So let’s have a quick talk about the awesome US postal service (USPS). Back in 1775 it sort of started (long story go look at history) with Benjamin Franklin as the first postmaster General. It transitioned a little but basically ran smoothly for ages. It’s also one of the few government organizations specifically authorized by the US constitution. They are also the only delivery service to guarantee “last mile delivery” to ALL US addresses no matter how remote, including US territories and overseas military bases (FedEx and UPS use them for this bit sometimes as it’s too expensive for them)… and stamp costs for letters is identical to all those addresses (and can only be raised by congress). Lastly up until 2006 (this will be in a note at the end) it was one of the few government services to actually make money most years, or at least hold even. It’s pretty awesome actually.
Now along comes Trump. On taking office he immediately had several issues with the post office:-
1. He thinks they should be privatized for some unknown reason, which also means that last mile delivery and fixed stamp cost would immediately go away as it’s not efficient or profitable.
2. He thinks they don’t make enough money completely misunderstanding the “service” part of their name, and ignoring the history that they did till they were screwed over by congress (see 2006 “Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act” yes, this is in the note at the end)
3. He thinks Amazon don’t pay enough for their services (which is wrong) because the Washington Post writes mean things about him and his tiny ego is hurt, Jeff Bezos owns Washington Post & Amazon, ergo Amazon is cheating somehow
4. He wants an excuse to stop postal voting because many Democratic states (like California) do it really effectively and he thinks killing the post office will do that.
5. I’m going to put this here despite being false but he also claims that mail in voting is fraudulent despite citing no evidence, the fact that it’s been done successfully since the civil war and all armed forces do it, and Trump and his top admins do it… so this is just a flat out lie.
After whining about it for ages as he does, Trump finally installed his political donor croney, DeJoy, as postmaster general to deal with it. Now DeJoy is not only following Trumps orders, he also has a massive vested interest in the USPS failing. He holds $30 million in stock in XPO which is a postal service contractor that is poised to take over more of the USPS work if it begins to or does fail. He also sold off massive amounts of stock in Amazon as he took office as their stock will suffer from Mail slowdowns.
DeJoy has so far taken the following actions
⁃ fired 3 senior managers immediately in the USPS and has since fired a whole slew more.
⁃ put an immediate stop to all overtime making the mail begin to pile up in sorting rooms and deliveries getting backed up, while simultaneously making Sunday working mandatory in many places.
⁃ He’s required all managers to issue warnings for petty offenses like being 15 seconds late from a lunch break or not wearing USPS approved socks, which are meaningless as nothing is done about them but they slow down the process further.
⁃ He has shut down and in some cases removed sorting machines from 7 major mail sorting centers, many of which handle ballots
⁃ He is systematically removing post boxes from the streets of mostly democratic tickets
⁃ He has instructed workers to sort ballots as a low priority over all other mail
⁃ He has instructed all states that they will no longer get the discounted 20c cost for mailing ballots to people and will instead be required to pay the full 55c
Effectively Trump and DeJoy are very rapidly destroying and dismantling the USPS in the middle of a pandemic when it’s relied upon by millions for paychecks, medicine, and business deliveries all for political gain and financial benefit. I’m sort of pissed off about this and so should you be.
While there’s specific action that could happen, mostly it’s down to removing Trump as him and his republican croneys are blocking any assistance and will likely block any accountability. Go vote to save the post office.
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So note at the end as promised: Just to clarify on the whole congress screwed them comment… Now for quite some number of years there’s been a mostly Republican “big government is bad!” Movement to privatize the USPS and take it from the government. The first major step on this was in 2006 when the horribly misnamed Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act was passed, which effectively made it so they were required to have retirement money ready to go for ALL employees well before their retirement date, something no company in the US is required to do. They had 10 years to have this roughly 6billion dollars ready and defaulted a few times on it because it’s a stupid amount of money. To be very clear here, the USPS had never failed to pay a retirement package before… the issue was having it all ready to go long before the retirement was due. The post office was doing just fine as a service and better than most then congress screwed them.