Postal Reform

As long as Louis DeJoy is Postmaster General of the United States, you can expect mail delivery to continue to be sluggish.  But a new bill passed by Congress and certain to be signed by President Biden should help alleviate matters somewhat.

The postal reform bill that was just passed will remove $57 billion in unpaid liabilities from the U.S. Postal Service and  and eliminate $50 billion in payments over the next ten years, replacing the pre-paid postal-retiree program passed in 2006 with Medicare, saving taxpayers $1.5 billion through 2032.  The bill also codifies new requirements meant to guarantee timely mail deliveries and allows the Postal Service to offer services other than mail in partnerships with state and local governments, which could pave the way for a return to postal backing for low-income Americans.

What did DeJoy think of this legislation?  He supported it; he actually lobbied congressional Republicans to vote for it.  But he's still doing an abominable job in running the agency, and hopefully it won't be long before there are enough postal-board governors he can't put in his pocket who will be ready to replace him with someone else.

One good thing has come of of all this turmoil in the Postal Service aside from this bill; Americans now at least know who the Postmaster General is.

Going Postal

Louis DeJoy, the U.S. Postmaster General (below), took part in hearings before two separate congressional committees - one in the Senate, the other in the House - and he tried to put the best spin on the "reforms" that he has instituted at the United States Postal Service.

He more or less told both committees that his changes are meant to deliver the mail in a leaner, more efficient way, and he added that he would ensure the prompt dispatching of mail-ballots for the fall elections.  He even endorsed mail-in voting, saying he votes by mail himself, and he added that Trump's demonization of mail in voting was "not helpful." 

Neither was DeJoy's testimony.  For all of his rhetoric to bring a more business-oriented approach to the Postal Service, he still defended his wrongheaded efforts to eliminate collection boxes and sorting machines, and his commitment to offering overtime "as needed" to keep the mail moving contradicted his earlier efforts to getting rid of that too. And, this past Saturday, U.S. Senator Gary Peters (D-MI) was quick to point out that the mail slowdowns, which DeJoy blamed on the pandemic, actually started months after the country partially shut down - and right after DeJoy took over the Postal Service.  Also, under questioning from Representative Katie Porter (D-CA), DeJoy revealed that he didn't know the domestic postal card rate (35 cents) Nor could he answer her question of how many people voted by mail in the 2016 presidential election (139 million people).

Even more damning were some documents that came to the attention of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, the committee that held this past Monday's heating, showing that mail delivery had indeed dipped after DeJoy took over. The documents had been withheld from public view, and the committee's chair, Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) accused DeJoy of withholding information and "concealing documents and downplaying the damage that you’re causing." Representative Maloney is threatening a subpeona for more inside documented information.

DeJoy, a logistics expert, is actually doing what any business CEO would do to keep a company going strong, but that misses the point.  As House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has been quick to point out, the post office is a government service.  Maybe a government service that pays its own way, but a government service just the same, and it isn't designed to run like a business like Federal Express (oops, excuse me -FedEx - the name was shortened to appease customers who can't spell) and United Parcel Service (which UPS still stands for).  Those companies ship and send mail for profit and only reach a limited clientele. The Postal Service, which is a directive of the original U.S. Constitution, is a universal institution designed to serve everyone, just like the Food and Drug Administration (another government agency being politicized by Trump) and the Treasury Department.  Because it's not just mail-in ballots that are on the line.  It's also prescription medications, bill payments, paychecks, and, yes, Christmas cards from Aunt Susan (I do have an aunt by that name, by the way, and she not only sends me Christmas cards every year, she sends me birthday cards every year!).  The Postal Service serves the public, not customers.  DeJoy ignores that distinction at the country's peril - and his own.

No DeJoy In Mudville

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy thought he could get away with cutting back post office hours, taking away mailboxes, and cutting back on overtime. He was wrong. The public outcry against his "reforms" has been so great that he now says he will halt his actions until after the 2020 election. Mail processing facilities won't be closed before then, hours at post offices would stay the same, and overtime would be approved "as needed."

DeJoy (above) may have been wrong about being able to do all of this with no opposition form the public, but not as wrong as he will be if he thinks this move will take the heat off him. Nancy Pelosi, for one, isn't satisfied.  She noted that DeJoy's about-face does not restore changes already made, stops only a few of his proposed changes, and does not go far enough to ensure that mail-in ballots for the election will be fairly counted.  So, he can still expect to have to appear before the House Oversight Committee meeting on August 24, and he even has to face a Senate panel.  And the House is going ahead with a vote on a bill to keep the Postal Service afloat.

I don't yet have full confidence that an election can be held with the guarantee that all mail-in ballots will be counted.  But I'm closer to having it after all of this news.

I gotta hand it to Trump, though, because even though the Postal Service was created out of the old Post Office Department in part to take the power of appointing the Postmaster General - a position that pre-dates American independence and first held by Benjamin Franklin - out of the hands of the President, Trump simply appointed sycophants to the Postal Service's board of governors to ensure the selection of his right-hand man for the job.

Meanwhile, in New Jersey, Governor Phil Murphy is sending mail-in ballots out to all of the stat's registered voters as soon as possible.

A Stamp of Disapproval

The United States Postal Service is shattering a 164-year tradition by announcing that it will soon feature living people on its postage stamps, and it's even asking customers to suggest their top five choices for who among living Americans could appear on new stamps in the coming months.  This has absolutely got to be the worst idea the U.S. stamp program has had since putting cartoon characters on stamps.

So why the change? I'll let Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe explain it:

"These remarkable individuals — through their transformative achievements in their respective fields — have made enduring contributions to the United States of America," Donahoe said of living people. "Honoring living individuals expands the interest in stamp topics and keeps our program timely, relevant and contemporary."

Donahoe also added that the change "will enable us to pay tribute to individuals for their achievements while they are still alive to enjoy the honor."  That's exactly why I think it's such a bad idea.  If we put living individuals on stamps, the subjects honored will be aggrandized in life by the official postal currency of a government agency, and the "honor" is going to give them pretty big egos to boot.  Eric Cantor on a stamp? Imagine what that'll do to his already swelled head!

The tradition of not honoring living people on stamps is derived from the same custom as pertains to coinage.  When the first U.S. coins were minted in 1793, a portrait of President George Washington was considered for the front, or obverse, of the coin, but Washington refused the honor.  Washington had fought the Revolution in part to rid America of the indignity of monarchical worship, and putting himself on a coin would have certainly made him seem like a king.

There's another reason why we have never honored living people on coins and stamps before. Living people are a always a work in progress; they have not lived full lives, and so it's impossible to give them any fair or full scrutiny before honoring them with a stamp, currency piece, statue or building.  Case in point: What if you were to honor a living politician with a stamp, only to have a scandal come along later and ruin his reputation? What if, had this policy change taken effect twenty years earlier, the Postal Service had honored living football players with a set of stamps in 1991 featuring O.J. Simpson - before the 1994 twin murders virtually everyone knows he committed?  And, even if we honored a reputable living statesman emeritus with a fairly solid record, like former President Bill Clinton, that would generate a lot of controversy, for while many people still like him, many others still can't stand him . . . for reasons having nothing to do with Monica Lewinsky.  You can't really judge someone who hasn't led a full life. As Sophocles once said, "One must wait until the evening to see how splendid the day has been." Timeliness, present-day relevance, and contemporary values get in the way of letting history be the final judge of people.

Who are we going to honor among the living first? Rihanna or Britney Spears in a series honoring women in the performing arts?  Jon Cryer in a series honoring contemporary television actors? Maybe living painters and scientists, but with the public being asked to suggest living people for postage stamp commemoration, they're not likely to think of such people.  I completely distrust the public on choosing stamp subjects.  When the Postal Service asked Americans to vote on subjects for their Celebrate the Century stamps at the end of the twentieth century, the Barbie doll outpolled a stamp for John and Robert Kennedy for the 1960s pane, and sport utility vehicles outpolled a stamp for women in sports for the 1990s issue. That's right, a feminist breakthrough lost out to manly gas-guzzling wagons!

Let me re-iterate: this is a spectacularly bad idea.  Pretty soon we're going to see all sorts of stamps honoring worthless celebrities like the kind that get issued by tiny West Indian island countries . . . like St. Vincent.  Yes, I know Great Britain and Canada feature Queen Elizabeth II on their stamps, and Canada Post has honored living Canadian scientists as well as living Canadian popular singers like Paul Anka (now there's a great argument against the U.S. Postal Service's policy change!), but the last time I checked, we're not the Brits, and we're not the Canadians.  We have a different way of doing things.  While that argument is groundless in opposing universal health care, it is certainly relevant and sound in this case.

Going Postal On the Postal Service

Republicans in Congress, smelling blood, are once again ready to shoot the wounded.  This time their target is the United States Postal Service, which is losing money rapidly, but not because of decreased volume due to the recession or the Internet.  The Postal Service has been required to prepay into federal employee retirement funds because of a law passed by Congress in 2006, and so it's been losing money even as its overall mail volume is actually increasing.  Without the prepaid retirement fund mandate, the Postal Service would be solvent.  Now, it's headed toward financial collapse.

President Obama is already reported to be in support of one proposed solution, ending Saturday deliveries. Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe plans to close 12,000 post offices by 2015.  This could help, but not much.  In the meantime, House Republicans are leading the charge to privatize and ultimately emaciate the Postal Service, reducing its presence in small towns that depend on its deliveries and thus cutting people off from their most essential public service. 

The Postal Service is a constitutionally mandated government agency, and by having the retirement fund prepayment mandate eliminated, it could run more efficiently and more cost-effectively than it currently does, and it runs pretty efficiently already.  It could raise rates to make more money than ending Saturday delivery would save, and it asked the Postal Rate Commission for the permission to raise rates.  But neither Congress nor the Postal Rate Commission is interested in helping the Postal Service come up with long-term solutions to its problems; both of those ideas have been rejected.

The Postal Service has repeatedly been barred from offering new products and services over the years, largely due to fear of competition among private shipping and parcel delivery companies.  Harvard political science professor Elaine Kamarck offered this example of how the government prevents the Postal Service from operating like the profit-making business it's supposed to be.  Internet shopping, Kamarck said, should have generated much more business for the Postal Service with the delivery of packages to individual households.  "But," she said, "parcel shipments were generated by large organizations and the USPS was not allowed to negotiate discounts and thus lost business. It was forbidden by law from lowering prices to get more business. This resulted in the entirely incredible situation in the 1990s where the United States Government negotiated an agreement for the delivery of U.S. government package services with Fed Ex because the USPS was not allowed to negotiate for lower prices."

The Postal Service looks like a carcass that's about to get its bones picked by a Republican political establishment in Washington that wants to put more of the public realm in the hands of profiteering businessmen that don't give a damn about the Constitution ("The right to make profits is not in the Constitution!" - Michael Moore), even when it mandates a public service that makes goods, services, and - most importantly - information available to everyone.

A weakened, private postal service run by profiteering special interests? Send that idea back return to sender.  Americans should realize that, at 44 cents to send a card or letter to anywhere in this geographically large and topographically diverse country, the United States Postal Service is still a bargain.   

Oh yeah, October is National Stamp Collecting Month.

Go On Round To 46

The Postal Service has proposed a two-cent increase of the first-class postage rate to 46 cents, to be effective in January. This announcement is likely to cause groans and guffaws all over America, and how expensive it's getting to mail a letter.

Spare me. I don't want to hear it. Because sending a card or a letter for less than the price of a weekly community newspaper is still a bargain. And contrary to the Postal Service's reputation for inefficiency, you can send a card or a letter from one end of the country to another knowing that it will get there in two to three days. In Great Britain, people pay more for first-class postage on mailpieces going from one end of the country to another, and Britain is about the size of Oregon.

It is true that the Postal Service is trying to cut waste and get rid of less industrious employees. (I know the old joke about the post office having something in common with shoe stores; they're full of loafers.) It's also been losing money, necessitating this postage rate increase, and it's lost a lot of business to the Internet. But even though you're more likely to get e-mail than postal mail these days, wouldn't you really rather have a hand-delivered birthday card from a friend, rather than an electronic message from E-Greetings? When your Internet service provider goes down, don't you appreciate the fact that you can send information to the other end of this vast country for less than fifty cents?

So when you get that invitation to your niece's wedding from the brother you haven't heard from, and you're grateful for it, thank the mail carrier who delivered it to you.

Going Postal

The United States Postal Service, having lost $3.8 billion in 2009 and seeing its volume down to 177 billion mail pieces and dropping, is planning to make various spending cuts to counter a growing budget deficit. The USPS is in trouble, and Postmaster General John Potter knows it. More and more people are turning to electronic mail and bill payments in place of first-class mail, and the recession has taken a toll on the Postal Service's business. Potter has proposed numerous reform ideas, including ending Saturday delivery, closing branch offices, offering more postal products in businesses such as Office Depot, raising rates yet again, and restructuring health benefits for retiree health benefits to mirror the way other government agencies pay out such benefits, along with addressing overpayments to the Postal Service Civil Service Retirement System pension fund.

Potter has tried to handle mounting costs before, but he's been rebuffed by Congress, who has the authority to allow or reject the Postmaster General's ideas. This time, he's hoping that the agency's problems - supported by independent research - will lead to what could be the most sweeping reform of the post office since 1970, when the current organizational structure was devised and the post office was taken out of direct control of the President and weaned off tax subsidies. One idea of Potter's is to have the Postal Service permitted to evaluate and introduce more new products consistent with its mission of universal communications, allowing it to compete more effectively by responding to customer needs. The only problem is that the Postal Service is in such sorry shape, it can't afford to try such ideas, like marketing cellular phones, as other countries's postal systems have done. Privatization is a non-starter for the time being as well, given the mess its finances are in. The United States is, as with everything else, behind the rest of the industrialized world in reforming its postal system to adapt to changing times.

Potter will hopefully be able to make the needed changes he can make, as well as get congressional approval this time for other reforms.

So far there's no threat of layoffs, with the Postal Service preferring to cut its workforce through retirements. Because the Postal Service pays well, my mother wanted me to get a job there. I resisted, thinking that I could succeed in a different line of work. Of course, that didn't work out so well. But I'm still not sure I would have wanted to work for the post office, what with all the horrific postal massacres - one in New Jersey happening in a branch office I had occasionally patronized - that have occurred.

Incidentally, the 44-cent first-class postage rate is still a bargain in a country as geographically large and as heavily populated as ours.

Philatelic Woes

I'm on a budget these days, and I can't afford all of the stamps the United States Postal Service has issued in the past year, though even if I could, I wouldn't want to buy all of them anyway. Stamps honoring "The Simpsons?" Puh-LEEZE!

Anyway, the recession has had its own effect on the Postal Service. Three issues planned this year were shelved - the fourth set of ten stamps in the Flags of Our Nation series, a holiday stamp depicting an angel with a lute, and a commemorative honoring Edward Hopper. The first two have been rescheduled for 2010; the Edward Hopper stamp is still on hold, likely never to be issued. Meant for the Postal Service's American Treasures series, the 2010 issue in that series will honor another painter - Winslow Homer.

Fans of Edward Hopper, who was famous for painting lonely, desolate scenes, must feel really lonely now.