Everyday Erinyes #163

Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”

How many agencies, or parts, or divisions of our government were actually mandated by name in the Constitution – the original Constitution, not by amendment? Well, certainly NOT the Department of Defense (or, as it used to be, the War Department) – if there was one thing our founders did NOT want, and said so very clearly and repeatedly, it was a standing army. Actually, off the top of my head, I can only think of four – The Legislative Branch, the Executive Branch, the Judicial Branch, and the Postal Service.

In fact, our Post Office predates the Constitution. Exchange of information was at first spotty in the Colonies. In 1710, Parliament extended the English postal system to the Colonies. And then – not immediately, but eventually – came talk of revolution, and the Continental Congress.

If you were considering gaining independence from a mother country, and the mother country was none too pleased about it, would you want to entrust your messaging to the postal service belonging to the mother country? Neither did our founding fathers, who, in the second Continental Congress in 1775 (July 26 to be precise), created the Unites States Post Office, appointing Benjamin Franklin postmaster (later succeeded by William Goddard.)

The official post office was created in 1792 as the Post Office Department (USPOD). It was based on the Constitutional authority empowering Congress “To establish post offices and post roads”. The 1792 law provided for a greatly expanded postal network, and served editors by charging newspapers an extremely low rate. The law guaranteed the sanctity of personal correspondence, and provided the entire country with low-cost access to information on public affairs, while establishing a right to personal privacy.

I don’t want to go into the entire history, much of which is not relevant to our current issues. For instance, it’s interesting, but not earthshaking, that postage stamps did not exist anywhere in the world until the 1840’s, with our first ones being issued in 1847. However, there are a couple of legislative actions which have brought us to our current precarious state. The first was the Postal Reorganization Act of 1970 (during Nixon’s presidency).

The Act replaced the cabinet-level Post Office Department with a new federal agency, the United States Postal Service, and took effect on July 1, 1971.

This was not, in my opinion, a good idea, but, by itself, it was not crippling. The Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006 (during the GW Bush presidency), however, was, and was intended to be, crippling.

You may know people who sometimes rant about how the USPS is always losing money because it is so mismanaged and it needs to be privatized. It’s true that the USPS runs in the red, but it has nothing to do with mismanagement. It has to do with the requirement imposed by the PAEA, which

requires the Postal Service, unlike any other government agency, to pay $5.5 billion a year into a health fund for its future retirees. The majority of the agency’s losses since 2007, about $32 billion, result from the health funding requirement, financial documents show.

This is not only “unlike any other government agency,” but also unlike any private corporation or unincorporated business on the face of the earth. It creates an impossible burden. More than all (and I’ll explain that) of the USPS’s red ink is due to this requirement. By this I mean that, if one takes those payments out of the equation, the USPS has been running at a PROFIT since 2006. For instance,

In 2016, the USPS had its fifth straight annual operating loss, in the amount of $5.59 billion, of which $5.8 billion was the accrual of unpaid mandatory retiree health payments.

In other words, without the prepayment requirement, the USPS in 2016 would have seen a SURPLUS of $210 million.

Incidentally, the USPS is NOT funded by our tax dollars, of which it receives $0.

Perhaps you are thinking that the USPS is, or is becoming, obsolete dut to the communications capabilities of the World Wide Web. Not so, for multiple reasons, just one of which is that, though the Internet may have decreased the necessity to send physical letters, it has hugely increased the necessity to send physical packages. I can see that dramatically in my own life, depending, as I do, on on-line ordering to compensate for my mobility issues. Yet another reason is privacy. The Internet is notorious for being a threat to privacy. Need I say more?

As Representative Bill Pascrell Jr. (D-NJ) points out in Washington Monthly,

[J]ust as Congress put the Postal Service on its current dangerous trajectory, so can Congress put it on a sustainable path, bringing our cherished institution back to full health. In fact, I believe we can go even further. With its massive infrastructure network, post offices could revolutionize how the American people perform a variety of essential tasks, from voting to paying taxes to banking. Tapping into this network has the potential to revitalize both the Postal Service and our democracy. Instead of discussing how to cut the post office, we should be talking about how to expand it.

We won’t let the postal eagle be replaced by the vulture

What stands in the way of talking about expanding it? Mostly, the “white noise” (pun intended) generated by the Individual 1 in the White house and his following of deplorables, both in and out of government. But unfortunately this noise itself has now turned to attacking out Postal Service. We cannot afford to lose it.

Elizabeth Warren has proposed bringing back Postal Banking. Rep. Pascrell makes a strong case for that. This alone will not save our postal service, but it is a start, it is a fairly easy case to make, and it can’t hurt.

AMT, help us to pay attention to this issue among all the cacophony generated by the current regime, and spur us to contact our own representatives in Congress to encourage them to action. It might also help to check out the agencies and groups invested in saving the Postal Service through “A Grand Alliance,” and support them as best we can.

The Furies and I will be back.

Cross posted to Care2 HERE.