Time to Save the Post Office

Recently I read the article by Mr. Ralph Nader, it’s time to save the Post Office. Mr. Nader is a consumer advocate, lawyer, and author. In the article he describes the real reasons the Post Office is failing. Truthfully, I could not disagree with his findings. He states, the battered national consensus behind a national universal postal service- conceived by Benjamin Franklin-is heading for a free fall due to bad management, corporate barracudas, and a bevy of editors and reporters enamored with the supremacy of the internet which makes up their world.

He states that Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe is pursuing a strategy of cutting or delaying services while increasing prices. Usually that is a sure prescription for continuing decline. For Mr. Donahoe, the drop in first class mail has left the Post Office with over-capacity. He is closing over 200 processing centers, and shuttering hundreds of post offices, including Philadelphia’s original Ben Franklin post offices. He mistakenly thinks closing additional USPS facilities will not result in revenue reductions and service abandonment.. Never mind the intangibles of convenience, safety, receiving medicines, and collegiality that characterizes many rural, small town and suburban post offices.

Mr. Donahoe tells reporters that he is acting the way any beleaguered business executive would, even though he knows that the Postal Service is not just another big business feeding off corporate welfare. The USPS has not taken any taxpayer money since 1971.

By contrast the federal government has taken money from the USPS and owes our Postal Service between $50 and $70 billion dollars in excess retirement benefits payments. The other overpayments to the federal government are for the unprecedented advanced payment of health benefits of future retirees of the next 75 years by 2016, amounting to $5 billion a year, (Congress is considering a bill to rectify this problem). Without corrective legislation, the Postal Service says it would have lost $8.5 billion this year. (By comparison, in addition to lost lives and destruction, the Afghan War quagmire costs the U.S. taxpayer over billion a week, thanks to the Bush administration.

If all this sounds bizarre to you, it is. No other public department is a defacto creditor of the federal government. The USPS is a hybrid corporation, created in 1970, from the old Post Office Department. It has been run into the ground on the installment plan by commercial competitors and by a corporate Board of Governors ideologically rooting for corporate privatizers. Moves to privatize the Postal Service go back to the senior Bush administration

Mr. Naders article is right on the money and only recently has the public and Congress finally realized it. Congress has asked the P.M.G for a moratorium of 5 months to have realistic studies done on future closings and it was granted. Hopefully the Postal Service will survive the latest attempt at privatizing and remain a strong symbol of the greatest country in the world.

Tommy Roma