Popular Post Office threatened by Trump’s attacks

Bill Knight column for  7-2, 3 or 4, 2020

           

This month, affordable, reliable, universal mail delivery could vanish, the American Postal Workers Union says.

That’s tragic when the nation’s divided; the United States Postal Service literally unites us.

“The humble Post Office is a community fixture, a civic inheritance, a rural lifeline, and one of the last vestiges of a shared civic culture in America,” wrote American Conservative’s Addison Del Mastro. “Tolerate it, treasure it, and don’t let the vicissitudes of global capitalism, contempt for government, or a viral outbreak take it away from us.”

Maybe too few have realized USPS is vulnerable to White House vengeance and corporate greed.

“I think there is a lack knowledge how much people rely on our job,” said Illinois mailman Vic Murrie, a legislative liaison with the National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC). “It might seem we will always be there.”

Operating without tax dollars for decades, and delivering to 160 million addresses daily, the USPS saw revenues fall due to email generally and the pandemic particularly, and USPS could lose $18 billion this year. Meanwhile, help is held up by President Trump. There was a lifeline in the CARES Act, which bailed out many businesses. (Airlines got $50 billion; United Parcel and FedEx together got $4 billion. USPS got zero.)

Both the House and the Senate favored financial relief for USPS, but President Trump threatened to veto relief measures if they included the Post Office, calling it “a joke” and saying package rates should be raised to four times current levels.

Speculation on Trump’s motives include resenting Jeff Bezos, who owns the Washington Post as well as Amazon, pandering to corporate zeal to privatize USPS, killing its unions, hurting possible mail-in voting, and expanding White House power.

Some Republicans were as startled as Democrats. The Trump-appointed Postal Board of Governors backs a $25 billion request, and ex-GOP Congressman John McHugh, chair of shippers’ Package Coalition, , said, “Why anyone on the Republican side of the aisle would want to bring the Postal Service close to a financial shutdown six to eight weeks out from the election and thinks that’s a vote-getter is beyond me.”

It’s beyond the public, workers and customers, too.

A bipartisan poll jointed conducted by Republican firm North Star and Democratic firm Hart Research said 90% of the country wants to keep USPS alive – with money, not just loans.

Writing to Congressional leaders, presidents of the postal unions (APWU, NALC, National Postal Mail Handlers, and the National Rural Letter Carriers' Association, representing some of the 600,000+ USPS workers) said, “The mission of the Postal Service, written in federal law, is ‘to bind the Nation together’ through ‘the correspondence of the people.’ It is our collective responsibility to preserve that bond.”

If Trump forces through his huge rate hike, big companies will pass along new costs to consumers, so everyday people will pay – along with small businesses, especially those who rely on mail orders.

For centuries, the Post Office was appreciated. Before it was in the Constitution, the Continental Congress in 1775 named Ben Franklin the colonies’ first Postmaster; in 1792 George Washington and James Madison expanded it to a national system of offices and post roads; in 1862 home delivery to towns was launched; and in 1896 rural delivery was established.

It was never run to make money any more than libraries or schools were expected to profit.

Still, its revenues were healthy until 2006, when Congress enacted a law forcing USPS to pre-fund employee retirement costs, including health care, for the next 75 years. That means it must fund pensions, etc. for employees who haven't yet been hired – or born.

The year that mandate passed, USPS made $900 million in net income. Burdened with that $5 billion annual expense – which no other company must make – it’s lost money ever since.

Trump’s claimed that USPS loses money on delivering Amazon packages, but that’s false. USPS is prohibited by law from losing money in competitive services, and USPS makes money from Amazon’s business, according to its 10-K filing with the IRS last year.

There are options to improve USPS and its revenues, like reviving its former banking services and providing public broadband. But Trump’s attacks jeopardize such forward thinking.

Still, support from the public, Congress and USPS’ Board of Governors “should be strong enough to carry the day over those who would carry out an unpopular agenda to privatize the Postal Service and sell it off,” said APWU president Mark Dimondstein. 

 Murrie added, “The USPS has served through our capital burned, a Civil War, the influenza pandemic, two World Wars, the telegraph, the telephone, countless depressions and recessions, fax machines, the Internet. I can't believe this could be the end.”

Concerned? Check out USMailNotForSale.org or Heroesdelivering.com.

We’re a nation founded by workers and protestors

Bill Knight column for 6-29, 30 or July 1, 2020

                       

This Independence Day, one remembers 1773’s Boston Tea Party, where Americans angry about the British Empire’s “taxation without representation” and the power of the British East India Company multinational corporation destroyed 46 tons of tea on three ships in the harbor.

One also recalls, after the uprising about the police killing of George Floyd on Memorial Day, the saying (and movie) “10,000 Black Men Named George,” about Black labor leader A. Philip Randolph and the union he led for decades: the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, with some 18,000 members.

As to the former: Property damage has proven effective sometimes (and it’s not “violence” – injuring or killing living things). Even if vandalism and looting during demonstrations for racial justice were misguided acts of outrage or “criminal shopping,” the focus should still be on African American victims of brutality.

The latter should remind us that organized labor at its finest stands with working people and against racism and inequality.

Historically, 17th century rebellions in the American colonies often led to black slaves and white indentured servants cooperating in fighting for freedom, struggles that led to “Slave Codes,” a precursor to the notorious Jim Crow laws making racism not just legal but mandatory.

But labor often saw common ground, maybe best shown in 1963’s March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where labor leaders A. Philip Randolph and Walter Reuther from the Autoworkers walked alongside the Rev. Martin Luther King and future Congressman John Lewis.

            Recently, Teamsters president James Hoffa said, “Black people fear for their lives on a daily basis by the very institutions which are supposed to protect them. It may not be most of our truths, but we must acknowledge and understand this is the truth of so many Black and brown brothers and sisters.”

From before the American Revolution, after the failed Reconstruction, and into the 21st century, the status quo has used a “divide and conquer” strategy to subdue workers, Black and white, and racial prejudice has been one tactic.

“Racism in America, from colonial times to the Trump era, divides us to prevent an effective united front,” said organizer Andrew Tillett-Saks of UNITE HERE Local 217 in Rhode Island, writing in In These Times magazine in 2016.

In W.E.B. Du Bois’ 1935 book “Black Reconstruction,” the historian and activist wrote, “So long as the Southern white laborers could be induced to prefer poverty to equality with the Negro, just so long was a labor movement in the South made impossible.”

There’s popular support for action. Polls show that 54% of Americans back the protests that have unleashed unrest in dozens of U.S. communities, and 74% agree that Floyd’s death reflects systemic racism in policing

April Sims, the Black secretary-treasurer of the Washington State Labor Council, said, “The system isn’t broken. The system is operating exactly the way it was intended to.”

Days after the AFL-CIO building in Washington, D.C., was damaged after protests, federation president Richard Trumka said, “Racism plays an insidious role in the daily lives of all working people of color. We must and will continue to fight for reforms.

“We remind ourselves that peace is not the absence of conflict, but the presence of justice.”

Of course, talk is cheap, so it’s insufficient to offer “thoughts and prayers,” advice to vote in five months, or to buy commercials or relay on public relations.

Some police have showed sympathy to demonstrators, but reactions have been inconsistent, and there’s a growing schism between labor and police unions.

Organized labor must step up and recognize the crisis. As UNITE HERE President D Taylor commented about Floyd’s murder, “This is not normal. Except it is.”