Postage Due

Louis DeJoy holds on to the office of Postmaster General for the time being.  But hopefully not for long.

President Biden announced that he will appoint two new members of the Postal Service's board of governors to replace a Republican and a pro-DeJoy Democrat, which makes the current Postmaster General's hold on power tenuous and his time likely numbered.  As there are already four other Democrats on the board, Biden can only appoint one more Democrat, so one of his appointees must be a Republican.  The Republican, Derek Kan, is a former aide to Mitch McConnell and now runs an e-commerce fulfillment company.  The Democrat, Daniel Tangherlini, is a former administrator of the General Services Administration under President Barack Obama and also served as the chief financial officer of the Treasury Department.

Tangherlini and Kan replace governors whose terms are expiring, and Biden may have to wait to appoint an additional Democratic postal governor to get DeJoy removed.  That day can't come to soon enough.  DeJoy has deliberately slowed down mail by dismantling postal sorting and routing equipment deliberately, and charging extra for parcels during the holidays.  DeJoy says this is all necessary to keep the Postal Service from losing money, but his cure is clearly worse than the illness.  

I'm just glad he never became a doctor.

Did I happen to mention that the logistics company he founded does business with the Postal Service?

It's getting to the point where we may have to mail Christmas cards this week to ensure they get to where they're going before New Year's.  And if you have Hanukkah cards to mail, well, you're already out of luck, as Hanukkah is next week.  Me, I'm getting tired of all of these mail delays.  I mailed a cable bill payment two weeks ago and it only got to its destination late last week.  Too many people have overdue bills simply because the payments didn't get there in time.  If this is DeJoy's idea of quality service, I'd sure hate to see what he considers substandard. 

DeJoy's Money Game

The controversy created by Postmaster General Louis DeJoy just gets bigger and bigger.  During his tenure at the Postal Service, he has diminished mail service all over the country, but it's his past as the CEO of a logistics company in his home state of North Carolina that has raised eyebrows.  The Washington Post recently reported that DeJoy forced employees to contribute money to Republican candidates for office, including Thom Tillis, North Carolina's junior U.S. Senator.  DeJoy would compensate for his strong-arming by reimbursing those employees with large bonuses. 

So what, you ask?  Well, even though the employees got their money back, the GOP candidates in North Carolina still got money they wouldn't have gotten otherwise, and the use of company funds to compensate the employees meant that it didn't cost DeJoy himself a cent.   

That's against the law. 

Plain and simple. 

Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA) has already called for action in response to the charges against DeJoy, which are not only highly credible but also highly unbecoming pf a Postmaster General.  "It demands a full and independent investigation, Schiff recently wrote.  "And [it] adds another compelling reason that Louis DeJoy should resign. Immediately."

And DeJoy might have to do just that.  North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein, reacting to formal complaints regarding DeJoy's actions, may be  going ahead with an investigation very soon.

It's unclear whether DeJoy has perpetrated, or has attempted to perpetrate, a similar scheme in the Postal Service.  But this revelation should prove once and for all that the only place DeJoy belongs inside a post office is as a mug shot on the bulletin board.  

Playing Post Office

It makes sense that, in the wake of a pandemic, Donald Trump would conspire to get his own choice for Postmaster General - a prerogative no U.S. President has had since 1969, when Nixon appointed Winton Blount before the Post Office Department became the Postal Service - into office, and then Louis DeJoy, said Postmaster General, would start making "reforms" to slow the mail down and make mail-in voting more precarious as Trump keeps shouting out loud how ripe for fraud it is.

The idea is that if DeJoy slows the mail down enough, the ballots mailed in for the 2020 presidential election won't arrive in time to be counted and that some ballots sent out for filling in won't make it back at all.  So now we have to worry if the Postal Service leadership is in cahoots to get Trump returned to office in a sham election.  I'm as worried about this as I am about the tropical storm due in my area tomorrow, not to mention catching COVID-19.

I've already seen the mail slow down.  I seem to get magazines I subscribe to a little bit later than usual, and, as I'm paid by mail for my job, I'm getting those much later.  My boss mailed my most recent check a week before it was postmarked.  This is the challenge anyone who votes by mail this year due to of COVID-19 faces.    

I went third party for President in 2016, my first time ever, and now in 2020, I hope to again do something for the first time ever by voting by mail.  I haven't ruled out voting in person, because COVID-19 is pretty much under control in my state and my town, but if I do vote by mail, I want to get my ballot as quickly as possible and I want to mail it as quickly as possible so it gets to its intended destination - I assume that would be my county court house - before November 3.  If it takes ten days to get there, I'll mail it twenty days before Election Day. DeJoy is smart.  Voters supporting Joe Biden have to be smarter.

There is a silver lining to Trump's war on mail-in voting: Republicans are likely to be at a disadvantage given that his supporters tend to be older and whiter and likely more afraid to vote in person due to a pandemic.  And there are a lot of young people in the Democrats' rainbow coalition who are ready to vote in person even if they have to camp out at the polling places to do so.  But with three months to go, anything can still happen.  Like maybe another late-October superstorm like Sandy.  Don't think meteorological history can't repeat itself.

I'm worn down by Trump fatigue.  A lot of us are.  I think people are ready to do the heavy lifting to send him packing.       

Oh, DeJoy!

Louis DeJoy is the new Postmaster General of the United States.  And that's not good.

DeJoy is a Trump donor and a Republican Party hack who is likely to do more harm than good to the United States Postal Service, which has been losing money and has been getting closer to possible bankruptcy.  Although he serves at the pleasure of the U.S. Postal Service's board of governors, he acts like he serves at the pleasure of the President, something no Postmaster General has done since the post office went from being a Cabinet-level department to an independent agency in 1971.  And Trump has repeatedly called the post office a joke, calling for the Postal Service to raise rates on packages since his arch-rival Jeff Bezos' Amazon firm, which would pass the costs onto the consumer.

Although President Nixon's push to have the post office pay its own way and be weaned off taxpayer support has largely been seen as a qualified success, to say the least (the very least), one good thing about the Postal Service being a separate agency is that the executive branch has no direct control over the agency anymore.  This means that, up to now at least, the White House has never had one of its cronies in charge.  Before then, there were numerous examples of that.  President Benjamin Harrison give the job to Philadelphia department store owner John Wanamaker, who showed favoritism toward Republican postal employees and banned a Tolstoy novel from being sent by the U.S. mail - on obscenity grounds - because he couldn't get a big enough discount on copies for his department store.  Wanamaker also ordered postal uniforms from a company he had a financial interest in.  (I still love his store [now a Macy's], the most beautiful edifice in all of Philadelphia.)  I need also mention Lawrence O'Brien, a Postmaster General from the 1960s who was appointed by President Lyndon Johnson.  O'Brien's background was in real estate and public relations. A former director of the Kennedy and Johnson presidential campaigns, O'Brien is best remembered as the Postmaster General who canceled postal contracts with railroads, which relied on them to keep their passenger trains going, and had the mail delivered only by air and highway transport.  The result?  The decline of passenger trains in the United States.  This led President Nixon to nationalize intercity rail transport and create Amtrak, but O'Brien's idiotic move led to many passenger rail routes across America bring terminated.

Oh yeah, O'Brien went on to become the commissioner of the National Basketball Association.  I fail to see the connection between mail and sports.

DeJoy's background is in logistics, but he has no direct experience with moving the mail.  And as a Trump loyalist, he can be expected to carry out various "reforms" that can cripple the Postal Service more than any presidentially appointed Postmaster General did back when it was called the Post Office Department.  Meanwhile, Democrats are pushing voting by mail at the same Trump - and, likely, DeJoy - are trying to stop it.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

(Although, if DeJoy intervenes with the U.S stamp program and gets rid of some of the more trivial stamp subjects the Postal Service has embraced of late - stamps for ice pops, pickup trucks, and, being issued this week, hip-hop - ! - I won't be offended.) 

Block The Vote - 2020 Edition

The Republican National Committee and other Republican groups are suing the state of California for attempting to expand mail-in voting for the November elections this year.  If Donald Trump weren't pushing the idea that mail-in voting - which he's taken advantage of in the past - is a bad thing, this suit would be utterly ridiculous.  But its utterly serious.

The courts are likely to side with California for expanding voting by mail, since several other states use it already, and Trump won't be able to stop any state from going forward with such plans.  Thanks to his efforts to make voting by mail look susceptible to voter fraud - despite the fact that the charge itself is a fraud - none of that matters.  If he gets enough people to suspect voting by mail as illegitimate, then he could successfully claim that the election was rigged should he lose to Joe Biden in the fall based on more mail-in ballots thanks to the COVID-19 crisis.  And spreading the idea that mail-in voting is fundamentally flawed might discourage some people from voting by mail or, because of the pandemic, voting altogether.  He wants to get people to doubt the process and get people to believe that the process only works if he manages to get re-elected.

This isn't utterly serious, it's utterly dangerous.  Mail-in-voting activists have felt under siege and de-legitimatized by Trump's antics and his efforts to discredit the electoral system.  Now is not the time for them to knuckle under.  Mail-in balloting may not have the same solemnity as showing up to vote in person, but it's an important part of expanding the franchise.  Hopefully, voting by mail can be upheld in the near future.  Assuming, of course, that the United States Postal Service is around by November.   

Trumping the Post Office

So, eh, what does Trump have against giving the Postal Service a nice big grant in the middle of a deadly pandemic, especially when it's the pandemic that has been the source of the Postal Service's most recent troubles?

Well, he explained from the Oval Office that the Postal Service has been needlessly losing money by charging ridiculously low rates to send packages to addresses, allowing Amazon - whose CEO, Jeff Bezos, also owns the anti-Trump Washington Post - to make an equally ridiculous profit at the Postal Service's expense.  He instructed Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to go ahead in negotiating a loan with the Postal Service contingent on promises of postal reform, but under no circumstances is Mnuchin allowed to give the Postal Service a grant with no strings attached.

Gosh, Trump's idea sounds so capitalistic, so business-friendly, so perfect for . . . a private company!  I am not an economist, but if the Postal Service were to raise its package rates - if it were to quadruple them, as Trump suggested - Amazon and other mail-order companies would have to spend more money to ship things and ultimately pass the costs onto . . . us?  You think Bezos is going to take one for America by sending things out without raising shipping fees for the customers?  And while the Postal Service, a self-sufficient government agency since 1971, may have to pay its own way, it is still a public entity that is required, as it should be, to deliver mail to everyone, and it is thus a nonprofit enterprise.  If the Postal Service were to make a profit, you'd have to privatize it - which is what Trump wants - but to become profitable, it would have to stop delivering mail to smaller communities on money-losing routs - which, again is what Trump wants!  Because otherwise,voting by mail - which Trump doesn't want (except for himself) would be way too easy!

We could be in a serious situation by September, when the Postal Service - which is also known for sending out life-saving prescription drugs - is expected to run of out of money.  Truth be told, companies like Amazon are actually keep the Postal Service going by using it.  But if the Postal Service does run out of money and goes down, voting by mail will be an irrelevant issue, because we won't be able to do anything else by mail either.

There is a bright side.  People are suddenly buying stamps in enormous quantities, especially stamp collectors.  And when people buy more stamps than they need or buy stamps they don't intend to use, that provides a lot of extra revenue for the Postal Service.

The solution to keeping the Postal Service going while Trump is in office and/or at least until the coronavirus pandemic is over is quite simple, really.   If you save stamps, stamps will save you!

Happy collecting.

Five Dollars Postage?

Would you pay five dollars for a stamp?

As shown above, the United States Postal Service does issue five-dollar stamps and has issued them for over 120 years, since back when it was the United States Post Office Department (more about that distinction in a moment or two), but they've always been for large postage amounts for things like packages.  Could you imagine using a five-dollar stamp on a standard first-class letter?

Well, you could, if Trump gets his way - and, what the man wants, he usually gets.  Congress attempted to appropriate a $25 billion grant to keep the Postal Service afloat after reports have strongly suggested that it could run out of money in June, in part because of the coronavirus pandemic. Instead, Trump personally made sure that the Postal Service would only get a $10 billion loan - a loan, as in, it has to be paid back - instead.  A loan of 40 percent of a proposed grant money doesn't make a ton of sense - especially since that loan has to be paid back with interest -  unless Trump's plan is to . . . privatize the Post Office.

And that's precisely what folks say Trump has exactly in mind.

Until July 1971, a taxpayer-supported Post Office Department existed and relied far less on postal rates to cover its operating costs.  But after the 1970 postal strike - which necessitated in having the Army run the postal system for a time - President Nixon took the initiative to convert the post office into a self-sustaining government agency, funded entirely on revenue from its services, with the Postmaster General to be appointed under a board of governors rather than the President.  But since the 2006 passage of a Republican-supported law requiring the Postal Service to pre-pay retirement funds for its workers, the agency has been under duress, even as increased electronic-mail usage had been gaining at the expense of postal mail.  It should be noted, by the way, that the Postal Service had trouble in its first decade providing service commensurate to price.  In 1971, when the Post Office Department became the Postal Service, the first-class letter rate was six cents; by 1981, after ten years of runaway inflation and increasing energy costs due to two oil crises,  that rate had tripled.   

Even so, 55 cents to mail a letter today - note that it took 38 years for the rate to go up threefold from 18 cents - is still a good bargain, compared to other countries.  Germany, a country the size of Montana with 83 million people, has higher postal rates than the United States, a country of 327 million people in an area a thousand-odd miles wide and three thousand miles long.  The Postal Service is a national treasure.  But without proper funding, it can't do its job. And without the funding it needs from the government, a subsequent shutdown would allow Trump to swoop in and hand it over to private operators who could charge what they want and make people pay more for all of its service - parcel post, certified mail, registered mail,, even first-class mailings.   Five dollars to pay a bill or send a greeting card?  If it makes someone rich, well, yes, er're going to have to pay five bucks to mail the most basic card or letter.  There may not even be universal postal service, because there's no money in that..

And stamp collecting - already an expensive because of the supplies and minimum number of stamps in one issue that you have to buy if you collect them mint - will only get more dear.

And now people are talking about voting by mail?

We can't let the post office go toward full privatization, something Nixon envisioned when the current system was set up nearly fifty years ago as a precursor to that possibility.  We need to make sure the public mails stay public.  I've already written my congressional representatives about the issue.  You should too.