Don't Believe the Haters—The Truth About the U.S. Post Office -- This public service is not what Republicans portray it as at all.
[Immediately characterize the story using a headline and subhead that invokes a pejorative, “haters” and linking it to the Republican party.]
One public service that people really like and count on is the post office -- which literally delivers for us.
[Delivers what? The United States Postal Service is quickly becoming irrelevant in this age of electronic communication. Having initially ceded secure, time-sensitive, and trackable delivery parcels to private corporations. Most mailboxes contain “junk mail” – advertising circulars delivered at “negotiated rates” while the cost of normal postal services continue to rise.]
Antigovernment ideologues and privatization dogmatists, however, hate the very word "public," and they've long sought to demonize the U.S. 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.
[Again, with the rhetoric of the far left.]
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 providing 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.
[If the USPS doesn’t take a dime of taxpayer dollars to fund its operations and is turning a profit in this competitive marketplace, what is the purpose of this anti-GOP hit piece? At this point in time, everything should be hunky-dory and life moves on.]
Yet, the media keeps reporting that the USPS is losing billions of dollars each year. What they fail to mention is that those are phony paper losses manufactured by Congress at the behest of corporate privatizers.
[How could the progressive media, which appears to be in bed with the leftists, report such false and misleading facts? How could our government manufacturer “phony” paper losses? Or is this the progressive socialist democrats claiming that these loses are as “phony” as the “phony scandals” swirling about the Obama Administration.
Are these losses as phony as the Fast and Furious gun walking program to Mexican Drug Cartels to influence the domestic gun control agenda? As phony as the cooked books of the Veterans Affairs programs that killed Americans? Phony like Benghazi? And speaking of the corporate privatizers, you mean like Federal Express and United Parcel Service?]
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.
[There must be more to this story. Why wouldn’t the Obama Administration, that controlled the House, Senate, and the Presidency – as well as being the massive recipient of union dollars – have changed the legislation?
According to Wikipedia …
The USPS has not directly received taxpayer-dollars since the early 1980s with the minor exception of subsidies for costs associated with the disabled and overseas voters. Since the 2006 all-time peak mail volume, after which Congress passed HR 6407, the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act, (which mandated $5.5 billion per year to be paid into an account to fully prefund both employee retirement health and pension benefits, a requirement exceeding that of other government and private organizations), revenue dropped sharply due to recession-influenced declining mail volume, prompting the postal service to look to other sources of revenue while cutting costs to reduce its budget deficit. The USPS lost US$ 5 billion in 2013, and its revenue was US$ 66 billion. <Source>
Public Law 109-435 mandates that the Postal Service completely pay the newly created 50-year pay-it-forward pension debt through 10 massive annual payments, one every September 30 over 10 years (2006–2015).
As I suspected, there is more to this story and it is an accounting nightmare. In 1971, when the Post Office was granted semi-independent status and emerged as the United States Postal Service, the government agreed that it would pay for all pension costs through 1971.
However, because of union-negotiated contracts, the pensions were based on a defined payment plan unlike the defined cost plans used in private industry. Because retiree benefits are based on the last three years of service and include cost of living adjustments, the government demanded taxpayer cost protection for pension costs accrued after 1971 for those previously employed employees.
Hence, the prepayments to insure that the USPS pension fund would remain fully funded at no additional cost to the taxpayer. While the case can be made for overpayments into this fund, it is an actuarial accounting issue and not a political one. It appears that the beneficiaries of this pre-funding program are both the taxpayer and the workers. To the extent that these payments disadvantage the postal unions by curtailing additional employees, and/or expanding services, is a problem to be managed like any other business operating in the United States.]
It's like tying an anvil around someone's neck, throwing the person out of a boat, and saying, "Swim to shore, sucker."
[As we can plainly see, the pre-payment issue is a straw-man argument with equal impact on both Republicans and progressive socialist democrats and their socialist unions.]
As if that's not enough of a weight to carry, the men and women who actually do the work and make service more than just a word in the U.S. Postal Service's name have had another unfair burden hung around their necks: A Postmaster General who has thrown-in with the privatizers. As PMG, Pat Donahoe is the titular head of this proud group of postal workers, letter carriers, mail handlers and rural letter carriers. They take pride in moving our mail to us wherever we are -- from inner cities all the way to the bottom of the Grand Canyon, where a Native American Tribe lives.
But Donahoe is not making the workforce proud, for he abandoned them, their millions of customers, and USPS's historic dedication to service. HE is deliberately monkey-wrenching out service -- including slowing delivery, reducing staff and hours of service, closing neighborhood and historic post offices, shutting down processing centers, constantly pressing Congress to end Saturday delivery, badmouthing his own agency's performance, steadily corporatizing public functions and transforming decent, union-scale jobs into the low-wage retail economy.
[So who is this turncoat Postmaster General?
Patrick R. Donahoe, the 73rd Postmaster General of the United States, is the Chief Executive Officer of the world’s largest postal organization and a lifelong postal employee.
Appointed Postmaster General by the Postal Service Board of Governors in October, 2010, Mr. Donahoe began his 37-year USPS career as a clerk in Pittsburgh, PA. Prior to his appointment as the organization’s top officer, he served as the Deputy Postmaster General and the organization’s Chief Operating Officer. He is a former senior vice president of Operations, senior vice president of Human Resources and vice president of Allegheny Area Operations. <Source: USPS>
Here is a lifelong postal employee trying to help his beloved organization survive in the digital age and against fierce competition. Not exactly an enemy agent unless you were a progressive socialist democrat union that demonized management and continually insisted higher wages, benefits, and membership-expanding work rules without any increase in productivity.]
One gross and portentous example of Donahoe's determination to bust the wages and undermine the performance of USPS is the sweetheart privatization scam he's set up with Staples. He's letting this big-box retailer place official postal kiosks in its 1,500 stores -- only they're not staffed by highly trained, publically accountable postal workers, but by Staple's own poverty-wage, high-turnover floor staff. In at least one case, Donahoe even cut the hours of service at post offices around a Staples store in San Francisco, and then put a sign directing postal customers to the Staples outlet. Rather than being dedicated to customer service and the public interest, the private "post officettes'" priority is to serve Staples' profit interests.
[Aha! Now we are getting to the real issue. There are significant cost savings to be had – without a curtailment of services – by using Staples non-union workers. That’s the problem. Forget about the pre-payments, forget about the nasty Postmaster, the real problem is that this initiative cuts into union membership and reduces the amount of pension funds that are managed, some say manipulated, by the union leadership.]
Mark Dimondstein -- the new, feisty president of the American Postal Workers Union -- calls Donahoe "Wall Street's Trojan Horse, the privatizer from within." But says Dimondstein, "We intend to stop him." His union has launched a Dump Donahoe campaign as well as a national boycott of Staples stores. For information and support, go toapwu.org.
[Perhaps Mark Dimonstein – the new, feisty president of the American Postal Workers Union – can tell me how Staples differs from those private mailbox companies or contract postal outlets? And, why shouldn’t the American people benefit from easier access to their mail?]
Source: Don't Believe the Haters—The Truth About the U.S. Post Office | Alternet
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