Don't Let Congress Kill The U.S. Postal System

The Republicans want you to think the United States Postal Service (USPS) is a failure, and needs to be abandoned in favor of private carriers. That is a lie. The USPS has always performed effectively, and continues to do so. The only reason it is in any kind of trouble is the onerous requirements that have been placed on it by Congress (especially the Republicans, who don't want their corporate buddies to have to compete with the USPS).

Here is how Texas populist Jim Hightower puts it on his blog:

One public service that people really like and count on is the post office – which literally delivers for us.

Antigovernment ideologues and privatization dogmatists, however, hate the very word "public," and they've long sought to demonize the US Postal Service, undercut its popular support, and finally dismantle it. Their main line of attack has been to depict it as a bloated, inefficient, outmoded agency that's a hopeless money loser, sucking billions from taxpayers. Never mind that USPS doesn't take a dime of tax money to fund its operation – it's actually a congressionally-chartered, for-profit corporation that earns its revenue by selling stamps and services to customers. And here's something that will come as a surprise to most people: The post office makes a profit – expected to be more than a billion dollars this year.

Yet, the media keep reporting that the USPS is losing billions of dollars each year. What they fail to mention, however, is that those are phony paper losses manufactured by Congress at the behest of corporate privatizers.

Late in 2006, the lame duck Republican Congress rammed into law a cockamamie requirement that the Postal Service must pre-fund the retiree health benefits of everyone it employs or expects to employ for the next 75 years. Hello, that includes workers who're not even born yet! No other business in America is required to pre-fund such benefits for even one year. To add to Congress' cockamamie-ness, the service is being forced to put up all of that money within just 10 years – which has been costing USPS more than $5 billion a year. That artificial burden accounts for 100 percent of the so-called "losses" the media keep reporting.

It's like tying an anvil around someone's neck, throwing the person out of a boat, and saying, "Swim to shore, sucker."

Bernie Speaks Up For The U.S. Postal System

The Republicans have darn near put our postal system out of business -- in spite of the fact that it is the best in the world. And they have done that on purpose, as part of their drive to privatize all aspects of government (so their rich friends can turn public service into just another money-making venture). I think this is wrong, and so does Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont). Here is what he had to say on the subject in an article he wrote for the Wall Street Journal.

The U.S. Postal Service is one of our most popular and important government agencies. It provides universal service six days a week to every corner of America, no matter how small or remote. It supports millions of jobs in virtually every other sector of our economy. It provides decent-paying union jobs to some 500,000 Americans, and it is the largest employer of veterans.

Whether you are a low-income elderly woman living at the end of a dirt road in Vermont or a wealthy CEO living on Park Avenue, you get your mail six days a week. And you pay for this service at a cost far less than anywhere else in the industrialized world.

Yet the Postal Service is under constant and vicious attack. Why? The answer is simple. There are very powerful and wealthy special interests who want to privatize or dismember virtually every function that government now performs, whether it is Social Security, Medicare, public education or the Postal Service. They see an opportunity for Wall Street and corporate America to make billions in profits out of these services, and couldn't care less how privatization or a degradation of services affects ordinary Americans.

For years, antigovernment forces have been telling us that there is a financial crisis at the Postal Service and that it is going broke. That is not true. The crisis is manufactured.

At the insistence of the Bush administration, Congress in 2006 passed legislation that required the Postal Service to prefund, over a 10-year period, 75 years of future retiree health benefits. This onerous and unprecedented burden—$5.5 billion a year—is responsible for all of the financial losses posted by the Postal Service since October 2012.

Without prefunding, the Postal Service would have made a $623 million profit last year. Excluding the prefunding mandate, the Postal Service estimates it will make more than $1 billion in profits this year. This is not surprising, since the Postal Service made a combined profit of $9 billion from 2003-06, before the prefunding mandate took effect.

The mandate allows the antigovernment crowd to proclaim that the Postal Service "is going bankrupt." Their solution is to slash hundreds of thousands of jobs, close thousands of post offices, eliminate hundreds of mail processing plants, end Saturday mail, and substantially slow down mail delivery.

In the House, Rep. Darrell Issa (R., Calif.) passed a bill through his committee that would do all of these things. The bill would drive more customers to seek other options and will lead to a death spiral—lower-quality service, fewer customers, more cuts, less revenue and eventually the destruction of the Postal Service.

In the Senate, Sens. Tom Carper (D., Del.) and Tom Coburn (R., Okla.) also passed a postal reform bill through the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee. While not as destructive as the House proposal, the Carper-Coburn bill could lead to the loss of about 100,000 jobs, allow the Postal Service to eliminate six-day mail delivery, substantially slow down the delivery of mail, and lead to the loss of more mail processing plants and post offices within the next few years.

There are much better ideas that would strengthen, not destroy the Postal Service, and they are in the Postal Service Protection Act that has been introduced by Rep. Peter DeFazio (D., Ore.) in the House and by me in the Senate. The House bill has 174 co-sponsors. The Senate bill has 27 co-sponsors.

First, prefunding must end. The future retiree health fund now has some $50 billion in it. That is enough. This step alone will restore the Postal Service to profitability.

Second, the Postal Service should have the flexibility to provide new consumer products and services—a flexibility that was banned by Congress in 2006. It is now against the law for workers in post offices to notarize or make copies of documents; to cash checks; to deliver wine or beer; or to engage in e-commerce activities (like scanning physical mail into a PDF and sending it through e-mail, selling non-postal products on the Internet or offering a non-commercial version of Gmail).

A recent report from the Postal Service Inspector General suggests that almost $9 billion a year could be generated by providing financial services. At a time when more than 80 million lower-income Americans have no bank accounts or are forced to rely on rip-off check-cashing storefronts and payday lenders, these kinds of financial services would be of huge social benefit.

It is time for Congress to save the Postal Service, not dismantle it.

USPS Is Campaign's Biggest Beneficiary

It looks like one big winner has already been decided in the 2012 political campaign -- the United States Postal Service. Spending on presidential campaign mailings was already over $28.9 million at the end of August. That tops the 2008 campaign's spending for the entire election cycle, which was only $27.9 million -- and you know the mailings going out to voters won't ease up any in September and October (but will probably increase).

The Postal Service had hoped to rake in about $285 million (in all races -- local, state, and federal), but it's now looking like they'll easily top that. The USPS is now hoping to top $338 million (which was its take in the 2010 election). But it could be even more. Political mail makes up about 15% of campaign spending, and the Center for Responsive Politics estimates that spending could top $2.5 billion -- which would give the USPS a windfall of about $375 million.

And it couldn't have come at a better time. The Postal Service has been having financial problems since Congress passed a bill in 2006 requiring it to donate over $5 billion a year for 10 years for future retiree health benefits. In fact, the USPS was expected to have a serious cash crunch in October. While the campaign money hasn't solved all their problems, it does look like it will take care of their immediate cash problems. And since they go into the holiday mailing season soon after the election, it looks like they will be OK until next year.

An added benefit this year is from spending by the super-PACs. While they spend a lot on TV, they like to use mailings because that lets them target the individuals and areas they are interested in reaching (without wasting money on places where the outcome is already known). And the super-PACs don't get a discount on their mailings like the campaigns do. They must pay the regular price.

I have to admit that I no longer even open any of the political mail that I get. It goes straight from the mailbox to the trash can -- regardless of which party has sent it. But I hope they go on spending that money on mailings. I have a daughter who makes her living by hauling the mail -- and she could use a little job security.

Some Great New Stamps

For those of you, like me, who are getting sick of the same old forever stamps, help is on the way. A new set of forever stamps went on sale yesterday. These stamps have painting of five different Hispanic entertainers -- Tito Puente, Carmen Miranda, Celia Cruz, Selena and Carlos Gardel. The AP says the stamps "represent a range of Latin musical styles, including Tejano, tango, samba, Latin jazz and samba." I like them -- a lot.

Post Office Lets Time Warner Write Its Rules

It looks like the Bush administration is still letting the big corporations call the shots, to the detriment of America's citizens. The U.S. Post Office is getting ready to institute a plan drawn up by Time Warner. This plan would give Time Warner and other big magazine conglomerates discount rates, while radically raising the rates on smaller magazines.

It sounds like the Post Office is letting themselves be used as a pawn so the big magazines can get rid of their smaller competition. But Timothy Karr says it better than I could, so I reprint below the letter I received from Free Press last night.


Dear Media Reformers,


The U.S. Postal Service is about to implement a massive hike in its rates for magazines that would put diverse and free speech at risk.

Postal regulators have decided to adopt a plan that favors the nation's largest publishers, like Time Warner and Hearst, while unfairly burdening thousands of smaller and independent magazines with much higher postal rates, as high as 20 or 30 percent.

The plan to give Big Media lower rates was submitted by Time Warner, the nation's largest publisher. We were stunned when postal regulators chose the Time Warner plan -- with little apparent hard research on how the plan would affect small publishers -- instead of another proposal made by the Postal Service itself that would have imposed an equal increase on all publishers.

If implemented, the Time Warner plan could push many smaller publications to the brink of bankruptcy.

America's founding fathers understood that the First Amendment would be worth little without a postal system that encouraged broad public participation in America's marketplace of ideas. To ensure that a diversity of viewpoints were available to "the whole mass of the people," they created affordable postal rates that gave smaller political journals a voice.

The rate increase reverses this egalitarian ideal. It threatens the democratic discourse that our founding fathers fostered through the U.S. mail system.

Please join us in urging postal regulators and Congress to convene public hearings, investigate how these rate increases were decided in what seems to be an unfair and unorthodox way, and reverse the ruling.

With your help, we can stop this decision and restore the postal system that has served free speech in America so well.

Thanks for all you do,

Timothy Karr
Campaign Director
Free Press
www.freepress.net