To The Editor:
I read that the USPS is not broke. In those four years of loudly deplored “Losses”, the service actually produced a 700-million operational profit (despite the worst economy since the great depression). What’s going on here? Right-Wing sabotage of USPS Financing, that’s what. In 2006 the Bush White House and Congress whacked the post office with postal accountability and enhancement act-an incredible piece of ugliness requiring the agency to prepay the health care benefit not only of current employees who’ll retire during the next 75 years. Yes, that includes employees who’re not yet born!
No other agency and no corporation has to do this. Worst, this ridiculous law demand that USPS fully finds this seven-decade burden by 2016. Imagine the shrieks of outrage if Congress tried to slap FedEx or other private firms with such an onerous requirement. This politically motivated mandate is costing the Postal Service $5.5 billion a year-money taking right out of postage revenue that could be going to services. That’s the real source of the financial crisis squeezing America’s Post Offices.
But it’s not the only hocus pocus that has falsely fabricated the public perception that our mail agency is “broke” Due to 40-year old accounting error, the Federal Office of Personnel Management thus overcharged the Post Office by as much as $80 billion for payment into the Civil Retirement System.
This means that, far from being a drain on the public treasury, USPS has had billions of its sales, dollars, erroneously diverted into the Treasure, restore the agency’s access to its own postage money an the impending of “collapse: goes away.
That’s all well and good, claim postal agency opponents, but there’s no disputing the fact that government-delivered mail is a quaint idea whose time has gone. USPS First business has fallen by 7.6 percent and even Postmaster Donahue says Flatly, “That’s not going to change.” The down school of despair break into two groups, “Kill it and Shrink it” The killers are the outright privativatizers who’ve pushed for decades to get the Post office out of our mailboxes.
In the 1960’s AT&T chairman, Fred Kappel headed a presidential commission on postal reform, and he told a congressional panel, “IFI could I’d make the P.O. a private enterprise”. He couldn’t, but he did set down the marker that remains the Holy Grail of the corporate champion for, as he put it in 1999 “closing down the USPS.”
The greater danger at the moment, however, are the shrinkers. Postmaster Donahue is presently the shrink-in-chief, having put forth plan that will A-close 3,700 of our post offices. B-shut down about half of the 487 mail processing centers across the country. C-Cut more than 100,000 postal jobs (or as Donahue prefers to phrase it, “reduce head count” D-Restrict mail delivery to five says a week by eliminating all Saturday postal services. E-Do away with the agency’s 40-year standard of next-day delivery of First-Class mail, replacing it with a lesser goal of two or more.
John T. Nickoless
Average American
Bennettsville, SC