An Open Letter to Tammy Baldwin: Save Postal Service

Senator Baldwin:

As I said to you at the bloggers’ meeting at the Wisconsin Democratic Convention in June, the US Postal Service is destroying its ability to serve the people of Wisconsin and the rest of the country by decimating its infrastructure: stopping some or all mail processing at plants in Madison, La Crosse, Eau Claire, Wausau, Oshkosh, as well as Kenosha, Portage, Rhinelander, Rockford IL, Duluth and Rochester MN, and Kingsford MI. Of 14 processing plants in and adjacent to Wisconsin, the USPS wants to continue full service at only two: Milwaukee and Green Bay.  And the Milwaukee plant is a leased building; the lease is up in 2015; the building is flimsy and not designed for heavy equipment. It shakes alarmingly whenever a train goes by.

USPS is destroying its entire mail-processing infrastructure.

At the same time, private presort houses such as Pitney-Bowes are expanding: building new plants and moving to larger plants.

Your constituents and the American people need your help to stop the destruction of the US Postal Service.

The leadership of the USPS itself wants to self-destruct. Why? Management has been captured by profiteers: the big advertising mailers like Val-Pak coupons—who don’t need first-class service; the big contractors like Pitney Bowes; and competitors like UPS.

If you don’t help to stop them, these profiteers will drive USPS to destruction and insolvency.

USPS is rushing toward privatization of all mail-processing operations.

Once Pitney-Bowes and others have been hired to do all of the mail processing USPS once did (1) the revenue will be gone: taxpayers will again have to pay for letter carriers to deliver mail; (2) there will be no service such as first-class service used to be.

This is not theoretical. It is happening as we speak. There were roughly 500 processing plants just a very few years ago. About half of them have already been closed or are in the process of being closed. The regions that used to be served by the now-closed plants no longer have what we grew up thinking of as first-class mail service. Instead of one-day service to a nearby town, it now takes several days to mail a letter across town.

The “savings” are a fiction. Destroying the service will give the revenue to private operators. Then there will be no revenue to pay for “last mile” delivery.

The purported “savings”—although more than offset by payments to trucking companies and private sorters—are money taken from the postal workers in Madison and other Wisconsin cities (and all across the country) who will lose their livelihoods.

This is the main thrust of the privatizers’ plan: to replace union jobs in the USPS with nonunion jobs at profiteers’ plants: replace living-wage jobs with non-living-wage jobs; replace jobs that offer benefits with jobs without benefits.

Senator Baldwin, what kind of America will you help create?

Will you help the plunderers, privatizers, and profiteers destroy the nation’s infrastructure, in order to destroy the last remaining living-wage, union jobs?

Or will you stand up for the Wisconsin and American people, fight to preserve their post office and to preserve at least a little of the middle class?

When I said to you in June that USPS is being destroyed in the service of the big mailers, what you said to me was, “Some of those mailers are in Wisconsin.”

The implication is that you may be willing to see the permanent destruction of essential American infrastructure; the permanent dismantling of the ability to provide first-class service, so that a Wisconsin corporation can reap more profit.

Who are your constituents? The big mailers? Or the Wisconsin people? You can’t serve both.

You must choose.

Choose to side with the people of Wisconsin and the rest of the country. Choose the middle class. Choose rural communities. Choose people without broadband Internet. Choose the small businesses for whom receiving checks today rather than 2 to 3 business days from now means quick enough cash flow to stay in business.

Privatized mail service, coming to the U.S. with blistering speed, has already happened to Europe, with dire results.

Likewise, closing post offices especially in rural areas devastates the rural communities and saves essentially nothing.

I see that you have not yet signed on as a sponsor of S.316, the Postal Protection Act of 2013. Will you take this first crucial step? Not only sign on, but persuade your colleagues to do so also. Even the Republican ones. Postal service should not be a partisan issue. We all need it. A world without postal service is a poorer world.

S.316 would undo some of the financial damage inflicted by the 2006 PAEA, and would reiterate USPS’s obligation to maintain current levels of service.

Much more must be done to remove the vultures from the postal eagle’s nest. 

For now, will you co-sponsor S.316.

Can I count on your leadership on this crucial issue?

Thomas Ray Worley
worleydervish.blogspot.com/search/label/USPS

The Destruction of the U.S. Postal Service Is Quietly Being Delivered to Madison

Shhh... There’s a Meeting...
The U.S. Postal Service recently announced it was doing an “Area Mail Processing” study to evaluate transfer of some mail-processing operations from Madison to Milwaukee. In other words, the USPS is planning to drastically reduce the size of the processing operation here in Madison, resulting in the loss of first-class mail service as well as 54 jobs in Madison. All mail received from southwestern Wisconsin would be shipped 73 miles from Madison to Milwaukee for processing, and then the portion of that destined for southwestern Wisconsin would be trucked back to Madison for further processing and distribution.

On Wednesday, May 15, at 5pm (too late for media to include it in that day’s news), a public meeting was very quietly announced at which the USPS will share the initial results of the “study,” which it is claimed supports the “business case for consolidation.” The community, postal employees, and the unions were given only 14 days’ notice of the meeting. The material to be presented at that meeting was released only seven days in advance.

The meeting will be held on Wednesday, May 29, 2013, at 7:00pm at the Alliant Energy Center, Exhibition Hall B. If you care about the local economy, local employment, and the continuation of first-class mail service, please plan to be there, and encourage friends and family members to attend as well.

The End of First-Class Mail
When the postal services says its “future network” would support 2- to 3-day service standards, what it’s really saying is that it plans to eliminate first-class mail altogether (even if they still call it that, it won't be first-class service as we now know it). So even a piece of mail going from one side of Madison to the other would be shipped to Milwaukee and back again before being delivered. Currently mail posted before 8pm is processed that same evening. The proposed “revised entry times” would mean that the last collection would be earlier in the day, further slowing mail delivery.

What the USPS is proposing, to take Madison’s outgoing mail processing to Milwaukee, is already being done with Saturday mail. Currently, a letter mailed across town in Madison on a Monday is processed here in Madison and arrives at its destination on Tuesday. But a letter mailed across town on a Saturday is now shipped to Milwaukee on Saturday night, is processed, and then shipped back to Madison for further processing on Monday, and doesn’t arrive at its destination until Tuesday.

Even if first-class mail volume is down, the service is essential and is extremely valuable to residential customers and small businesses. Lower volume does not mean that the service is less valuable or is unnecessary. Moreover, the prices charged for all the different classes of mail are absurdly low. Raising the price for first-class delivery would be far preferable to losing the service altogether. Postmaster General Donahoe says the postal service doesn’t want to raise its rates, but he gives no indication as to why.

Moreover, once first-class mail service is gone, there will be no getting it back. The postal service is piece-by-piece dismantling its processing capabilities, so even were mail volume to increase in the future (which it very possibly could), the postal service would no longer be able to provide first-class service. The public’s only option would be to procure the service through private delivery companies that would charge an astronomically higher price than the USPS.

The USPS’s claim to “preserve the ability to provide and finance secure, reliable and affordable universal delivery service” is specious at best. It’s not going to “enhance commerce” to slow mail delivery.

The Presumed Savings
The postal service spuriously claims that the proposed “consolidation” would save some $5 million per year. But the USPS’s annual revenue is roughly $65 billion per year. Even if the estimated savings were accurate (which they aren’t), and even if the same savings were achieved in a hundred different locations, it would save only a half-billion dollars and would not significantly lower the claimed budget gap of roughly $10 billion per year. These would be shockingly small savings for destroying not only service but also invaluable, irreplaceable infrastructure.

The postal service claims that it has “excess capacity” and that parts of its operation are idle owing to low mail volume. However, the reason for idleness is that mass mailers are given deep discounts for doing sorting work that the USPS would otherwise do. The costs of doing that work are largely fixed costs; we’ve already paid them. We’ve built the plants, acquired the equipment, hired and trained the staff. So having outside mail companies do that work does not save those costs, but huge discounts are granted anyway. In other words, the USPS is giving away the store. It regularly loses large amounts of money because of those huge discounts it grants to bulk mailers.

Postal management claims it will save $4 million per year by eliminating 30 mail-processing jobs (54 fewer in Madison and 24 more in Milwaukee). Yet the eliminations would be the new hires who work part-time for about $15 per hour, with few benefits, making on the order of $15,000 per year each. Thirty fewer such positions would save about half a million dollars. The claim of $4 million in savings is high by a factor of 10 (even if the mail processing and distribution really could be done with 30 fewer employees—rather than more employees, as is likely).

The USPS claims that the consolidation is part of its plan to “protect U.S. taxpayers.” Say what? No tax dollars—no federal funds or appropriations—go to the postal service. Moreover, the way the postal service is supposed to work is that it should charge enough for its services to cover its costs. However, the 2006 Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act tied rate increases to the consumer price index, in spite of fuel costs rising much faster than the CPI. The law also demands $5.5 billion per year to fund 75 years’ worth of future retiree medical costs within ten years—an onerous requirement no other government agency is subject to.

The Costs of Consolidation
At a time when everyone else on the planet is coming up with ways to drive less in order to lower fuel consumption and reduce environmental damage, the USPS is increasing its fuel consumption in the name of cost savings. Transportation and mail-handling costs will rise significantly with the increased movement of mail to and from Milwaukee, causing significant wear and tear on the roads, along with increased traffic congestion (and accidents) and fuel consumption. Not to mention the how the vicissitudes of Wisconsin weather would impact increased shipping during the peak mailing season in December. It’s not a more efficient transportation network when mail is needlessly shipped 150 miles or more because of reduced processing capacity.

During times of peak volume the efficiency of the mail system will decrease. With slower service, the mail will be in the USPS’s possession longer, thereby clogging up the plants and increasing opportunities for mail to be lost or misdirected. During the month of December, when mail volume is at its yearly peak, both the Madison and Milwaukee processing plants are heavily used. Concentrating all the mail processing from southern Wisconsin in Milwaukee, even if some extra equipment and workers were added there, would seriously clog that plant’s operations, especially in December.

The “consolidation” and other plant closings in Wisconsin represent significant destruction of valuable postal infrastructure that cannot be restored. Already ten mail-processing plants in the area have been or are being closed: Kenosha, Portage, Oshkosh, Wausau, Eau Claire, La Crosse, Rockford IL, Duluth MN, Rochester MN, and Kingsford MI. In areas where plants have closed, service has declined and savings, if any, have not been significant. Further decimation of the infrastructure will severely limit the postal service’s ability to deliver the mail and will result in few if any savings.

Job Losses
Postal management projects that with its consolidation plan it would eliminate 54 jobs in Madison. This smaller workforce, however, would be responsible for the increase in mail-handling and transportation between the Madison and Milwaukee plants. Many career employees in Madison have already been replaced with part-time, low-wage, low-benefit workers. Employees have not been laid off, but they have been transferred to other facilities, some of which are subsequently downsized or closed.

And yet the postal service claims that its proposal will “maintain fairness to employees.” The claim doesn’t square with how employees’ are moved to other locales only to find those jobs also being eliminated. Nor does it square with Postmaster General Donahoe’s assertion that cost savings will be accrued via “worker compensation reforms,” in other words, lower pay.

A Manufactured Crisis with a Simple Solution
The “consolidation” proposal in Madison is part of the relentless ongoing step-by-step march toward privatization. Large commercial mailers, which USPS management frequently refer to as “stakeholders,” don’t want first-class mail service, and they shudder at the thought of paying high enough prices to provide paying postal employees a living wage. Those commercial mailers enjoy constant access to USPS top management; they even have an office inside USPS headquarters in Washington, in the guise of a “Mailers Technical Advisory Committee.” In this and other ways it is the mass mailers who’ve captured control of USPS decision making, and they are the ones pushing for ever-lower costs and the destruction of the postal infrastructure.

The USPS claims that it has a “massive nationwide infrastructure that is no longer financially sustainable.” It claims that its “dire financial position requires urgent action to ensure continued mail delivery and to restore long-term self sufficiency.” But that valuable, irreplaceable infrastructure would indeed be financially sustainable, and the postal service’s financial position would be no longer be so “dire” if only Congress would require the USPS to charge customers enough to cover its costs, free the USPS from the ludicrously burdensome requirement to prefund retirement for yet-to-be-born employees, and require that overly generous discounts to large commercial mailers be discontinued.

Residential Customers’ Postal Board
Heretofore residential customers have not been represented in deliberations concerning the USPS. It is essential, then, that a residential customers’ postal board be formed along the same lines as the Citizens’ Utility Boards. The Residential Customers’ Postal Board would need to hire researchers and lobbyists to work on behalf of the American people, to exercise a counterweight to the outsize influence of the large commercial mailers, to shine a bright light on USPS management and its masters in the mailing industry, and to lobby on behalf of residential customers before the Postal Regulatory Commission, the Postal Board of Governors, USPS management, the U.S. Congress, and the president.

If you’re interested in working toward the formation of a Residential Customers’ Postal Board, please contact us at worleydervish@gmail.com.

Your Action Is Needed
Come to the meeting and make your voice heard: Alliant Energy Center, Exhibition Hall B, on Wednesday at 7pm. Review the talking points and help us make sure each is addressed at the meeting.

Write a letter (postmarked no later than June 13, 2013) opposing the “consolidation plan” and the elimination of first-class mail even if you attend the meeting (sample letter here). Mail the letter to

Manager, Consumer & Industry Contact
Lakeland District
PO Box 5008
Milwaukee, WI 53201-5008

And finally, please sign and share the “Save Our Post Office” petition, Wisconsin edition.

For Whom Does the Post Exist?

Postmaster Mark Jamison writes an excellent article in Steve Hutkins' wonderful blog, savethepostoffice.com, about the big issues: does USPS exist merely to serve advertising mass mailers, or does it have an obligation to serve the nation? USPS management and frequently its Office of the Inspector General, and many of the people on the Postal Regulatory Commission, on the Board of Governors, in Congress, and the president, have the wrong answer.

We Are All Immigrants

If you missed it last night, or you've turned your television off like we have, you can watch Frontline: Lost in Detention online (54 minutes). Not for the faint of heart, it shows the abusiveness and insanity of US immigration enforcement.

Because of the likelihood of abuse, a few things should never be privatized. Prisons, health care, and education are at the top of that list. Capitalism is fine. But when it morphs into unbridled greed, as it clearly has done, it can only lead to human suffering, gross injustice, and economic collapse.

Alabama's new anti-immigrant law is already hurting its farmers, because much to the surprise of Governor Bentley, most U.S. citizens really don't want to do farm work. "Jobless resident Americans lack the physical stamina and the mental toughness to see the job through," says Alabama farmer Jerry Spencer. There's a certain measure of desperation, determination, and fortitude required to do that kind of work. Most of us aren't that desperate, determined, or tough. But if the economy and our elected officials continue on their current path, it's likely that our children will be.

All human beings are migrants. We are born into this life, we stay for a while, and then we move on. None of us are permanent residents. In the meantime, we go where we believe we have the best chance to provide for our families. Those who are desperate, determined, and strong enough to do the work that U.S. citizens do not want to do, who see grueling farm work as their best chance to provide for their families, pose no threat to anyone. We need them. And our well-being is tied to theirs.

--TomRW & MaryRW

More from HuffPost: After Alabama Immigration Law, Few Americans Taking Immigrants' Work

And more from the Washington Post/Associated Press: Few Americans Take Immigrants' Jobs in Alabama

Urgent Call to Action: Save First-Class Mail

The management of the US Postal Service has proposed a drastic and irreversible reduction in first-class mail delivery standards. Currently 41.5 percent of first-class mail is delivered in one day, 26.6 percent in two days, and 31.6 percent in three days. The proposal would eliminate one-day delivery altogether. Two-day deliveries would increase to 50.6 percent and three-day to 49.1 percent. The proposed increase in delivery time would be devastating to the many individuals, small businesses, and entrepreneurs who rely on first-class mail.

The proposal, the stated goal of which is to “bring operating costs in line with revenues,” would enable the USPS to eliminate 60 percent of the USPS’s processing-and-distribution plants, purportedly to cut costs. But the presumed savings are actually quite small (only $3 billion, or 4 percent of the USPS’s annual budget). All the mail would still have to be delivered. It would just have to be hauled farther to be processed, thus increasing fuel costs and the commensurate harm to the environment.

The possibility of raising revenues by increasing prices and expanding services is never mentioned. Bowing to pressure from the Direct Marketing Association, the postal service recently withdrew a request for an “exigent rate increase.” The USPS charges direct mailers less than what it costs to deliver their advertising mail, so in essence the direct mailers are stealing from the USPS with each piece of mail they send. Regarding the withdrawal of the proposed rate increase, Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe exclaimed that the direct mailing industry is “way too fragile” to survive a price increase. Clearly, the health of that industry is more important to him than the health of the USPS.

In its projection of the effects of the proposed change in service standards, the USPS does not even mention the American people. It lists only the possible effects on “commercial mailers.” Noncommercial mailers—citizens, entrepreneurs, small businesses, and rural communities—are not given even the slightest consideration.

Because the reduction in service standards would enable the USPS to dismantle its extraordinary processing-and-distribution network, a return to the current service standards would be impossible, thus permanently undermining the USPS’s ability to serve the American people, further reducing mail volume and postal revenues, and further imperiling the US Postal Service itself. The vast majority of the American people won’t fully realize the effects of the proposed reduction in service until it’s too late.

The notice in the Federal Register invites comments from the public between now and October 21, 2011. Letters may be sent to Manager, Industry Engagement and Outreach, United States Postal Service, 475 L’Enfant Plaza, SW – Room 4617, Washington, DC 20260, or e-mailed to industryfeedback@usps.com.

In hopes of gathering more signatures, we have created a petition at Change.org calling for retention of the current first-class service standards. We have less than two weeks to gather as many signatures as possible. Please sign the petition and write your own letter, and ask others to do the same. Once USPS management’s proposal is accepted, there will be no turning back.

Privatized Postal Disservice

This article, “Privatised mail: a second-class delivery” in The Guardian sheds light on some of the chaos and hardship resulting from privatized postal service. Undelivered mail stacks up in the apartments of privatized carriers in Holland, who are paid piece rates amounting to far less than the minimum wage.

The longer version of the same article, “In the Sorting Office,” in the London Review of Books, includes some of the political history in the Reagan-Thatcher era that brought the privatization about.

The winners from Holland’s liberalization of the postal market were the big organizations who bulk mailed. The losers? Almost everybody else.

The author, James Meek, wrongly accepts that the Internet necessarily means less demand for postal service. The opposite is true. Customers e-mailing documents to USPS to be printed at and delivered from the destination post office could be the biggest boon to mail since paper.

USPS Under Threat

The Postmaster General is in the process of:

• reducing the postal distribution network from some 520 processing and distribution centers to “less than 200,”
• increasing delivery times by at least 1 or 2 days for all mail,
• closing 15,000 “unprofitable” post offices,
• destroying 220,000 of the 645,000 postal jobs.

He also wants to:

• reduce delivery from 6 days per week to 5 days per week,
• break the employee unions, lay off middle-class union employees, and replace them with part-time, low-wage, low-benefit employees,
• take away promised retirement benefits employees have worked for,
• take away promised medical insurance benefits employees have worked for.

Why? The big lie is, “USPS is in financial trouble, because volume is down.”

Not true. The “crisis” is entirely a manufactured one. It was manufactured by a 2006 law passed by Congress and signed by George W. Bush. This law requires USPS to:

• pay $5.5 billion yearly to the U.S. treasury, every year for 10 years,
• never raise postage rates, for any kind of mail, faster than the rate of inflation.

If it were not for these arbitrary and deadly requirements, USPS would not be in a financial “crisis.”

The $5.5 billion per year is supposed to pay for medical insurance benefits for future retirees for the next 75 years. No other company, and no other government agency, has to prepay 75 years worth of future benefits.

USPS has already overpaid at least $50 billion into its pension fund. USPS is in no danger of running out of money for retirees.

Postage rates on catalogs and other kinds of “bulk mail” are lower than the cost of delivery. This was true in 2006, it was known in 2006, and it is still true. The 2006 law makes sure these rates stay lower than what it costs USPS to deliver the mail.

Fuel costs have risen faster than the rate of inflation. The 2006 law makes sure USPS cannot increase its prices as much as its costs have increased.

The effect of these destructive requirements is to bankrupt the Postal Service.

Instead of asking the Postal Regulatory Commission for permission to raise prices, the Postmaster General is closing most of the postal distribution network, closing thousands of post offices, destroying hundreds of thousands of decent jobs, and planning to drastically reduce postal service.

It’s as if the people who wrote the 2006 law, and Postmaster General Donahoe, were trying to destroy the Postal Service.

Who would do this? Who will benefit?

The private mailing industry will benefit. After the US Postal Service reduces its distribution network to the point where it can no longer provide service within 1 to 3 days, anyone who needs to send a piece of mail to get somewhere quickly will have to send it FedEx, or some other private service, at a much higher price.

The U.S. Postal Service owns a huge amount of very valuable property: usually a large Post Office in the center of every town. Once the post offices and processing and distribution centers are closed, they will be sold, at low prices, to private companies. Once these post offices and processing centers are gone, USPS will never again be able to recover them.

The Direct Marketing Association and other big mailers of the “Mailers Technical Advisory Committee” want to keep their postage rates low—whatever the cost.

• The cost will be thousands of lost post offices. The loss of some of these will devastate their towns.
• The cost will be hundreds of thousands of lost middle-class jobs. In a bad economy, this loss will multiply to many more unemployed people.
• The cost will be a lesser postal distribution network, no longer able to provide first-class service.
• The cost to remote areas will be that postal service will simply be unavailable.
• The cost to the economy will be the loss of a service essential to millions of people and business.

The USPS has been adding 3 million delivery addresses per year, as population grows. Reducing the distribution network and closing post offices, capacity will not be available when population, prosperity, and need for postal service increase.

The U.S. Postal Service is not a business. It is a public service. Its destruction will do great harm to the U.S. economy.

What should be done?

• Congress must pass House Resolution 1351. This would allow USPS to use the $50 billion it overpaid into its pension fund to cover its obligation under the 2006 law to prepay future medical insurance for future retirees.
• Congress must reject House Resolution 2309 and all similar bills. H.R. 2309 would close thousands more post offices and break the employee unions, replacing decent jobs with low-wage, low-benefit jobs.
• Congress must repeal the 2006 “Postal Accountability Enhancement Act,” which is the cause of the crisis.
• Postage rates on all kinds of mail must at least cover their costs.
• The Department of Justice must investigate and stop the Postmaster General’s actions to close post offices and processing and distribution centers in violation of current law. By law, post offices and processing centers cannot be closed unless USPS can show that the closing will not hurt service. The closings always hurt service. USPS acts without providing required information to the community and unions, without regard to public input, without regard to reduction of service.

Please sign the petition at http://www.change.org/petitions/dont-let-the-usps-be-destroyed. We plan to send the petition to Congress on Sept. 27, 2011.

For more information, see savethepostoffice.com, and follow the links in the “petition activity” tab under “The story so far” on the Change.org petition page.

Contact your representative and senators at http://www.contactingthecongress.org/.

Visit the American Postal Workers Union website at http://www.capwiz.com/apwu/home/ to send your congressional representative an e-mail message and/or find their mailing address.

Contact President Barack Obama via Web Form.

Website: www.whitehouse.gov

Washington Office: District of Columbia 20500

Phone: (202) 456-1414
Fax: (202) 456-2461

Experts on this issue include:

Steve Hutkins writes a brilliant website devoted to exposing USPS attempts to destroy itself:

http://www.savethepostoffice.com/

This post from Sept. 11, 2011 is a good overview:

http://www.savethepostoffice.com/whats-wrong-postal-service-how-about-whats-wrong-media

This post from Aug. 13, 2011 explains that USPS has precipitated a crisis in order to win destructive change not normally possible:

http://www.savethepostoffice.com/shock-doctrine-why-postal-service-scaring-hell-out-us

Carol Miller brings the important perspective of the isolated rural Western town, hard hit by the ruthless and unnecessary abandonment of postal service:

http://www.dailyyonder.com/closing-rural-po-ko-punch/2011/08/12/3472

Cliff Guffey, president of APWU, presented this excellent rebuttal of USPS claims, to the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs on Sept. 6, 2011:

http://www.apwu.org/news/nsb/2011/nsb19-110906-senatehearing.pdf

Chuck Zlatkin, Legislative and Political Director of the New York Metro Area Postal Union, the largest local of the American Postal Workers Union, AFL-CIO, reiterates that USPS is telling the country the Big Lie about itself, in order to turn itself into an employer in the Walmart mode:

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Destroying-the-Postal-Serv-by-Chuck-Zlatkin-110905-492.html

Zlatkin is also quoted in Allison Kilkenny’s piece in Truthout, exposing USPS actions as class warfare:

http://www.truth-out.org/last-union/1315492298

This Truthout link also includes a video of Thom Hartman interviewing Chuck Zlatkin.

—TomRW

Ready for the Bread Line? The "Wisconsinization" of the USPS

Yesterday afternoon, a Senate hearing entitled "U.S. Postal Service in Crisis: Proposals to Prevent a Postal Shutdown" was convened before the Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs, chaired by none other than the inimitable Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.). In his introductory statement, Senator Joe had this to say about the USPS:

Through parts of four centuries, the Postal System has actually helped make us a nation, connecting the American people to one another, moving commerce and culture coast to coast and to all points in between. The Postal Service has also bound individual towns and neighborhoods together, with the local Post Office often serving as a center of civic life.

Over the years, the Post Office has grown very large. Today the United States Postal Service is the second largest employer in the United States, second only to Wal-Mart. And with 32,000 Post Offices, it has more domestic retail outlets than Wal-Mart, Starbucks and McDonalds combined. Sadly, these impressive statistics belie a troubled business on the verge of bankruptcy. . . . The bottom line here is that if nothing is done, the Postal Service will run out of money and be forced to severely slash service and employees. And that is the last thing our struggling economy and our country need right now.

First, Mr. Chair, the USPS is not a "troubled business." It is not a business at all. It is a public service. Certainly, severely slashing service and employees (sounds extremely painful both literally and figuratively) is indeed the "last thing our struggling economy and our country need right now." I can't help but think that was a Freudian slip about slashing employees (rather than slashing jobs or slashing the number of employees).

In her statement, Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine) correctly asserted that "the Postal Service plays an essential role in our national economy. . . . The Postal Service directly supports a $1.1 trillion mailing industry that employs approximately 8.7 million Americans. . . . Many of these businesses can’t turn to readily available alternatives. They depend on a healthy, efficient Postal Service."

The National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC) has pointed out that the USPS's financial difficulties can be entirely attributed to the "congressional mandate to pre-fund future retiree health benefits. [The USPS] is the only federal agency required to do so: It must pre-fund these benefits some 75 years into the future on a massively accelerated schedule. This postal-only mandate, which costs the USPS $5.5 billion per year, accounts for 100 percent of the Postal Service’s $20 billion in losses over the past four years. It also accounts for 100 percent of the rise in the Postal Service’s debt in recent years. Without the mandate, the USPS would have been profitable over the past four years and it would have significant borrowing authority to ride out the bad economy" (emphasis added).

That the truth of this situation is not being reported on and that the lies about the situation are being spread by the media has me howling mad. According to savethepostoffice.com, "The Postal Service could be pursuing a rate increase now to help with its cash flow problem, yet it was just a few weeks ago that the Postal Service pulled its request for an 'exigent rate increase' (i.e., one that goes beyond the rate of inflation) because the Postmaster General didn’t want to anger the mail industry — his big 'stakeholders,' for whom a small increase means less profit."

In his testimony yesterday, Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe pointed out that as of June 2011 the number of USPS employees had been reduced by 8,000 in the previous quarter. So not only is the USPS hemorrhaging money, it's already hemorrhaging jobs at an alarming rate. In the last four years, the number of USPS career employees has been reduced by 110,000, plus another 20,500 so far in 2011.

Nevertheless, Donahoe wants Congress to give him permission to break a four-month-old contract so he can slash 220,000 more jobs. He wants to go to 5-day delivery and slash worker benefits. The point of this, really, is not to save the USPS. It is to destroy the postal unions.

As Chuck Zlatkin asserts in his perceptive piece in OpEd News, the situation is nothing less than the "Wisconsinization" of the postal service, that is, it's "an excuse to break postal unions and siphon off the profitable aspects of mail delivery to private enterprise and demanding that those most in need sacrifice again."

Both Collins and Lieberman praised Donahoe yesterday for his "courage" and his "creative proposals." Donahoe's proposal to throw the USPS under the bus is neither courageous nor creative. It's cowardly and utterly destructive.

Because the USPS is so big and is spread all over the country, because it supports a $1.1 trillion industry, gutting the USPS as Donahoe proposes will have a calamitous effect on the already embattled US economy. It will have a far greater impact than the "Wisconsinization" of Wisconsin. It will be an enormous blow to the already rapidly shrinking middle class and may very well precipitate another Great Depression.

Remember the bread lines, soup kitchens, hoboes, and Hoovervilles of the 1930s? They may be our future as well as our past.

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If you haven't already signed the petition, please do so,

and ask your friends and family to as well.