsizing that—while not so immediately draconian as the plan advanced by House Oversight and Government Reform Committee chairman Darrel Issa (R-CA)—accepts the notion that the postal service’s future is one of closures and cuts. Ultimately, that downsizing points the postal in a direction where privatization could be inevitable.

But that does not have to be the case.

National Association of Letter Carriers president Fredric Rolando is right when he says: “Nothing is inevitable about the so-called decline of the U.S. Postal Service.”

What is real, however, is the threat.

Republican leaders in Congress have made proposals for 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. That scheme won’t be implemented by this Congress. But a half-step in that direction could be made.

Supposedly “centrist” US Senators Tom Carper (D-DE), Joe Lieberman (I-CT), Susan Collins (R-ME) and Scott Brown (R-MA) have developed a series of proposals they describe as a “bipartisan consensus” for a death by slower cuts.

Their “21st Century Postal Service Act,” the latest variation on a supposed compromise now being weighed by the Senate, would still move the postal service toward the closing of hundreds of mail processing centers, the shuttering of thousands of post offices, delays in mail delivery and a pressuring of consumers toward more 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.’ ”

Republicans, and those Democrats who side with them on this issue, hold that radical surgery is necessary because the postal service is in financial crisis.

Earlier this year, however, we learned 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, US Senator Bernie Sanders argued at the time, put “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 unprecedented burden” of being forced to put $5.5 billion every year into its future retiree health benefits fund. Sanders’s office explains that “even if there are no further contributions from the post office, and if the fund simply collects 3.5 to 4 percent interest every year, that account will be fully funded in twenty-one years.” At the same time, the senator suggests, the postal service should be allowed to recover more than $13 billion in overpayments it has made to a federal retirement systems.

That’s not the end of the debate about the future of the postal service. Along with Senators Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Mary Landrieu (D-LA), Sanders is working with key Senate Democrats—and, the group hopes, some Republicans who represent rural states—to develop amendments, and potential alternatives, to the “21st Century Postal Service Act.” Not only would they get the accounting right, they would remove barriers to the USPS so that it can compete and grow.

The Senate should embrace it—not the slash-and-burn proposals of Republican leaders, nor the slower slash-and-burn proposals of supposed centrists.

h/t: John Nichols at The Nation

One of the issues not getting a lot of play, even though it affects the lives of each and every one of us is the ridiculous debate about the U.S. Post Office. This is a debate that never should have taken place at all, but because of legislation enacted by the lame duck Republican Congress in 2006, the Post Office has been hemorrhaging money. That legislation requires the Post Office to pre-fund 100% of the future obligation for retirement benefits for current employees and to do it in ten years. No other employer, private or public, is mandated to do pre-funding of that nature. Normal actuarial tables would have the funding done over a 75 year time frame. But the USPS? Ten years. The reason, it seems to me, is clear. Republicans want to privatize the Post Office, just like they want to privatize health care, social security and anything else they can think of where they can squeeze an extra buck out of the American public and give them less for their money. Can you spell GREED?

The United States Post Office is not funded by taxpayer money. All of their money comes from the sale of postage. They are efficient and they are everywhere. Did you known that when UPS and FedEx don’t have routes for packages that have been sent via their services, they hand them off to the Post Office to complete the trip? There are a lot of people in rural America who get those UPS and FedEx deliveries from their local postal employee.

Let your representatives know that you want them to refund the overpayments the Post Office has made (that’s $11 Billion) and tell them that raising the price of a postage stamp to 50 cents isn’t going to drive you to go to UPS and FedEx, where the delivery of your letter or bill would most certainly cost you a LOT more and to get off the backs of the Post Office and the men and women who work there and serve the public so well.

h/t: Ann Werner at AddictingInfo.org

After a stopgap measure last year, Congress will once again debate whether the United States Postal Service as we know it can survive.  The better question is: Will Congress let it?

The U.S. Postal Service is at risk of defaulting on healthcare obligations or exceeding its debt limit by the end of the year. Last month, USPS management unveiled a “Path to Profitability” that would eliminate over a hundred thousand jobs, end Saturday service and loosen overnight delivery guarantees. The Postal Service also proposes to shutter thousands of post offices.  “Under the existing laws, the overall financial situation for the Postal Service is poor,” says CFO Joe Corbett.  Republicans have been more dire, and none more so than Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, who warned of a “crisis that is bringing USPS to the brink of collapse.”

Listening to Issa, you’d never know that the post office’s immediate crisis is largely of Congress’s own making.  Conservatives aren’t wrong to say that the shift toward electronic mail – what USPS calls “e-diversion” – poses a challenge for the Postal Service’s business model.  (The recent drop-off in mail is also a consequence of the recession-induced drop in advertising.)

ut even so, in the first quarter of this fiscal year, the post office would have made an operational profit, if not for a 75-year healthcare “pre-funding” mandate that applies to no other public or private institution in the United States.

The Postal Service fulfills its mandate without direct government funding.  Faced with right-wing warnings about bailouts, the postal worker union this week is running a new round of TV ads reminding taxpayers that USPS is funded entirely by fees, not taxes.  Guffey says the union — the largest of four representing post office workers — will likely hold rallies on next month’s Tax Day to drive home the same point.

Issa and other Republicans have been insisting for years that to stay solvent, USPS needs to make big cuts. In 2010, Issa told the postmaster general at a congressional hearing that the Postal Service has “more or less a third more people than you need. He  warned in an Op-Ed that “Allowing USPS to postpone billions in obligations just makes a bailout easier.” In a December Op-Ed, Issa compared continuing Saturday mail service to “asking us to revive the Pony Express.”

Sanders is among the backers of the Postal Service Protection Act, whose recommendations are similar to the ones in the senators’ letter. Guffey says the most promising route to an acceptable compromise would be for these recommendations to be incorporated into a tri-partisan bill introduced by Sens. Joe Lieberman, Tom Carper, Susan Collins and Scott Brown.

Among USPS management’s proposed changes are a transformation of workers’ healthcare plans and the elimination of at least 155,000 jobs.  USPS has already eliminated 130,00 full-time equivalent positions in the past three years.  In a union contract signed in May 2011, APWU agreed to concessions in order to preserve its “no-layoff” clause; Guffey says that the Post Office’s projections, designed to make the case for further sacrifices from workers, fail to factor in savings from the concessions they’ve already agreed to.  Union leaders expressed surprise last year when, within three months after signing the new contract with APWU, USPS issued white papers in support of congressional proposals to override those layoff protections.  But Corbett says he believes the reduction can be accomplished through voluntary incentives.

Cutting those jobs would mean further reductions in public sector employment, including among veterans and African-Americans, who for decades have been over-represented in Postal Service ranks.  “It just doesn’t seem like it’s the right time to go after veterans and their employment,” says Guffey. He wants Congress to maintain current delivery standards, which he says would save many post offices from closure.

Cuts have intangible costs as well.  Interviewed for a Washington Postprofile of the endangered post office in Star Tannery, Va., one resident said, “Closing the post office would be one step toward eradicating small-town life in America.”

True to form, President Obama falls between Sanders and Issa: He would scale back the pre-funding requirement and allow postage rates to rise, but would also back the elimination of Saturday service. In an emailed statement, White House spokesperson Matt Lehrich wrote, “The President proposed a balanced plan that would return USPS to financial viability while saving taxpayers money, and Congressional action that enacts this type of balanced plan is necessary.”

h/t: Josh Eidelson at AlterNet

If ever a Fox News segment proved how elitist those “we like America” Fox Newsies are, it was this segment from Forbes on Fox on Saturday, October 22, 2011. Host David Asman purported to frame it as a discussion about the Postal Service’s financial problems, especially with regard to the unions. But that was really a thinly-disguised excuse to talk up privatization. Asman slyly maneuvered the conversation that way by going immediately after his introduction to panelist Dennis Kneale with the enthusiastic “question:” “Dennis, you say, ‘Shut down the whole post office before taxpayers get stuck with another bailout!’”

“It already may be too late,” Kneale said. While he spoke, a banner on the screen read, “CALLS TO SHUT DOWN POST OFFICE AS UNION FIGHTS JOB CUTS.” Who, besides this panel, are the calls coming from? Nobody said.

Kneale continued, “The Post Office has lost $20 billion in the last 4 years. Those losses are getting bigger… It stopped paying $800 million a year into its own retirement fund for employees, and it owes $5.5 billion into that retirement fund within a few months… This is a service that specializes - its business is down 20% - in delivering the junk mail from companies that we throw out at really cheap rates… Spin it off. FedEx and UPS will bid to buy it and chop it up.”

Panelist Victoria Barret offered the “balance” of arguing against privatization – but she was on board the anti-union bandwagon. She said, “You can’t just junk the post office. There’s incredible value in what the Post Office has. It’s an immense distribution system. That’s worth a lot… I like sending Christmas cards, Dennis, you get one every year… The union contracts are a problem. You need to rip them up. That’s true.”

David Asman had a “solution.” “Steve, you can send Christmas cards for free on the Internet now. The internet changes everything.”

Barret objected, “It’s not the same.”

Steve Forbes, predictably, argued for privatization “so it does compete. Remove the monopoly on first class mail and the like, let it be like any other company.”

Reporter Kym McNicholas said, “No. I don’t think that’s the answer.” She laid the problem at Congress. “The Inspector General issued a report in July that said that Congress has overcharged the United States Postal Service to the tune of $75 billion for retirement benefits. Why not make them pay it back? It’ll solve the whole problem.”

Wait a minute! That’s a potential solution! Why didn’t host Asman bring this up in the introduction? Why didn’t it come up until the middle of the segment? And why didn’t this solution get any serious consideration?

Instead, the gang scoffed about Congress and then continued on their privatization jag.

Panlist Mike Ozanian said, “The Post Office desperately needs to be privatized.”

Asman did point out that privatization was likely not to cover rural areas.

Forbes said dismissively, “Business will figure out how to do it.” Sure it will and the heck with what kind of service rural areas get and at what price! As “proof” that it will all work out just peachy (at least for billionaire Forbes), he added, “Everyone has a cell phone now no matter where they are in the world. Twenty years ago, they cost $4000. Today they’re cheap. “ Yes, and if people can’t afford to buy bread, they can always eat cell phones!

Kneale interrupted to offer his “thoughts” on behalf of rural Americans: “And you can always MOVE! If you’re in a rural area that doesn’t get postal service and it’s important to you, MOVE! I’m sick and tired of spending money to reach out and (unintelligible).

Memo To Kneale: If you don’t care enough to make sure your fellow Americans in rural areas get affordable, timely and reliable delivery, maybe you should consider moving to another country.

h/t: Brian and Ellen at Newshounds.us

Both the news media and a number of politicians have claimed recently that the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) is in “crisis,” and that it is necessary to lay off thousands of workers or reduce service in order to make the post office fiscally stable. And the Post Office itself has proposed laying off as many as 120,000 employees and withdrawing from federal health care plans in order to navigate upcoming fiscal crunches.

It is true that USPS is facing fiscal challenges — it lost nearly $20 billion over the last four years and is at risk of not being able to meet a $5.5 billion mandated payment to the Treasury at the end of this month (which has been put off six weeks thanks to the last continuing resolution in Congress).

But what has been lost in the political debate over the Post Office is why it is losing this money. Major media coverage points to the rise of email or Internet services and the inefficiency of the post model as the major culprits. While these factors may cause some fiscal pain, almost all of the postal service’s losses over the last four years can be traced back to a single, artificial restriction forced onto the Post Office by the Republican-led Congress in 2006.

At the very end of that year, Congress passed the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006 (PAEA). Under PAEA, USPS was forced to “prefund its future health care benefit payments to retirees for the next 75 years in an astonishing ten-year time span” — meaning that it had to put aside billions of dollars to pay for the health benefits of employees it hasn’t even hired yet, something “that no other government or private corporation is required to do.”

As consumer advocate Ralph Nader noted, if PAEA was never enacted, USPS would actually be facing a $1.5 billion surplus today:

By June 2011, the USPS saw a total net deficit of $19.5 billion, $12.7 billion of which was borrowed money from Treasury (leaving just $2.3 billion left until the USPS hits its statutory borrowing limit of $15 billion). This $19.5 billion deficit almost exactly matches the $20.95 billion the USPS made in prepayments to the fund for future retiree health care benefits by June 2011. If the prepayments required under PAEA were never enacted into law, the USPS would not have a net deficiency of nearly $20 billion, but instead be in the black by at least $1.5 billion.

h/t: ThinkProgress Economy

The recent attacks against the United States Postal Service (USPS) are more than signs of desperate times - a natural sunset moment for a service rendered archaic by FedEx and UPS. Rather, the Postal Service has been under constant, vicious assault for years from the right, who views this as an epic battle with the goal of finally taking down the strongest union in the country, the second largest employer in the United States (second only to Wal-Mart,) and a means to roll the country ever closer toward the abyss of privatization.

The Postal Service, which is older than the Constitution itself, stands at a precipice. If this great institution, which provides one of the oldest, most reliable services in the country, is permitted to fall and Congress kills its great union, then truly no collective bargaining rights, no worker contract, no union will be safe within the United States.

As the USPS spirals toward default, the historically uncontroversial mail service system has suddenly become a hot-button issue. It’s an unlikely organization to inspire such hysteria. The Postal Service isn’t paid for by taxpayer dollars, but rather fully funded by the sale of stamps. It’s easy to forget what a marvel this is - that today, in 2011, one can still mail a letter clear across the country for less than 50 cents. And if the impressiveness of that feat still hasn’t sunk in, attempt this brain exercise: consider what else you can buy for $0.44.

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.

The hopeless task was made even more daunting when Wall Street blew up the world’s economies. It was this, and not the invention of email, that became the Postal Service’s death knell. Zlatkin finds the whole “blame it on the Internet” excuse amusing. The Internet had already existed for quite a while in 2006, the USPS’s busiest year, not to mention that every item purchased on Amazon and eBay - every piece of information addressed to stockholders and bank customers - still needs to be snail mailed, which is enough volume to keep the Postal Service prosperous.

“I’ve yet to figure out a way to mail a shirt through a computer,” he chuckles.

When Wall Street’s derivatives gamble blew up the country, businesses slowed their operations during the recession and, as such, the Postal Service was no longer handling historically high volumes of mail. The boom was over and the death spiral began.

At the same time, the USPS was bleeding money by overpaying into worker pension funds. An audit done by the Postal Service’s Office of Inspector General came up with the figure of $75 billion in pension overpayments. Then, the Postal Regulatory Commission, an independent agency that actually received more autonomous power under PAEA, commissioned its own independent audit. The commission placed the overpayment at $50 billion.

Taking these figures into consideration, the projected $9 billion deficit the USPS now faces seems like chump change that could easily be corrected with some minor accounting tweaks.

“You could actually transfer over payment from the pension funds to the healthcare retirement funds,” says Zlatkin. “And it wouldn’t cost taxpayers a single penny.”

H.R. 1351, the United States Postal Service Pension Obligation Recalculation and Restoration Act of 2011, is a piece of legislation sponsored by Massachusetts Congressman Stephen Lynch. The act calls for the Office of Personal Management to do the definitive audit, come up with the actual figure of overpayment and then apply that to the ridiculous system of prepayment funding expenses. The Postal Service would then have that $5.5 billion a year to use for running its services and improving mail delivery.

This would eliminate the need to terminate Saturday mail delivery service, close down mail processing centers and there would be no need to lay off 120,000 workers (the Postal Service work force has already been reduced through attrition by over 100,000 employees over the last four years).

But there are political opponents that have no desire to see the USPS survive what is, for all intents and purposes, a stupid accounting maneuver. Namely, the GOP and moderate Democrats were the players behind the PAEA, and are now the same forces peddling the narrative that the Postal Service is broke, the union too demanding and the only solution is cuts, cuts and, oh yes, more cuts.

Zlatkin says the name “Darrell Issa” like he just smelled something seriously foul. He had his first encounter with the Congressman in May soon after the American Postal Workers Union (APWU) and the Postal Service reached a collective bargaining agreement. The agreement, through givebacks that the union offered, guaranteed the Postal Service over $4 billion in cost savings on employees over the life of a contract. At the time, Postmaster Patrick Donahoe hailed this as a victory for the Postal Service, its employees and the people they serve.

However, as the union was preparing to vote on the agreement, Issa called a hearing on the contract. The move was completely unprecedented. Here was a Republican chair of the Oversight Committee grilling the postmaster general about an agreement (Issa called the contract too generous) upon which a union was currently voting. “Talk about tampering with elections,” says Zlatkin.

For Zlatkin, the only other name that inspires as much contempt is Dennis Ross (R-Florida), another member of the Oversight Committee. “Issa’s henchman,” as Zlatkin calls him, went after the postmaster for settling on the agreement, demanding to know why he didn’t negotiate the contract.

“The bigger issue is really the longer-term changes we need to make to the Postal Service in terms of its viability,” Ross said to Donahoe. “I hope we can empower you to do more.”

Side note: It’s interesting to hear the GOP refer to the Postal Service as if it’s a business rather than an entity that provides a public service. The Postal Service is not designed to churn profits.

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.

Soon after meeting with Donahoe, Issa introduced the Postal Reform Act to Congress, a bill that Zlatkin says would “Wisconsin” the Postal Service. “[The bill would] give them the kinds of powers that the Super Committee is having to just go in there temporarily and do what has to be done: rip into the contracts, close post offices without hearings. It’s basically the Postal Service Destruction Act.” The bill has one co-sponsor: Dennis Ross. And both men just happen to be in charge of the House Oversight Committee. Between the “Save The Postal Service” H.R. 1351 and the Postal Service Destruction Act, Zlatkin asks rhetorically, “which is gonna come to a vote?”

It makes sense that the Postal Service has become the target of rich, overwhelmingly white politicians. As former Deputy Assistant and Deputy Press Secretary to former President George W. Bush, Tony Fratto so eloquently tweeted: “Over the past 10 yrs I might have visited a post office 10 times, total.”

When you can hand off parcels to your assistant who then ships it off at FedEx’s higher rates, then yeah, the post office might not be for you. 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.

“Any time a post office is rumored to be closing, it’s devastating to the neighborhood that it’s in,” says Zlatkin, “what happens when we get involved with elected officials and community people to try and keep a post office open, it’s always the same people who turn out: elderly people, disabled people, poor people and small business owners. They’re the people who are the ones who that depend on the postal service that they can’t really afford or have access to alternatives.”

UPS and FedEx aren’t required to do what the Postal Service does and that is deliver the mail to every place, even if the recipient is located in hard-to-reach rural terrain, or an inner-city neighborhood deemed too “dangerous” for other services, like taxi cabs, in which to travel. If the USPS falls, it will be another strike in the class war where poor people are yet again cut off from a service that used to belong to everyone.

So, here we have a service that caters primarily to the economically disadvantaged and employs over 574,000 union members. No wonder it became such a mouth-watering target for the GOP. It would be quite a feather in the cap of Darrell “the liberal hunter” Issa to take out one of the largest unions in the country and simultaneously give the US a nudge in the direction of total privatization by crippling one of the last great public services.

“Obama is gonna have a job talk for the country,” says Zlatkin. “Is he gonna talk about the necessity for maintaining the 120,000 postal jobs, or is he going to ignore it? I would guess he would ignore it. We were the second union to endorse Obama, the APWU and since that time, he hasn’t been a, what we call, good friend to the postal workers, or the people they work for.”

h/t: truthout.org