This Shit is Cool

The USPS is about to declare bankruptcy. It’s at the center of the longstanding plans for disaster recover and has been since the Cold War. It’s the only institution that could (for example) deliver covid meds to every home in America in one day.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/25/national-emergency-library/#going-postal

But Congress has decided not to bail out the postal service, despite Art 1, Sec 8 of the US Constitution: “To establish Post Offices and post Roads.”

Maybe it’s because without a USPS we couldn’t have a postal vote in 2020?

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/27/just-asking-questions/#save-usps

The proximate cause of the post office’s bankruptcy is the pandemic, but that is merely the finishing blow. The USPS was murdered in 2006, when Congress passed the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2020/04/will-the-united-states-post-office-become-a-victim-of-covid19.html

The Act gave the USPS a mere 10 years to “prefund its future health care benefit payments to retirees for the next 75 years.” That is, to set aside cash to pay medical bills for future employees who hadn’t been born yet.

https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h109-6407

The Act gave the USPS a mere 10 years to “prefund its future health care benefit payments to retirees for the next 75 years.” That is, to set aside cash to pay medical bills for future employees who hadn’t been born yet.

https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h109-6407

The USPS’s murder is straight out of the neoliberal playbook: “1 Defund, 2 claim crisis, 3 call for privatizatization, 4 profit!”

As Lambert Strether points out, it was a bipartisan act of murder, cosponored by the “centrist” Democrat Henry Waxman.

Killing the USPS looms large in the Trump admin’s (nonmetaphorical, actual) privatization playbook, “Delivering Government Solutions in the 21st Century Reform Plan and Reorganization Recommendations”:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Government-Reform-and-Reorg-Plan.pdf

The proposals are for USPS to become a Wework clone or franchisee, but not to become a publicly owned bank - a common line of business for other nations’ postal services, natural based on the amounts of cash they handle.

The USPS is the nation’s second largest employer of veterans, with 630,000 employees. Trump is about to allow it to collapse so that UPS, Fedex and other private firms can skim off the most profitable parts of its business and leave rural Americans totally isolated.

The loss of the USPS would mean the loss of the last truly universal federal program in America and would unduly hammer the people whom Trump claims to love – veterans and rural voters.