Congress’s War on the United States Postal Service

[Galraedia]

After a stopgap measure last year, Congress will once again debate whether the United States Postal Service as we know it can survive. The better question is: Will Congress let it?

The U.S. Postal Service is at risk of defaulting on healthcare obligations or exceeding its debt limit by the end of the year. Last month, USPS management unveiled a “Path to Profitability” that would eliminate over a hundred thousand jobs, end Saturday service and loosen overnight delivery guarantees. The Postal Service also proposes to shutter thousands of post offices. “Under the existing laws, the overall financial situation for the Postal Service is poor,” says CFO Joe Corbett. Republicans have been more dire, and none more so than Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, who warned of a “crisis that is bringing USPS to the brink of collapse.”

Listening to Issa, you’d never know that the post office’s immediate crisis is largely of Congress’s own making. Conservatives aren’t wrong to say that the shift toward electronic mail – what USPS calls “e-diversion” – poses a challenge for the Postal Service’s business model. (The recent drop-off in mail is also a consequence of the recession-induced drop in advertising.)

But even so, in the first quarter of this fiscal year, the post office would have made an operational profit, if not for a 75-year healthcare “pre-funding” mandate that applies to no other public or private institution in the United States.

Read more: http://www.salon.com/2012/03/14/congresss_war_on_the_post_office/singleton/

[RufusTFirefly]

1. Just one theater of a much larger war

The goal is to privatize everything the is currently public. The rich want nothing less than to own this entire country.

The approaches for privatizing each public component are varied: deceitful, diabolical, brazen, and occasionally creative.

In the case of the Post Office, it's by fabricating a false crisis.

[Plucketeer]

2. One MORE reason

to give these evil freaks the boot in November! I'd personally love to lodge the toe of a size 13 boot in Issa's backside!

[Newest Reality]

3. Interesting how this

one was pulled-off. The problem was created, now we see the reaction. What's the solution? Private interests?

It keeps working that way in a methodical pattern.

I wish I had a dollar for every raping of the commons and a drug that would make it all easily forgotten.

However, its the people who notice and remember who see something almost tangible behind what is becoming more obviously, a facade where what looked like random, unrelated events, starts to stand-out as a trend/method reaching for an outcome.

[nadinbrzezinski]

4. You got to pay very close attention

I had to explain to my brother the why, and sinc the nooz has not gone there he remains convinced I made it up...just married to a postal worker, so why would I have a personal stake? But as Rhodes puts it, if it's not on your tv, it never happened.

[Newest Reality]

5. Yes, that's how easy it is

to "hide" it in plain sight.

You've probably seen me use the Simulation metaphor now and then ... though I sincerely wonder if it is only a metaphor. More real than real = hyper-real. That's what many people take for truth so manipulation is easy when media conglomerates are trusted by average folks who have not yet seen through the constructed image.

It works ... for now.

[Wilms]

6. ^