Bipartisan statement that the postal service should remain public. It has 170 cosponsors already. Get your congressman to sign on. Postal workers just held a rally yesterday on Capitol Hill. It's easy to keep this momentum up.
The USPS is specifically enumerated as a duty of Congress--Article I, Section 8. But since these clowns seemingly think of the Constitution as ink-stained wallpaper, I guess that doesn't matter. I guess the larger question here is, why is Congress so eager to give its power away to these numbnuts?
The USPS is a service, not a business. It was never intended to make money. It was always intended to provide a service--mail delivery--to the entire country, all of the country. Never meant to be self-supporting. The military is a service, too. Is some corporation going to take over the military and turn it into a for-profit enterprise? Oh, wait. Don't give them any ideas.
I am genuinely impressed at DeJoy’s workaround on compliance there. That is the kind of innovative spirit we can expect from a rich asshole who never expected people his kids’ age to try and bully him. He probably enjoyed every second of messing with the little pissants for sport. Musk sent a couple of weasels into a tiger cage there. Guy like DeJoy’s been fucking up underlings’ lives since he was their damn age.
DeJoy wasn't good, but from the inside he still believed the postal service should exist to serve the people. He just had bad ideas about how to save money.
What is with all these morons who think a govt entity is supposed to make a profit? It is a service offered by the govt for the good of society not a get rich quick scheme. Governments are not a for profit business, you ignorant louts!!! Also, healthcare and prisons should not be for profit either. I swear I am going to turn this car around if you people can't behave!
Ta, Dok. I've been getting all my packages sent to the pied-à-nuage because packages in the hallway at the pied-à-terre have been stolen. However, the pied-à-nuage is so rural that Crom only knows whether or not it will still be getting mail. My postal worker mother is screaming from her grave.
Unlike DeJoy and all these rape-ublicans, I don't just want to keep the post office, I want it expanded to include banking for people too poor (or too undocumented) to have bank accounts. USPS already sells money orders, at about 2/3 the price of Western Union or the scammy check cashing places that dot the landscape. USPS was never intended to make money, but expanding into small scale banking could keep it in the black.
DeJoy tried to expand into banking via prepaid visa gift cards. The banking lobby and his old Republican congressional buddies shut him down after the first day in a trial office in Philly. That was the start of them hating him.
While I despise DeJoy and all the problems he caused, I feel compelled to point out one inaccuracy in this story, that the post office is required to deliver to every address, no matter how far out in the sticks it is. I keep seeing this and keep correcting it. There are some locations in very sparsely populated areas (west Texas, for example) where residents can not get mail delivery and must rent a post office box in the nearest town if they want to get mail. In addition, if you do live in a town with a designated ‘rural’ post office, you may not be able to get delivery. The reason (as it was explained to me by the PO clerk) is that all deliveries are made from a vehicle in a rural post office, and in town, it wasn’t possible to do that. They did not have carriers who walked from door to door and with parking along the streets, there was no way for people to put mailboxes out for delivery from a vehicle. So it is not true that the PO is required to deliver directly to every address. But of course, that does not justify privatizing mail service either.
The rural AZ neighborhood I live in is part of the county but those of us who are grandfathered in get delivery to our homes. But the houses built after a certain period have to go to a corner on the main street that has cluster boxes assigned to them.
I can confirm your correction, Liz. I used to live on a small resort island in Lake Erie, and there was no mail delivery to people's houses. The only way to get mail was via a post office box.
But I have to check the tire pressure in my mom's car and since I lived in a walking city for years and haven't checked the pressure on a tire since I drove a lil dinky sports car in grad school -- and that's on top of all the SSA stuff I'm going to have to do for her since she ... hasn't been doing the optimal thing keeping up with her paperwork
😑
Really looking forward to that with these crooks nominally in charge
"Trump appointed the board’s majority, which then somehow figured out that it should give the postmaster job to a big GOP campaign donor instead of hiring someone with any experience at all in the USPS."
"Second verse, same as the first!"
The Fulvous Fuckwad still places loyalty and sycophancy over experience. If he doesn't surround himself with yes-women and yes-men he might be forced to listen to those who won't tell him what he wants to hear... they'll tell him the straight poop with no ego stroking.
-----
"Trump was willing to force out the guy who shared his basic aims"
Mooseballs Mussolini will push out *anyone* who strays off the MAGA message by even one iota. He doesn't give a rat's ass if someone shares his perverse visions if they don't ask, "Sir, how high do you want me to jump?" when he commands it.
On second thought, they should jump and hope it is high enough for him, asking how high is questioning his orders. If it's not high enough, or the Sociopathic Marigold Swamp Monster is questioned about instructions, well then... buh-bye.
-----
"That would presumably be a step on the way to privatizing the USPS, a priority for Trump and Musk."
I've asked this before, and will likely continue asking, what businessperson in their right mind would want to acquire the USPS to privatize it? No one with even a modicum of business savvy knows that purchasing (I assume that our first and second transactional POTUS wouldn't let it go without a substantial bribe -- that would be a bad deal for him) a company deep in the red is a very dangerous proposition, especially when the predominant part of the loss is outside management control; and the USPS is deep, DEEP, *DEEP* in the red:
> "The net loss for the year under generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) totaled $9.5 billion, compared to a net loss of $6.5 billion for the prior year, an increase of $3.0 billion primarily attributed to the year-over-year increase in non-cash workers’ compensation expense. Over 80% of our current year net loss is attributed to factors that are outside of management's control, specifically, the amortization of unfunded retiree pension liabilities and non-cash workers' compensation adjustments." [fiscal year 2024] https://about.usps.com/newsroom/national-releases/2024/1114-usps-reports-fiscal-year-2024-results.htm
-----
"3) there are plenty of companies that would love to reap huge profits from taking over USPS"
I'm not so sure of this; please see above quote from the USPS itself.
-----
"And hey, nobody likes junk mail, so why not just let that part of the mail wither and die?"
You can't let junk mail disappear. Outside of parcel deliveries (I'm curious to see how the new entity would compete against other established delivery services like UPS, FedEx, and DHL), junk mail is the *only* mail many of us find in our mailboxes on a daily basis. Ending junk mail will put severe constraints on the USPS' bottom line.
I 'member when we had to buy an "Air Mail" stamp if we wanted something to get there in a reasonable amount of time. Somewhere in the mid-70s they eliminated that because everything was loaded onto planes for long hauls anyway. Make mail trucks great again!
We expect to pay more for less because profit motive. All these Americans voting for this think they'll be millionaires one day. Or, honestly, a lot thought that government benefits were going exclusively to Black people.
Oh yeah it did also turn out that the Postal Service hires a lot of Black people. It's one of the more diverse agencies. Ah well.
Also one more thing; the USPS board is supposed to be independent, because of the dangers with fucking with the postal service. So it wasn't beholden to Joe Biden. (or any Democrat). The difference is when you have autocrats who have the backing of the unreconstructed, of course. Since they are the representatives of those who have always had rights, they can do what they wish with agency independence. Because who were the ones complaining about the fuckery in the Post Office under DeJoy? It was just Democrats. MSM was busy spreading FUD, and Republicans have wanted to deep-six USPS for great profit for years.
Back when my mother, of blessed and curses memory, was a postal worker, she did mention that if one were an honorably discharged veteran or a member of a racial minority (protected class), extra points were added to the score on the test to become employed by the post office. This is how so many veterans, Blacks, etc. were able to live as members of the middle class.
Isn't that the thing? A lot of the DEI is about deliberate hiring of veterans (not to mention women). But these guys think it's only about putting Black people where they assume we don't belong.
My dad worked for the USPS as a mail sorter. He would sit in the basement with a mockup of a new route and learn how to sort zip codes into slots by hand. Supers were always trying to get the sorters to go faster, faster! I think he would have appreciated the automation we have now.
We live in a rural area now, and yes, the rural folk are MAGA and very dependent on the mail service. It's a long way to town from a lot of the homes and ranches around here.
I realize that you didn't choose these consequences, but your neighbors did. As they say, it sucks to be you. MAGA voted to run the government like a business and to shit on all minorities at whatever cost. Now you know the rest of the story.
My mother, a career postal employee whose final job there was head of the EEOC for the Philadelphia region (she worked in Trenton NJ), retired earlier than she intended originally because Ronnie Raygun fucked everything up for postal retirees.
Speaking of which, the PATCO shenanigans had nothing to do with air traffic controllers. Raygun wanted to prove he could bust a federal union because the postal workers intended to strike.
When we were going through "stuff" cleaning out my parents house a few years ago, after mom had passed, we discovered a bunch of correspondence my dad had with the democratic party, in support of public service and the postal service. I brought those back home with me and have been meaning to read them again. Now is a perfect time.
They're trying to inspire a more independent spirit. Instead of relying on the gubmint, pick up and deliver your own letters and packages, people! And one great side effect is going to be the increase in people buying local, as the trek to Taiwan, China, etc. is going to be too arduous just for the latest gizmo or whatchamacallit.
I am not paying Rocket Man $25 to send a birthday card to my sister every year. Move fast and break THIS, BigBallz.
H Res. 70
Bipartisan statement that the postal service should remain public. It has 170 cosponsors already. Get your congressman to sign on. Postal workers just held a rally yesterday on Capitol Hill. It's easy to keep this momentum up.
The USPS is specifically enumerated as a duty of Congress--Article I, Section 8. But since these clowns seemingly think of the Constitution as ink-stained wallpaper, I guess that doesn't matter. I guess the larger question here is, why is Congress so eager to give its power away to these numbnuts?
The USPS is a service, not a business. It was never intended to make money. It was always intended to provide a service--mail delivery--to the entire country, all of the country. Never meant to be self-supporting. The military is a service, too. Is some corporation going to take over the military and turn it into a for-profit enterprise? Oh, wait. Don't give them any ideas.
They aren't eager to give up that power. They just need to be reminded. H Res. 70.
Yeah- forcing every US soldier to be a mercenary is a brilliant plan
I am genuinely impressed at DeJoy’s workaround on compliance there. That is the kind of innovative spirit we can expect from a rich asshole who never expected people his kids’ age to try and bully him. He probably enjoyed every second of messing with the little pissants for sport. Musk sent a couple of weasels into a tiger cage there. Guy like DeJoy’s been fucking up underlings’ lives since he was their damn age.
DeJoy wasn't good, but from the inside he still believed the postal service should exist to serve the people. He just had bad ideas about how to save money.
What is with all these morons who think a govt entity is supposed to make a profit? It is a service offered by the govt for the good of society not a get rich quick scheme. Governments are not a for profit business, you ignorant louts!!! Also, healthcare and prisons should not be for profit either. I swear I am going to turn this car around if you people can't behave!
damn lithium batteries
Ta, Dok. I've been getting all my packages sent to the pied-à-nuage because packages in the hallway at the pied-à-terre have been stolen. However, the pied-à-nuage is so rural that Crom only knows whether or not it will still be getting mail. My postal worker mother is screaming from her grave.
Unlike DeJoy and all these rape-ublicans, I don't just want to keep the post office, I want it expanded to include banking for people too poor (or too undocumented) to have bank accounts. USPS already sells money orders, at about 2/3 the price of Western Union or the scammy check cashing places that dot the landscape. USPS was never intended to make money, but expanding into small scale banking could keep it in the black.
DeJoy tried to expand into banking via prepaid visa gift cards. The banking lobby and his old Republican congressional buddies shut him down after the first day in a trial office in Philly. That was the start of them hating him.
This idea has been floated for years, and I've always thought it was brilliant.
Louie DeJoy lives in my town and let me tell ya, he lives awfully well for a man that totally sucks at his job.
While I despise DeJoy and all the problems he caused, I feel compelled to point out one inaccuracy in this story, that the post office is required to deliver to every address, no matter how far out in the sticks it is. I keep seeing this and keep correcting it. There are some locations in very sparsely populated areas (west Texas, for example) where residents can not get mail delivery and must rent a post office box in the nearest town if they want to get mail. In addition, if you do live in a town with a designated ‘rural’ post office, you may not be able to get delivery. The reason (as it was explained to me by the PO clerk) is that all deliveries are made from a vehicle in a rural post office, and in town, it wasn’t possible to do that. They did not have carriers who walked from door to door and with parking along the streets, there was no way for people to put mailboxes out for delivery from a vehicle. So it is not true that the PO is required to deliver directly to every address. But of course, that does not justify privatizing mail service either.
The rural AZ neighborhood I live in is part of the county but those of us who are grandfathered in get delivery to our homes. But the houses built after a certain period have to go to a corner on the main street that has cluster boxes assigned to them.
I can confirm your correction, Liz. I used to live on a small resort island in Lake Erie, and there was no mail delivery to people's houses. The only way to get mail was via a post office box.
For those of you who don't fix cars, you might be fuzzy on Dok's use of the term "parting out." If so, it comes from this:
https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Ftse2.mm.bing.net%2Fth%3Fid%3DOIP.y0hl9JJW4e3-Qrqcg_OK7wAAAA%26pid%3DApi&f=1&ipt=459ffa949cd51200980ea3f31969a33b21ba9f7e2adb443c68abaf888b03b559&ipo=images
Whoa 😮😯😲
I do not fix cars
But I have to check the tire pressure in my mom's car and since I lived in a walking city for years and haven't checked the pressure on a tire since I drove a lil dinky sports car in grad school -- and that's on top of all the SSA stuff I'm going to have to do for her since she ... hasn't been doing the optimal thing keeping up with her paperwork
😑
Really looking forward to that with these crooks nominally in charge
And libs were worried about how to get rid of DeJoy!?
He self deported when Big Balls showed up.
"Trump appointed the board’s majority, which then somehow figured out that it should give the postmaster job to a big GOP campaign donor instead of hiring someone with any experience at all in the USPS."
"Second verse, same as the first!"
The Fulvous Fuckwad still places loyalty and sycophancy over experience. If he doesn't surround himself with yes-women and yes-men he might be forced to listen to those who won't tell him what he wants to hear... they'll tell him the straight poop with no ego stroking.
-----
"Trump was willing to force out the guy who shared his basic aims"
Mooseballs Mussolini will push out *anyone* who strays off the MAGA message by even one iota. He doesn't give a rat's ass if someone shares his perverse visions if they don't ask, "Sir, how high do you want me to jump?" when he commands it.
On second thought, they should jump and hope it is high enough for him, asking how high is questioning his orders. If it's not high enough, or the Sociopathic Marigold Swamp Monster is questioned about instructions, well then... buh-bye.
-----
"That would presumably be a step on the way to privatizing the USPS, a priority for Trump and Musk."
I've asked this before, and will likely continue asking, what businessperson in their right mind would want to acquire the USPS to privatize it? No one with even a modicum of business savvy knows that purchasing (I assume that our first and second transactional POTUS wouldn't let it go without a substantial bribe -- that would be a bad deal for him) a company deep in the red is a very dangerous proposition, especially when the predominant part of the loss is outside management control; and the USPS is deep, DEEP, *DEEP* in the red:
> "The net loss for the year under generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) totaled $9.5 billion, compared to a net loss of $6.5 billion for the prior year, an increase of $3.0 billion primarily attributed to the year-over-year increase in non-cash workers’ compensation expense. Over 80% of our current year net loss is attributed to factors that are outside of management's control, specifically, the amortization of unfunded retiree pension liabilities and non-cash workers' compensation adjustments." [fiscal year 2024] https://about.usps.com/newsroom/national-releases/2024/1114-usps-reports-fiscal-year-2024-results.htm
-----
"3) there are plenty of companies that would love to reap huge profits from taking over USPS"
I'm not so sure of this; please see above quote from the USPS itself.
-----
"And hey, nobody likes junk mail, so why not just let that part of the mail wither and die?"
You can't let junk mail disappear. Outside of parcel deliveries (I'm curious to see how the new entity would compete against other established delivery services like UPS, FedEx, and DHL), junk mail is the *only* mail many of us find in our mailboxes on a daily basis. Ending junk mail will put severe constraints on the USPS' bottom line.
fnord
Sure, that was a good jump, there. But you didn't ask permission to come back down. You're fired.
I 'member when we had to buy an "Air Mail" stamp if we wanted something to get there in a reasonable amount of time. Somewhere in the mid-70s they eliminated that because everything was loaded onto planes for long hauls anyway. Make mail trucks great again!
We expect to pay more for less because profit motive. All these Americans voting for this think they'll be millionaires one day. Or, honestly, a lot thought that government benefits were going exclusively to Black people.
Oh yeah it did also turn out that the Postal Service hires a lot of Black people. It's one of the more diverse agencies. Ah well.
Also one more thing; the USPS board is supposed to be independent, because of the dangers with fucking with the postal service. So it wasn't beholden to Joe Biden. (or any Democrat). The difference is when you have autocrats who have the backing of the unreconstructed, of course. Since they are the representatives of those who have always had rights, they can do what they wish with agency independence. Because who were the ones complaining about the fuckery in the Post Office under DeJoy? It was just Democrats. MSM was busy spreading FUD, and Republicans have wanted to deep-six USPS for great profit for years.
Back when my mother, of blessed and curses memory, was a postal worker, she did mention that if one were an honorably discharged veteran or a member of a racial minority (protected class), extra points were added to the score on the test to become employed by the post office. This is how so many veterans, Blacks, etc. were able to live as members of the middle class.
They employ a lot of veterans, too.
Why do they hate America?!
Isn't that the thing? A lot of the DEI is about deliberate hiring of veterans (not to mention women). But these guys think it's only about putting Black people where they assume we don't belong.
My dad worked for the USPS as a mail sorter. He would sit in the basement with a mockup of a new route and learn how to sort zip codes into slots by hand. Supers were always trying to get the sorters to go faster, faster! I think he would have appreciated the automation we have now.
We live in a rural area now, and yes, the rural folk are MAGA and very dependent on the mail service. It's a long way to town from a lot of the homes and ranches around here.
I realize that you didn't choose these consequences, but your neighbors did. As they say, it sucks to be you. MAGA voted to run the government like a business and to shit on all minorities at whatever cost. Now you know the rest of the story.
My dad was a career rural mail carrier. He loved it and was forced into retirement before he was ready because they kept cutting retirement benefits.
My mother, a career postal employee whose final job there was head of the EEOC for the Philadelphia region (she worked in Trenton NJ), retired earlier than she intended originally because Ronnie Raygun fucked everything up for postal retirees.
Speaking of which, the PATCO shenanigans had nothing to do with air traffic controllers. Raygun wanted to prove he could bust a federal union because the postal workers intended to strike.
When we were going through "stuff" cleaning out my parents house a few years ago, after mom had passed, we discovered a bunch of correspondence my dad had with the democratic party, in support of public service and the postal service. I brought those back home with me and have been meaning to read them again. Now is a perfect time.
They're trying to inspire a more independent spirit. Instead of relying on the gubmint, pick up and deliver your own letters and packages, people! And one great side effect is going to be the increase in people buying local, as the trek to Taiwan, China, etc. is going to be too arduous just for the latest gizmo or whatchamacallit.