The US Postal Service is YUGE agency…
(It is also unionised …)
It does something probably no other company on earth can do…
Deliever letters and packages EVERYWHERE in American around the planet at pretty good prices
And it does this as a quasi-public company…
It does NOT get money from your tax dollars but it IS part of the American government…
And it has something else no other company has…
It HAS TO hold pension money for pensions that might never happen…
The House has moved to end this requirement which would bring the angency’s budget problem’s down…But the Republican led Senate has NOT voted on it…
Donald Trump has always had a sore spot for the agency…
He has ranted against the agency giving Amazon discount prices for them giving the agency bulk mailing discounts like everyone else because Amazon is owned by Jeff Bezos the guy who owns The Washington Post which does pieces that the does like…
That is now added to Trump’s efforts to do vote suppression thru slowing the mail-in ballots that could be more than 50% of the Novembers vote …
With a new Postal Boss, who is a Trump political donor/supporter there has been a spot light on efforts to ‘reform’ the agency, which seems to most us as way to slow the movement of the mail by cutting employee overtime, cutting back mail boxes and removing mail sorting machine around the country…Coincidently 80 days before a national election?
The thing is?
Amazon , FedEx and UPS cannot become the private US Mail company…
They simply do Not have the infrastructure to do so….
Why some might think the solution on this is to shrink the Post office out of the package business and push people on line to do their business?
THAT is impractical…
the noise against this will echo mostly against the very politicians that support Trump…
Rural lawmakers…
For their public and those in urban lower class neighbourhoods…
A diminished post office is gonna become economic hardships….
Has Donald Trump managed to fuckup something else?
And give Democrats something else to use to beat him down with voters…
Those most affected by reports of slowdowns in delivery services include veterans, senior citizens and rural residents who have long voted Republican, arming Democratic challengers and incumbents with a salient campaign issue. Democrats are already blanketing the airwaves, latching on to the opportunity to highlight support for an institution that has a 91 percent approval rating, according to an April survey by the Pew Research Center.
“Senator Perdue needs to take a stand on principle for once in his career and demonstrate that his oath to the Constitution and his constituents is more important to him than his allegiance to President Trump and his Political Party,” said Jon Ossoff, who’s running against Sen. David Perdue (R-Ga.) this cycle. “And if he allows the president to sabotage voting by mail, he will be condemned by history as an accomplice to this attack on our democracy.”
Trump said Thursday that he opposes both $3.6 billion in election aid for states and a $25 billion emergency bailout for the Postal Service because he wants to restrict how many Americans can vote by mail, part of a broader assault on mail-balloting that he has repeatedly claimed, without evidence, would invite widespread fraud. Trump, his family and many top aides, by contrast, have regularly voted by mail themselves.
Democrats uniformly balked at Trump’s move to restrict mail voting during a pandemic, when many Americans fear heading to the polls for fear of catching the novel coronavirus, while most Republicans were silent or offered qualified objections….
image… AP Photo/Paul Sancya/Sun Sentinel