Yves here. As you’ll see from our post today on the sorry state of the stimulus negotiations, the Democrats’ interference in the Republicans’ plan to starve the Post Office into privatization is one of the big sticking points. Gah.
By Mark Jamison, a retired postmaster who serves as an advisor, resident guru, and regular contributor to Save the Post Office. His previous posts can be found here. He can be contacted at markijamison01@gmail.com. Originally published at Save the Post Office; cross posted from Angry Bear
The United States Postal Service is an essential national infrastructure. That simple and indisputable fact has never been more evident than during the current pandemic. A network that has the capability to serve every address in the United States, almost all of them daily, is a lifeline and a necessity.
It’s no secret that the Postal Service, like much of the infrastructure in this country, has been under assault by those who are ideologically predisposed to dismiss the necessity of a functioning, well-managed government. They would like to privatize the postal system, the national parks, the schools, the railroad, even roads and bridges. For them, these public infrastructures are merely targets of opportunity, another way for the few to profit at the expense of the many. By disregarding and undermining the value of public infrastructure at the expense of domestic tranquility and the promotion of the general welfare, they do a great disservice to the country
The postal system has been a target for generations. The privatizers and those who could not discern the fallacy inherent in trying to run government as a business when their ends and purposes were very different have repeatedly sought to turn the postal system into something much less useful than a nationwide infrastructure. Over the last fifteen years, since the passage of PAEA, the capacity and institutional strength of the USPS have been compromised by a succession of Postmasters General who substituted empty rhetoric and misguided plans for the very real value of a broad and robust network dedicated to universal service.
The current president came into office with lots of grudges and fury but no knowledge or understanding of the Postal Service. For the last three and a half years he has overseen the corruption of our institutions, the debasement of our bureaucracies, and the hollowing out of our ability to serve our citizens. The administration has acted with malice and ignorance, failing at its most basic task of governing. Nowhere has this been more evident than in the mismanagement of the Postal Service.
Recently a new PMG was installed. Mr. DeJoy has a background in logistics, one that might perhaps be useful in managing a postal network were it not for the very real conflicts of interest between his private investments and his public duties. Mr. DeJoy’s main qualification for the job seems to have been his large political contributions along with his willingness to carry the president’s stated desire to throttle the Postal Service.
His current austerity tactics along with the disdain of Mr. Mnuchin at Treasury threaten to starve and permanently disable this national infrastructure that provides so much and employs so many. Mr. DeJoy, like the president he serves, seems more intent on destroying value rather than serving the needs of the American people.
It appears the American people are waking up to the damage this president and his administration have done to our country. No president has suffered such consistently high disapproval rates. Current polling indicates that the administration and many of its enablers in Congress will be replaced during the November election. Unfortunately there is much damage that can be done before they leave office next January.
That is even more the case with the Postal Service because of its structure. The Board of Governors selects the PMG and only they can replace him. The PRC has oversight but the wheels turn slowly, more slowly because it is almost assured that any steps by the PRC to hold the current BOG or PMG accountable to standards will end up in court, or worse, be ignored.
There are however some steps that can be done to ensure that the Postal Service remains viable. First, Congress must insist in any stimulus bill that sufficient funds are provided to stabilize the Postal Service through next January. There must also be language in the bill requiring the PMG to adhere to established mail delivery standards and to obey all directives and orders from the PRC. The bill should also direct the PRC to open an advisory opinion docket on impacts of the PMG’s plans and directives with respect to service while also encouraging efforts to preserve the capacity and viability of the postal network during the pandemic.
The Biden campaign should make clear that one of its priorities upon taking office will be postal reform legislation that recognizes the Postal Service and the postal network as essential national infrastructure and supports a strong public postal service with a robust universal service mandate. Furthermore it should be made clear that a failure on the part of postal management including the BOG to preserve and protect this important American asset will be subject to strict standards of accountability.
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The lousy record of privatization never seems to matter with these decisions. Besides the important role the Postal Service has in the next election, it could also provide a setting for public banks. The railroad system is another victim of bad agendas.
Lousy for who? As usual, cui bono…
there are winners who cash in big
A few with a lot at stake often overwhelm the masses each with little, even if the net result is obviously negative
The Post Office is so quintessentially American that to privatize it is unpatriotic. Virtually every town in the country has a Post Office nearby; if you move to another town there’s a Post Office, connecting you to the rest of the Nation and the world. All of this will be lost if instead we allow FedEx and UPS and whoever else to supplant it.
Not that the Post Office doesn’t need to change. One thought is to place the job of Rural Broadband into the hands of the Post Office. As a federal agency the job of getting infrastructure installed would be significantly easier; landowners would be required to allow cable to be run through their land when needed.
And it could be enhanced with a secure Post Office email account for every citizen (hanklinderman@po.gov) that could be used for communication with government agencies like the IRS, Medicare, and so on.
The Post Office was created to facilitate communication, Rural Broadband is a real need, seems like a fit.
+1.
FYI – The Post Office uses usps.com instead of usps.gov ever since the website came into being. The .com extension is usually used by commercial firms. The crooks who want to privatize the USPS seem to have thought well ahead. The Congress is the one that needs to take the major part of the blame for what is happening to the postal service.
Your idea of using the postal service to provide broadband is a good one. However, private companies will probably get involved in operating it and will therefore charge exorbitant rates. Look what they’ve done to the REA’s (Rural Electrical Cooperatives).
Yes, broadband, and let’s not forget that we need a public bank as well, to serve all those that our current banks are failing to serve. Public banks and postal service goes well together in many countries.
The post office offers banking services in Italy. Not sure the specifics but it’s a good thing for the citizens, my father uses it when he visits. They also allow grocery checkout workers the ability to sit on stools instead of standing. Civilized.
We had a postal savings system here in the US from 1911 to 1967:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Postal_Savings_System
That article also has a link to one on the general concept and where it has been operated. (And, in some countries, is still operating.)
In Austria we had the Postbank, that was then separated from just the “Post”, privatized, went bankrupt and was recently recreated from scratch as part of the Postal Office once more, just under a different name.
I would not be entirely surprised by this process repeating in the future.
Switzerland:
https://www.postfinance.ch/en/private.html
unfortunately, although I agree completely with this, every action taken needs, in the mind of “the them”, to be capable of global control. The ideas must be scalable to global exploitation.
Just like with Uncle Joe, no one is telling us what the master plan is…
Something I haven’t seen from the ruling class is a proposal to replace the post office. How are they going to send their bills and court summons?
Kidding aside, I think I got my first notice that I would be charged extra for the privilege of receiving a bill in the mail rather than by email about 20 years ago. Ain’t capitalism great?
Side note – I think there may be an NC fundraiser coming up soon. Maybe we can encourage people to mail in payments this year? It may not singlehandedly save the post office, but you know, walking the walk and all.
People who want to walk the walk could also cancel their electronic-billpay systems and go back to paying bills by check in the mail. If that is still permitted. It would be a way to answer the question Which Side Are You On?
If some version of Kill The Post Office is in a bill which reaches the Senate, Sanders could destroy it all by himself just by placing a Senatorial Hold on it, could he not? But if he could, would he? Or would he consider that to be the kind of Revolutionary Vanguard behavior which he has long abjured and refused to conduct?
I can see how some large Financial services firms and mortgage servicers will love privatization, with all that access to big data and the ease in which they can enhance their late payment revenue streams, interest rate increases.
Combine this with one of the postal services key roles in the service of process – its extensive network, it sorting machinery and all the facilities waiting to be monetized and the huge pile of Benjamins in the form of retirement funds just waiting to be divided among the conquerors = it just makes a feudal lord wet his pants in joy or an King fill with glee.
The post office has never been funded by tax dollars yet – congress (bought and paid for by private interests) has and is doing everything to undermine the USPS to make it fail into private hands.
It is shocking how much our legislative branch has been corrupted all these years – it is unbelievable – so much so that people literally do not believe it – and the politicians play that disbelief to their own advantage –
Believe it and wake up to the facts – the usurpers lead the good by a wide margin
Don’t forget all that very expensive real estate in cities to be divided up and sold off at a huge profit! In NYC alone the USPS real estate is worth millions.
And whose husband’s firm handles the Post Office real estate?
“Moderate” California Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein.
https://theintercept.com/2015/05/05/watchdog-slams-company-part-owned-feinsteins-husband-abusing-huge-post-office-contract/
“Eyebrows rose when the USPS made the contract with CBRE in June 2011 for all real estate transactions. Blum chaired CBRE at the time; he stepped down last year, but remains a director and a major shareholder. Feinstein, D-Calif., has always denied involvement in the deal, which proved lucrative as the cash-strapped Postal Service looked to its excess real estate to finance operations.”
I’ve said this before, but to me, the Post Office is national security infrastructure.
It provides a rudimentary “last mile” Federal civil communications and delivery network connecting every economic unit in America (household, farm and business) that has worked for over 200 years. It’s the ultimate example of what Taleb calls an Antifragile institution.
It may not be commercially competitive these days, so what? It also stays functioning in the event this 30 year old experiment called the World Wide Web goes down, for whatever Black Swan reason, and takes down with it all the alternative modes. Is that so far fetched in 2020?
Anyone willing to bet their towns or counties can get their act together quickly enough to requisition/ration/distribute staples, scrip and, importantly, fuel! before widespread hunger or brigandage breaks out? Better pray your local Nat Guard commander is on the ball (btw, they often are).
I recall reading (possibly via PK here?) that when the banking system in Ireland crashed in the 1970s(?), people were able to obtain store credit for essentials from local shops and pubs, where they were known. Anyone expect your Whole Foods, of BofA manager, or Kwikimart franchisee to extend that kind of service?
We are fast becoming a hollow nation, looted or rotted away at the core, unable to remember how our world worked before. Like Jared Diamond’s tribe who forgot how to fish!
+1. Add to that the fact mailmen and mailwomen perform health and welfare checks on their daily routes: is mail piling up in the letterbox? Has no mail been sent out in some time when usually letters are going out? Do things look ‘not right’? Should they tap on the door to see if anyone answers? They save lives.
Those are lives which the upper class wants to stealth-kill by “letting them die”.
They might as well just hand Amazon the keys to the country. The only e-commerce company that has the resources to go vertical will benefit greatly from the demise of the post office.
They should fire the ugly beast and tell them to deliver their own crapola, or at the very least charge Amazon exactly what any other peasant that walks up tp the window is charged. The peasants had their prices raised by the post office by nearly 400% when they implemented the biggest scam in the shipping business, dimensional weight and told them to phuck off and use UPS or FraudEx instead,
The price increases are so extreme that shipping prices may as well be $∞
I figure the USPS loses so much money shipping the ugly beast’s and Chinese crapola they have to make it up by gouging the tiniest pinpricks of capitalism in existence.
No one at the post office could tell me why, either, just some blank stares and the occasional addmission that upper management is retarded.
The price increases are part of the plan to get people to use UPS and Fedex. It’s time someone started a shipping service cooperative to compete with the oligapoly.
Rural areas are usually strong republican. It doesn’t make sense that republicans want to privatize the USPS. If privatized it won’t be long before unprofitable locations will be closed. This would do more harm to their voters because the unprofitable locations probably are in rural areas. A lot of the country would end up without mail service or drastically reduced service.
Ideology when improperly applied, is a nasty thing. The R’s would love to sink USPS through treachery like the 2006 law requiring prefunding employees retirement But I’d imagine that FedEx, UPS and King Kong Amazon would rather donate to our politicians than see the usps flourish.
For liberty loving folks, the post office is even in the scared constitution! Article 1, section 8 mentions gov’t establishing post offices and post roads. Its a fundamental public “good” that cannot be replaced with e-mail or amazon.
when you’re kicking people when they’re down, how do you know which kick is going to finally do them in….I mean it seems like they can take an unlimited portion of punishment….
“how did I know that one kick was going to be the one that…”
5 of nine…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-50M2Wex20
6 of nine…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mbvrOmirQg
sadly the United States of America can be boiled down in almost any louis l’amour tale…
Does anyone on here actually get value from the post office? I haven’t gotten anything but junk mail in four years. Let’s be real…the days of the essentiality of the USPS are long past.
“Virtually every town in the country has a Post Office nearby; if you move to another town there’s a Post Office, connecting you to the rest of the Nation and the world. All of this will be lost if instead we allow FedEx and UPS and whoever else to supplant it.”
This is true. If only there were a way to “connect yourself to the rest of the nation and the world.” Like a computer. Or a telephone.
You obviously don’t spend significant time in a rural area. USPS is universal. Electronic service is not even close.
No legal docs? No state or country car license/tag reg./renew forms? No birthday cards? Nothing? Well, if you never use the PO it’s not costing you a dime. So what’s you’re beef?
I like money orders, if it gets lost or stolen there’s remuneration and an investigation because stealing mail gets you in big trouble. Your packages also have some rights when the Post Office has them, while that’s a no with the privates. Also I had a bike broken in a UPS shipment, they wouldn’t cover damage because it was shipped from a non union warehouse. IMO the reason they want to get rid of the Post Office is that it works. I’ve been wondering whether or not a PO Box would work for mail in voting? Lastly, I’m sure “they” have a plan for a post Post Office world, but I can’t quite figure out what it is…getting everything into the cloud would benefit several of the usual suspects and Total Information Awareness would be more complete than it already is, so that’s a possible…
“If only there were a way to “connect yourself to the rest of the nation and the world.” Like a computer. Or a telephone.”
Try that in a natural disaster, riot or power failure. Same with the ‘covid free’ cashless society.
“Cash on the barrelhead” is more than a quaint expression. It works, night and day, anywhere, with or without power, no need for credit card readers, satellite uplinks, internet, government or bank approval of your ATM/Debit cards, no fees, no deducations, no privacy invasion, no control of your life.
In honor of BLM, here’s a quote for you:
“To make a contented slave, you must make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and, as far as possible, to annihilate his power of reason. He must be able to detect no inconsistencies in slavery. The man that takes his earnings, must be able to convince him that he has a perfect right to do so.”
Frederick Douglass
>Does anyone on here actually get value from the post office?
FFS, what an idiotic statement.
All of my prescriptions, almost all of my remuneration from work, much of my actual work production – outgoing.
Climb out of your internet cave and take a look around sometime.
I actually get value from the post office. I get and pay all my bills by post office. I get all kinds of mail order things in the mail by post office.
Lots of value. Lots of value every day.
Check out the members of the current BOG. Click on their names for a brief description of who appointed them and their relevant business experience. It’s eye opening. They have serious financial conflicts of interest, imo.
https://about.usps.com/who/leadership/board-governors/
Seeing as the only bipartisan law making in Congress is the renaming of post offices, how could they let it go away?
It’s basically the only accomplishment my Congressman Kevin McCarthy has in nearly 15 years, in terms of legislation he introduced, which became law. The Merle Haggard Post Office & the Buck Owens Post Office in Bakersfield are his highlights.
Check your Congress person’s efforts, i’m sure you’ll find some renaming of post offices in their past…
Question for the privatizers:
How will tax payments be made without a post office? With an app? Fine, then the government can buy each of our family a smartphone. Same with employers who want us on an electronic leash/fence.
Meanwhile, as part of a more nefarious privatization plot, we have the war on cash.
“The Cashless prospect is ominous… it’s time to ask ourselves if this abrogation of privacy and autonomy would be acceptable. You good with this?
It doesn’t mean mostly cashless and you can still use a ‘wee bit of cash here & there’. Cashless means fully digital, fully traceable, fully controlled. I think those who support a cashless society aren’t fully aware of what they are asking for.
A cashless society means:
* If you are struggling with your mortgage on a particular month, you can’t do an odd job to get you through.
* Your teenager or spouse can’t go & help the local business to earn a bit of summer cash.
* No more cash slipped into the hands of a child as a good luck charm or from their grandparent when going on holidays.
* No more money in birthday cards.
* No more piggy banks for your child to collect pocket money & to learn about the value of earning.
* No more cash for a rainy day fund or for that something special you have been putting $50 a week away for.
* No more side jobs because your wages barely cover the bills or put food on the table.
* No more charity collections.
* No more selling bits & pieces from your home that you no longer want/need for a bit of cash in return.
* No more cash gifts from relatives or loved ones.
What a cashless society does guarantee:
* Banks have full control of every single penny you own.
* Every transaction you make is recorded.
* All your movements & actions are traceable.
* Access to your money can be blocked at the click of a button when/if banks need ‘clarification’ from you which will take about 3 weeks, a thousand questions answered & five thousand passwords.
* You will have no choice but to declare & be taxed on every dollar in your possession.
* The government WILL decide what you can & cannot purchase.
* If your transactions are deemed in any way questionable, by those who create the questions, your money will be frozen, ‘for your own good’.
Need a catchy slogan:
Don’t AMTRAK the post office!
One mystery i’ve never been able to figure out, is why don’t post offices get robbed more often?
All they do is take in money all day long and security isn’t all that typically, and yes it’d be a Federal crime if you get caught, not that it would stop the bad guise.
To help keep the postal service solvent, I think email should be taxed with the proceeds going the USPS. Email is easily kept track of, so the amount of outgoing email from any address could readily be determined. The tax per email could be miniscule, but the total collected would be very substantial. The tax could be charged to the ISP that hosts the email account and charged by the ISP to the customer. I suppose email account arrangements are more complicated than my limited technical knowledge recognizes, but still the fact remains that everything that happens on the Internet leaves a record and that record can be used.
Taxing email may mean the end of free email accounts, but so what? There is no free lunch and there should not be free email.
Not sure this makes sense at all (i.e., taxing emails). The US already has some of the highest-cost internet service in the world… Additionally, we all get tons of unwanted emails – are customers supposed to pay for those?
“… but still the fact remains that everything that happens on the Internet leaves a record and that record can be used.” Be careful what you wish for.
The author tells us “they” want to privatize the railroad. What on earth does he mean? The railroad is already private, much of it owned by Warren Buffett.
Does he mean Amtrak? Amtrak is a public enterprise because the corporations couldn’t make a profit from passenger rail and gave up on it. (This may be the future of the airlines.) The repugs don’t want to privatize Amtrak, just to shut it down.
I wouldn’t trust Biden not to privatize the post office – but selling off Social Security comes first!
“the corporations couldn’t make a profit from passenger rail and gave up on it.”
Railroads got their land for free from the government. In exchange for that, they were later regulated by the Interstate Commerce Commision. They ran high quality, comfortable passenger trains around the country and served the public, and made a profit on it.
Later, when oil companies and airlines took that business away and sucked up government subsidies to do that, the railroads were obliged to keep running fewer and fewer passenger trains. Then deregulation.
Following your logic, Perhaps Buffet should pay fair market value for the land owned by railroads, plus interest and multiplier, adjusted upward for inflation, back to the American people from whom they got their mile wide strips of land in the 1880s?
AMTRAK was a sop thrown to people who couldn’t drive or afford to fly or had a nearby airport. Freight took precedence over taxpayers.
Union pay levels for skilled operators no longer applied to AMTRAK employees,who do the best they can relative to the deliberate sabotage of their infrastructure and operations.
The post office has already been AMTRAKED, that’s why it’s mediocre, not the other way around.
Americans need to go on a national tax strike to protest and stop the dismantling of our country. Since it seems that only their interests are represented in D.C., let the corporations, Wall Street and the billionaires pay the most or all of the federal taxes, which soon will be mostly interest on the national debt that they lent to the government.
What could the government do?, arrest and seize the homes and clunkers of declining value, of say ten percent of the well armed population?
Would the privateering profitization of the Post Office extend so far as to letting the corporate kakistocrats get their hands on the pension fund so extravagantly frontloaded in funding?
That was my thought… Wonder if the pension fund provisions were passed with an eye on privatisation (and the opportunity to raid it) in the first place? Plus – as noted – all that real estate… what a tasty morsel it will be.
My wife took a great photo that is post office related. How can I send to you to use?
Unfortunately, the overuse of undefined acronyms hurts this piece, as in this paragraph:
“The Board of Governors selects the PMG and only they can replace him. The PRC has oversight but the wheels turn slowly, more slowly because it is almost assured that any steps by the PRC to hold the current BOG or PMG accountable to standards will end up in court, or worse, be ignored.”
I’ve read enough about the USPS to figure out that PMG means postmaster general, and I see that BOG must stand for Board of Governors — but what is PRC? In a different paragraph, Jamison refers to the PAEA, which in context I can figure out probably stands for the horrible pension obligations Congress shackled the USPS with — but what is the name of that Act?
Too many articles these days seem to be written for insiders who will instantly understand the lingo, rather than for the great unwashed public who would just like to know what’s going on…
PRC = Postal Rate Commission
PAEA = Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act, passed in 2006. Among other things, it’s the law that obligated USPS to pre-fund its employee pension fund so heavily (even if it’s more like 50 than 75 years in advance).
POSTAL REGULATORY COMMISSION = PRC
Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006 PAEA
Thanks. I hope Mr. Jamison, who is doing such wonderful work, will include full names as well as their acronyms in future articles.
Thanks to run75441 for the correction of the one I thought I knew offhand (and so did not check). Apparently I got carried away by the talk about the PRC’s control over rates.
(LATER: Looks like PRC did stand for Postal Rate Commission from 1970 through 2006 when the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act was passed, as we both noted. But I haven’t been quite so focused on this fiasco for all that time — so that’s an explanation, not an excuse.)
John:
It is not a contest and your answer is fine. And your comment “I haven’t been quite so focused on this fiasco for all that time” kind of encapsulates what have been happening since the PAEA was passed in 2006. Much of the US citizenry do not know what is happening.
If you have some time go to Save the Post Office. site. There are many fine posts by Mark Jamison and Steve Hutkins as well as some others. It is excellent reading. Mark is a superb writer. If you have questions, My email addy is listed at Angry Bear or you can add hotmail to run75441 and find me. I will try to answer.
Yes, I have the same problem. No definition of PRC.
Thanks Yves I appreciate your posting this commentary by Mark.
Mark and I go back almost a decade. I came across Mark at “Save the Post Office” when researching some of the issues with the post office. Steve Hutkins, a literature professor who teaches “place studies” at the Gallatin School of New York University I believe still edits and administers the site where Mark writes from time to time.
We exchange emails from time to time as two old Vietnam veterans would do in discussing various topics and what the hell is going on in the world today. This particular post was sent to me by Mark after one email exchange when I was checking in on him and his safety from Covid at his home in the North Carolina mountains. One of these days I will wander down there also.
Regards,
“Congress must insist in any stimulus bill that sufficient funds are provided to stabilize the Postal Service through next January.”
I agree this is necessary and I believe much much more is needed to regain the US Postal Service we once enjoyed. The abuses Congress and the Executive Branch have forced on the US Postal Service makes a pitiful statement of just how rotten the US Government has become.
I am not sure Biden or Congress could draft or enact “postal reform legislation that recognizes the Postal Service and the postal network as essential national infrastructure and supports a strong public postal service with a robust universal service mandate.” The political machinery of the US no longer serves Populace or anything which might be construed as the Common Good. Both parties fall all over themselves groveling for the favors of Big Money.
Here’s one kind of US Postal Service Big Money envisions: “Rather than expanding USPS’ scope with a new non-essential, non-core service to offer consumers, turning the USPS into a publicly-traded corporation through an initial public offering (IPO) would be a better, less risky alternative for improving USPS’s financial situation.”
[https://reason.org/commentary/postal-banking-act-return-to-sender/ ] Reason is a libertarian think tank which counts the Koch brothers among others filling their coffers. [https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Reason_Foundation]
Of course, there are still some mailed solicitations which include prepaid envelopes — so we can help those solicitors help the USPS.
I must admit that the reason I’m an avid follower of NC is the opportunity to watch from the safety and comfort of a wealthy, well-run little county far away, the once great USA self-destruct and disintegrate.
It has a kind of fascinating horror, like watching a beautiful suspension bridge that once led the world in scientific and design technology, fall apart because of lack of maintenance and sheer neglect while the traffic still roars across it no longer seeing it, so familiar with it are they. Another piece falls off and the watcher marvels that it still stands, but the groaning and creaking is becoming even louder to those not deafened by the roar of their 6-cylinder Chevvy or the racket from their radios as they cross it.
When it goes it will go suddenly and disastrously as these things do, and I can only hope I’m far enough away not to be caught in it.
The US bridge to the future — a version of the first Tacoma Narrows Bridge?
Mail delivery has already slowed down. The people in my neighborhood are not getting their mail in time to pay their bill when due. I myself, have not received any mail for the last week which has never happened before. People in the neighborhood are already looking for alternatives for USPS which is not as reliable. Meanwhile, many employees at the local post office are refusing to wear masks, saying they work for Trump, not the state government.
Telee:
Many of the postal centers which distribute the mail to various post offices have suffered from Covid also. Workers have contracted Covid and these centers have slowed down as a result.
With Black Lives Matter getting so much public awareness bandwidth, there is very little social bandwidth brain capacity left over to care about Save The Postal Service
If the Save-The-Postal-Service community wants the public to think about Saving The Postal Service, maybe they should think about how a functioning Postal Service matters to Black Lives. How many Postal Service jobs are Black jobs? They would all be lost if the Postal Service goes extinct. Do Black jobs matter? How many poor country Black people or poor elderly Black people get their life-saving medications in the mail each month? How many of them are too poor to pay a UPS or FedEx or Amazon price to get their meds delivered? If the Postal Service goes extinct, will these Black people go without their medications?
Will they all die? Do Black lives matter?
If somebody with contacts in the Black Lives Matter leadership elite were to bring these considerations to the attention of the Black Lives Matter leadership commanders, would those leadership commanders decide that the Postal Service matters to Black Lives which Matter? If they were to decide that . . . ” Yes. The Postal Service matters to Black lives”, would they add Save The Postal Service to the list of concerns that they could lead or inspire multi-million-marcher demonstrations about? If they could, maybe they would. And maybe that would attract so much attention to Save The Postal Service that the current elites would become too afraid to destroy it just now.
I know its a long shot, but what other hope is there? No other hope at all.
” Save The Postal Service. It matters to Black lives and Black lives Matter.”