US's President Traitor wants to destroy Constitutionally mandated Post Office .

Politics and Social Issues
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Have you tried buying US Post Office supplies on line this morning?

This weekend pleas were put out for folks to support their US Constitution Mandated, US Post Office -despite trumps plans and efforts to destroy it.

This morning their website had to put our a notice that they have had such a heavy volume of orders, that we are to expect a few days delay in delivering. Almost sounds like democracy in action. The heart still beats, but can we actually revive it?

Will the United States Post Office Become a Victim of #COVID19?

Posted on April 12, 2020 by Lambert Strether

nakedcapitalism _ com/2020/04/will-the-united-states-post-office-become-a-victim-of-covid19 _ html

Readers will recall the neoliberal playbook: “[1] Defund [or sabotage], [2] claim crisis, [3] call for privatization… [4] profit!” (rinse, repeat as necessary. We can see this happen with the VA here, and with the NHS in the UK. Fortunately for those who believe that the maiil is a public good, we in the United States, even in the current crisis, seem hung up between stage [3], “call for privatization,” and [4], “profit!” (And by invoking Betteridge’s Law with the headline, perhaps I have done my own little bit to keep things hung up.)

In this post, I’ll look at the initial act of sabotage (“The Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act”), then at the prospects for privatization, and finally at the politics of a Post Office bailout in the midst of the corona virus crisis (which nobody wants to waste). Much of this material will be a refresher for long-time Naked Capitalism readers, since most of our posts on this to published in 2015, and newer readers may find it useful as well.

The Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act …

Continued Efforts at Post Office Privatization …

The Politics of a Post Office Bailout …

NOTES

[1] There is also a view that Trump wants to destroy the prospect of Vote By Mail for November by destroying the Post Office. I think this assumes that Trump is pointlessly devious. To control the outcome of vote by mail, all you have do is control the tabulation. So far as I know — I could be wrong — none of the vote-by-mail proposals on offer prevent privatizing the count. Much simpler to buy a vendor or a programmer than to take the heat for destroying the Post Office.

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Column: The Postal Service is America’s most popular government agency. Why does Trump hate it?

By MICHAEL HILTZIK - BUSINESS COLUMNIST - JAN. 9, 2020, 11:17 AM

latimes _ com/business/story/2020-01-09/postal-service-trump

It’s time once again to stand up for the most popular government agency of all, the one that curiously has come under the most consistent attack by the Trump administration and its congressional henchpersons.

We’re talking about the U.S. Postal Service. According to a survey last year by the Pew Research Center, 90% of the public has a favorable view of the USPS, handily outdistancing even such other popular agencies as the National Park Service and NASA.

Yet the conservative drumbeat for privatizing this crucial service never seems to slacken, even though privatization, which would inevitably mean crummy service and immense price increases, would be the surest route to turning public admiration for the USPS into public scorn.

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Trump Moves to Gut the Post Office

His war on Amazon expands to include the right wing’s campaign to abolish America’s oldest—and still successful—public service.

BY DAVID DAYEN - APRIL 16, 2018

prospect _ org/power/trump-moves-gut-post-office/

… And sometimes dreams become reality.

Let’s look at the executive order, which is a bit deceptive in its intentions. The policy section manages to mention that the Postal Service routinely earns the highest public approval rating of any agency in the federal government. But then it layers on the bad news: the decline in first-class mail volume—$65 billion in losses since 2009, an “unsustainable fiscal path.”

Amazingly, the policy section alludes to the inability of the USPS to fund retiree health and pension benefit obligations, without stating that it has the impossibly high statutory burden of pre-funding those obligations 75 years out, effectively having to pay today for future workers who have not yet been born.

No public agency or private company has any similar burden. It was placed on the Postal Service in the 2006 Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act to deliberately cripple the agency at the behest of UPS and FedEx, its two major competitors on package delivery. There should be no confusion: Without this completely anomalous pre-funding mandate, the USPS would be a money-making operation, regardless of the rise of email. …

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Trump’s privatization plan would destroy the Postal Service

washingtonpost - com/opinions/trumps-privatization-plan-would-destroy-the-postal-service/2018/08/07/caaf9a24-99a2-11e8-8d5e-c6c594024954_story - html

By Katrina vanden Heuvel - August 7, 2018

The post office has been woven into the fabric of American society since 1775, when the Second Continental Congress appointed Benjamin Franklin as the first postmaster general. Today, the U.S. Postal Service is the most popular government agency in the country, with a favorability rating of nearly 90 percent. But now, President Trump is apparently bent on destroying it.

This week, a task force created following an April executive order from Trump, is scheduled to deliver its recommendations for an overhaul of the Postal Service. Led by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and White House budget director Mick Mulvaney, the task force is expected to endorse the privatization proposal buried in the White House’s plan to reorganize the federal government — a radical assault on the administrative state.

That reorganization plan claimed that “USPS’s current model is unsustainable.” But while the Postal Service is losing money, its financial woes are largely the result of bad policy. Nearly all the agency’s losses over the past decade are attributable to a 2006 law requiring it to pre-fund retiree health benefits for 75 years, an onerous mandate that doesn’t apply to any other agency. As the Postal Service’s Office of Inspector General explained in 2015, the pre-funding requirement essentially amounts to a credit card company saying, “You will charge a million dollars on your credit card during your life; please include the million dollars in your next payment.”

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I literally feel sick after reading this. I hope it’s not C-19.

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Looks like fake news. No evidence whatsoever that Trump is planning to “destroy” USPS, just paranoid opinions.

The fact is the postal service has been decline for 20 years because much of what it used to do is now done online. It is simply not as necessary as it used to be. The 2006 Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act was instituted because the tide was already turning against USPS even way back then and it had to adapt.

I predict USPS will continue for at least another generation because it still serves a limited purpose, but probably within the lifetime of today’s young people, the agency will either be disbanded or turned it to something much, much smaller.

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Looks like fake news.
Why's that? You didn't hear it from FOX?
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The Right Wing’s Assault on the Post Office – Smashing the Myth That It’s in Financial Trouble
Posted on October 6, 2015 by Yves Smith

By Zaid Jilani, an AlterNet staff writer who you can follow at @zaidjilani on Twitter. Originally published at Alternet

The Washington Post recently published an article asking if the post office should “be sold to save it.” It begins with an explanation of what the author sees as an unsustainable postal service:

The U.S. Postal Service, which has been losing customers for almost a decade, is still struggling to right itself. Everyone understands its basic problem. The electronic age has pushed first-class mail into an unstoppable decline. To stay afloat, the post office needs to get its costs under control, by closing post offices, eliminating Saturday delivery, downsizing its workforce. To boost revenue, it could offer banking services and sell lots of stuff besides stamps.
It goes on to advocate for privatizing the agency by selling off parts of it to bidders who could then operate it independently.

That year, the Congress passed the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006 (PAEA). Under the terms of PAEA, the 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.”The problem with the Post‘s argument starts in its thesis: that the post office is in some sort of deep fiscal hole of its own making – a result of being left behind in the Internet Age and a shrinking consumer base. The truth is that almost all of the postal service’s losses can be traced back to a single change in the law made by the Republican Congress in 2006.

As consumer advocate Ralph Nader noted in 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.”

Remarkably, even one of the main sponsors of the 2006 legislation now agrees the pre-funding requirement was a bad idea. In 2014, a writer for the Roanoke Times reached out to former congressman Tom Davis, a Virginia Republican who today works for the accounting and consulting giant Deloitte. Though Davis agreed that the requirement was unwise, he said it was “the cost of getting the bill through,” noting that the Bush administration wanted to use the revenue to help balance the budget (note that the U.S. Postal Service doesn’t actually use taxpayer dollars but does have implicit subsidies such as borrowing at a lower rate).

That’s why suggestions like selling off the postal service or ending Saturday service are unnecessary. They fulfill the ideological agenda of those who want to undermine one of America’s oldest public institutions, but they don’t get at the heart of the actual budgetary problem. As the Office of the Inspector General for the service writes, other than this onerous requirement, it is basically fine:

First, let’s look at current funding levels.

The Postal Service has set-aside cash totals of more than $335 billion for its pensions and retiree healthcare, exceeding 83 percent of estimated future payouts. Its pension plans are nearly completely funded and its retiree healthcare liability is 50 percent funded — much better than the rest of the federal government. But getting to this well-funded position has been painful. The Postal Service’s $15 billion debt is a direct result of the mandate that it must pay about $5.6 billion a year for 10 years to prefund the retiree healthcare plan. This requirement has deprived the Postal Service of the opportunity to invest in capital projects and research and development.
But wait, there's more, https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/10/the-right-wings-assault-on-the-post-office-smashing-the-myth-that-its-in-financial-trouble.html
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Whenever a righty uses the term “fake news” I’m pretty sure they are full of it.

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https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/apr/15/afl-cio/widespread-facebook-post-blames-2006-law-us-postal/

Our ruling A Facebook post said: "The Postal Service is not losing money because of Amazon. It’s losing money because in 2006, the Republican-led Congress passed a law forcing it to prepay its pensions for 75 years, which no other corporation does … Without this law, the Postal Service would be turning a profit." The Postal Service isn’t losing money from its deal with Amazon. But the 2006 law requiring the pre-funding of health benefits for future retirees — not pensions — has put a financial strain on the Postal Service and hurt its ability to turn a profit in some recent years. However, the Postal Service has more financial problems than just the requirements of the law. We rate this statement Half True.
The 2006 bill did not help matters, but it does not change the fact that USPS is becoming obsolete.
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However, the Postal Service has more financial problems than just the requirements of the law. We rate this statement Half True.
What could be more of a financial problem than paying 75 years worth of pensions? Really, if they had most of that money back, they would still be in financial trouble? Really?
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now it’s crickets, guess the man ran out of convenient one-liners.

Which reminds me of a realization I had talking to the dude we get our drinking water from. Heck of a nice guy, we’ve chatted for years, he’s in his 40, perhaps 50s, still the single ski bum and partier at heart and a FOX News viewer. In person I can trying being much more diplomatic that over here at my corner hangout, so I try to parse the weirdness he espouses. It became crystal clear that one problem is these people simply don’t want to look beyond the headline they’ve been told to embrace. No curiosity whatsoever for: the rest of the story. No curiosity about the way things work.

I mean people aren’t even aware of how their toilets works. Durango is a per capita very well educated town, yet, the TP shortage has translated into monstrous problems for the water and sewer people, because people are flushing insane substitutes for TP down the toilet.

How could any adult be so disinterested and apathetic is what I’m wondering - I mean how can you possible imagine that the toilet is magic and once you flush, all of it disappears - yet that’s what they are thinking. Or is it that they really don’t care if we clog up half the sewer lines in town. Why worry?

But, I’m told it’s all fine and dandy and that it’s me who has absolutely no reason for feeling upset about our collective serial failures?

 

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Or is it that they are not thinking at all? About sewer systems, or our atmosphere, or our biosphere, or about evolution which is switching into high gear because we are fundamentally tearing part this planet’s web of life, and from here on in, biology and evolution are going to be scrambling to keep up with a biosphere that is falling apart. Unfortunately, it’s that old biosphere (we are destroying just as fast as our “ingenuity” will allow) that supplied all of the life support systems we literally depend for everything…