It is a story that is easy to overlook in the age of the internet, with email easily overtaking the fresh ink snail mail of the past, but it is a story that is also underreported – and due to lack of relevant information when reported – not understood by most Americans. It’s the story of the deliberate sabotage of the United States Postal Service, and the stealing of public assets by the super rich, via their corporate sponsored puppets in the U.S. government, both democrats and republicans. Sometimes both oligarchy funded parties cooperate in a bipartisan manner to screw over the American public.
You’ve probably heard in bits and scattered pieces in the media that the U.S. Postal Service is in financial trouble, having to lay off thousands of workers nationwide and potentially having to scrap Saturday service altogether. But you probably don’t have more than a vague idea of the cause, and the idea you have is probably incorrect. That is because the story is usually inserted into a small section of television “news,” amid other stories of economic woes, celebrity updates, or of more important segments in the nightly news, like the broadcast of viewers’ favorite youtube videos. It takes some digging to get at the truth, which I will summarize here with some commentary, and provide links for more detailed information. The narrative is being expanded though, with new advocacy for saving the post office, with the help of celebrities of course. Without Danny Glover, it might not have even made it into the news at all recently.
The reason the post office is in trouble is because of a bill passed by congress in 2006, known as the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act. Like many dubious pieces of legislation named the opposite of what they really stand for, this act of congress is the reason for the demise of a U.S. institution that has guaranteed the delivery of mail to every address known in the United States. The bill was sponsored by lobbyists from Fedex and UPS, as well as other private companies. These private companies would have you believe that they paid high earning Washington lobbyists, out of the goodness of their hearts, to pass a bill to protect the alleged, in danger of financial collapse, pensions and healthcare of postal employees. Of course, these companies would have you believe this only if you found out they were behind this legislation in the first place. Needless to say, they didn’t brag about their good intentions in public.
The heart of the bill that has put the Post Office in dire financial straights is an outrageous requirement that no other company or government entity in the entire country has to abide by. The new law requires that the Post Office pre-fund the healthcare and pensions of its employees 75 years in advance, over the next 10 years. You can read that last sentence of couple of times, thinking surely it is a typo error or just an incorrect fact, but it is not. 75 years of pension funding up front within the next ten years, by 2016. Wow, Fedex and UPS sure want to protect the workers of the post office. To add further insult to injury, the law specifically forbids the USPS to diversify its services. How’s that for the so-called champions of the so-called free market?
The results were predictable, but amazing in that they weren’t more devastating, more quickly: over 193 thousand job cuts and eliminations, and over 1000 post office shutdowns. Furthermore, many of these post offices are being auctioned off to the highest wealthy bidders, with the historic artwork that resides in many of them (thanks to a New Deal initiative by FDR’s wife that involved paying unemployed artists and sculptors to produce work for local post offices) included in the sale. In other words, the casualties in the USPS are being looted by opportunists with extremely close ties to the companies and politicians that participated in the sabotage law of 2006. Reporter Lauren Steiner points out an example of this looting in The Contributor:
“Fourteen murals by famous artist Ben Shahn in the post office of the Bronx, New York, are probably worth more than the real estate itself. But never fear, we can count on the largesse of the One Percent to allow us limited access to this publicly funded art. Movie producer Joel Silver just bought the Venice Post Office for his production company offices and is spending $100,000 to restore Edward Biberman’s famous “Story of Venice” mural. Everyone is falling all over themselves with excitement, because he said he would allow the public in six times a year to view the mural by appointment.”- See more at: http://thecontributor.com/saving-us-postal-service-not-just-buildings#sthash.dBdfqhbi.dpuf
In the same article, Mrs. Steiner points out a direct connection between another company that sponsored the destructive anti-post office legislation, and a prominent U.S. Democrat Senator:
” But the corporate connection to this travesty does not end there. One company, CBRE, was given the exclusive, no-bid contract to sell or lease the $110 billion worth of real estate owned by the Post Office. And that company is chaired and partly owned by Richard Blum, who is also one of the University of California Regents who is working on privatizing the state’s public university system. Richard Blum is none other than the husband of California’s U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein.”
Another important fact most people do not know about the U.S. Postal Service, and I was one of those people until I began my research, is that the USPS is not funded by taxpayers, and hasn’t been, since 1971. It relies on its very modest fees to fund itself. Perhaps that is why the lobbyists wrote in extra protection for themselves that limits the diversification of services that the USPS can develop.
This war on the United States Postal Service is just another prime example among many, of corporate America’s attempted hijacking of a government program, for the enrichment of themselves at the expense of the rest of us. The internet was developed and funded by the U.S. government in cooperation with private companies, but since it turned out to be profitable, monopolies in the cable and telecom industry have since tried to take control of the internet by the creation of a “fast lane” of broadband service which they would charge more for, effectively giving them control over internet content. Every year drugs are developed by government funded university research projects, led by publicly educated scientists and doctors, and then taken control of by private pharmaceutical companies who then retain monopoly rights known “patents,” artificially raising the cost of drugs to drastic heights. These pharmaceutical companies are also attempting through bogus, so-called “free trade agreements” to prevent Third World countries from making copycat versions of the drugs that save millions of lives. Just as shocking and immoral, is that these companies have actually succeeded in getting our own government to pass a law that specifically forbids our own government from negotiating lower drug prices for seniors on Medicare and Social Security, even as they sell the same drugs to other countries at lower, negotiated prices.
The pharmaceutical companies and the legislation they have written and gotten passed by their sponsored politicians, which we are given the privilege to vote for , should serve as an unquestioned example of how evil of a form greed can take. The entire Military Industrial Complex is another, though thanks to patriotic indoctrination at an early age and the world’s most sophisticated propaganda system, its motives and fleecing of American tax payers is kept more hidden.
While the war on the United States Postal Service may not kill millions of people worldwide like the above cited examples, the same principle of greed is at work. The same method of bribing politicians through “campaign donations” and “free speech” is being utilized, and when enough money and the right connections are made to corporate, puppet legislators, the result is the same: bipartisan raping of the public on behalf of the largest corporations and the super rich. And when done skillfully, most of us are rarely aware of what’s being done and how.
For further information and ways to protect this valued U.S. institution, please copy and paste the following link:
http://www.savethepostoffice.com/