One of the most odious WSJ columns to ever see the light of day was recently delivered by one nincompoop named Gary MacDougal, in a May 6 WSJ op -ed ('Phase Out, Don't Bail Out, The U.S. Postal Service'). MacDougal pulled out every canard and piece of disinfo his febrile brain could expel in trying to make a specious case for gutting the Post Office. At every turn validating Jim Hightower's point (in a 2014 column) that:
"The main line of attack has been to depict it as a bloated, outmoded, inefficient agency that's a hopeless money loser"
The pompous piffle from MacDougal reinforces this, but is only a fraction of the refuse streaming from the Right's ideologues, led by the Maggot-in -Chief, Donnie Dotard. For Dotard destroying the Post Office is a way to get back at Jeff Bezos (owner of the WaPo), based on the delusion Bezos needs the USPS to distribute his paper. (Never mind most of get the digital version). Nor does Trump have the most remote notion of the collateral damage his idiocy would cause. (And we won't even get into his manic crusade to halt any mail voting, under the idiotic belief it would encourage cheating, see e.g.
The lies and disinformation from the Right include spreading the fable that with the rise of email and the internet people don't use it as much. But that covers barely 1 percent of the story. In fact, the Post Office would be turning a profit were it not for a misbegotten 2006 law I'd written about in an earlier post (Sept. 3, 2014).
Therein I noted the disgusting tactic used by a right wing congress that passed the “Postal Pension Reform Act of 2006” (later cynically renamed 'The Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act') to try to drive the U.S. Post Office into insolvency. The bastards from the 2006, GOP-dominated Congress actually used this "law" to require prepayment of health-pension benefits for up to 50 years - setting aside up to $5 b a year for ten years. That in itself put a mssive burden on the agency. But the same time the bill kneecapped the Post Office's ability to raise money by setting price caps on major products like first class mail. So the Post Office was given massive new obligations to meet even as income was basically locked in place.
This is something no other company in the country is required to do. (And note, my friends, while the Post Office is part of the federal government it is required to pay for itself via sale of its products and services, including issuing stamps for stamp collectors such as myself) Anyway, the dismal fiscal effects were almost immediate as the Post Office went from collecting a profit of $900 million in 2006, to suffering a loss of $3.8 billion just three years later.
So it is clear that the Post Office's financial morass today has nada to do with the use of email, say as the moron MacDougal blathered:
"But first class mail, the USPS's core business has been dwindling for years thanks to email and online bill paying.:
Which is total codswallop, given the real reason is saddling the agency with meeting 50 years of future pension- health obligations for retirees while putting a price cap on the sale of major products. So, MacDougal is not only a liar but propagandist, trying to sow furher memes to justify the "phasing out" of this essential institution. That is given that one deranged law has accounted for 74 percent of the Post Office's losses since it passed and despite shedding over 100,000 jobs. Besides all this, goobers like MacDougal fail to process the postal service is that - a SERVICE - not a profit -making operation,
Op-ed scrawlers like MacDougal (who is a "director of UPS" btw) also display a cavalier attitude in respect of the existing 600,000 postal service workforce in their advocated "phase out". According to this twit (ibid.):
"We can deal humanely with the workforce of 600,000 - offering early retirement for senior employees and offering assistance for the remaining employees in finding a new job. An experienced outplacement firm could connect employees with new opportunities. In some cases the USPS could pay moving expenses to those who have to relocate to take a new job."
By this point you have to wonder how much speed, MJ and opioids this fool took before writing this crap. Then you pretty well figure it out after reading his next set of bollocks:
"Amazon, FedEx, and UPS would all need to add more employees to accommodate the delivery volume now handled by the post office,"
Yeppers, and that would be roughly 400,000 more workers. Does this bozo really believe those private companies will add that many more workers to compensate for the lost delivery volume? Give me a break! Further, let's bear in mind neither Amazon, FedEx or UPS are geared to provide pickup and delivery services across the nation, especially in rural areas, towns.
If this cockamamey phaseout goes through, citizens had better get ready for missent jury summons, bills and undelivered mail ballots if this turkey's plan is implemented. Besides, will these outfits now take on the pension, health care benefits that were imposed by congress on the P.O.? I doubt it!
This fact of being hobbled by an act of congress makes it infuriating that the Right's toadies and propagandists - like MacDougal, and John Stossel recently - would then try to hold it up as a sign that government agencies are naturally bloated and incompetent. Which again is horse manure..
Americans in both urban and rural settings depend on the Postal Service to receive mail ballots (as Janice and I do here in Colo), jury summons, census information, as well as credit card and utility bills - which we also pay by mail. (We do not trust online payment services or banking after numerous instances of being hacked, compromised). Prescription drugs are also a critical delivery component, and as noted in the WSJ main news section yesterday ('Mail Order Prescription Delivery Up', p. A8):
"More patients are turning to mail or courier to get their prescription drugs during coronavirus lockdowns, a shift from the traditional visit to a pharmacy that is expected to endure after the pandemic subsidies."
All of the above delivery examples add up to some 472 million pieces of mail processed and delivered each day - an achievement neither FedEx or UPS could accomplish at the same low rates. This is also probably why the National Security Council identified the delivery of postal services as an "essential service".
This nefarious, disgusting plan embodied in the 2006 law ultimately has led to increasing debt and the future projections of Post Office obligations - with the Righties yelping about a need for "privatization". The key malignant component was prohibiting price increases of postal service products to compensate for having to fund future pension liabilities.
All of which shows the Right's crusade is bogus.
As Jim Hightower had written in his 2014 article, despite all the media and comedians blabbering - the Post Office is actually profitable. Really? Yes! As Hightower put it, the vermin behind this are the usual suspects: Anti-government right wing ideologues who wouldn't know the Constitution if it was imprinted on their brains, to pseudo-market liberalization fanatics (like Stossel) who go nuts just hearing the word "government" and degenerates who've long had a boner to disparage and demonize the U.S. Postal Service - which is just about the most faithful, consistent agency in the entire government.
Most of these idiots trying to bring the Post Office down (including Dotard) don't even understand its basis. That's how uneducated and semi-literate they are. In regards to Trump's cynical recent moves, Jim wrote in a smirkingchimp.com blog post:
"The U.S. mail service, however, is enormously popular, so Trump can’t just blatantly choke off its survival funds. Instead, he’s taking the agency hostage, offering to provide a $10 billion “loan” from the Treasury Department — contingent on the public entity agreeing to his draconian demands that it raise postal prices, gut postal unions, and cut postal services."
The most despicable aspect of the Swine-in-Chief's fell moves is the extent to which they damage his own base, rural voters - assuming they succeed. One can only hope his imbecility will rebound on him in the fall, as his actions now put more "nails" in his electoral coffin. As another blogger, Michael Winship, put it:
"There must be one mission above all, one goal supreme: Vote this monster out of the White House. And along with him, tow to the nearest dump the clown car of malefactors who gave him license to cripple our republic."
See also:
When one beholds nutso political chicanery like this - as well as shuttering Social Security Administration Offices (via inadequate budget funding), one can grasp why the political fabric of this nation is so badly torn.
"The main line of attack has been to depict it as a bloated, outmoded, inefficient agency that's a hopeless money loser"
The pompous piffle from MacDougal reinforces this, but is only a fraction of the refuse streaming from the Right's ideologues, led by the Maggot-in -Chief, Donnie Dotard. For Dotard destroying the Post Office is a way to get back at Jeff Bezos (owner of the WaPo), based on the delusion Bezos needs the USPS to distribute his paper. (Never mind most of get the digital version). Nor does Trump have the most remote notion of the collateral damage his idiocy would cause. (And we won't even get into his manic crusade to halt any mail voting, under the idiotic belief it would encourage cheating, see e.g.
The lies and disinformation from the Right include spreading the fable that with the rise of email and the internet people don't use it as much. But that covers barely 1 percent of the story. In fact, the Post Office would be turning a profit were it not for a misbegotten 2006 law I'd written about in an earlier post (Sept. 3, 2014).
Therein I noted the disgusting tactic used by a right wing congress that passed the “Postal Pension Reform Act of 2006” (later cynically renamed 'The Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act') to try to drive the U.S. Post Office into insolvency. The bastards from the 2006, GOP-dominated Congress actually used this "law" to require prepayment of health-pension benefits for up to 50 years - setting aside up to $5 b a year for ten years. That in itself put a mssive burden on the agency. But the same time the bill kneecapped the Post Office's ability to raise money by setting price caps on major products like first class mail. So the Post Office was given massive new obligations to meet even as income was basically locked in place.
This is something no other company in the country is required to do. (And note, my friends, while the Post Office is part of the federal government it is required to pay for itself via sale of its products and services, including issuing stamps for stamp collectors such as myself) Anyway, the dismal fiscal effects were almost immediate as the Post Office went from collecting a profit of $900 million in 2006, to suffering a loss of $3.8 billion just three years later.
So it is clear that the Post Office's financial morass today has nada to do with the use of email, say as the moron MacDougal blathered:
"But first class mail, the USPS's core business has been dwindling for years thanks to email and online bill paying.:
Which is total codswallop, given the real reason is saddling the agency with meeting 50 years of future pension- health obligations for retirees while putting a price cap on the sale of major products. So, MacDougal is not only a liar but propagandist, trying to sow furher memes to justify the "phasing out" of this essential institution. That is given that one deranged law has accounted for 74 percent of the Post Office's losses since it passed and despite shedding over 100,000 jobs. Besides all this, goobers like MacDougal fail to process the postal service is that - a SERVICE - not a profit -making operation,
Op-ed scrawlers like MacDougal (who is a "director of UPS" btw) also display a cavalier attitude in respect of the existing 600,000 postal service workforce in their advocated "phase out". According to this twit (ibid.):
"We can deal humanely with the workforce of 600,000 - offering early retirement for senior employees and offering assistance for the remaining employees in finding a new job. An experienced outplacement firm could connect employees with new opportunities. In some cases the USPS could pay moving expenses to those who have to relocate to take a new job."
By this point you have to wonder how much speed, MJ and opioids this fool took before writing this crap. Then you pretty well figure it out after reading his next set of bollocks:
"Amazon, FedEx, and UPS would all need to add more employees to accommodate the delivery volume now handled by the post office,"
Yeppers, and that would be roughly 400,000 more workers. Does this bozo really believe those private companies will add that many more workers to compensate for the lost delivery volume? Give me a break! Further, let's bear in mind neither Amazon, FedEx or UPS are geared to provide pickup and delivery services across the nation, especially in rural areas, towns.
If this cockamamey phaseout goes through, citizens had better get ready for missent jury summons, bills and undelivered mail ballots if this turkey's plan is implemented. Besides, will these outfits now take on the pension, health care benefits that were imposed by congress on the P.O.? I doubt it!
This fact of being hobbled by an act of congress makes it infuriating that the Right's toadies and propagandists - like MacDougal, and John Stossel recently - would then try to hold it up as a sign that government agencies are naturally bloated and incompetent. Which again is horse manure..
Americans in both urban and rural settings depend on the Postal Service to receive mail ballots (as Janice and I do here in Colo), jury summons, census information, as well as credit card and utility bills - which we also pay by mail. (We do not trust online payment services or banking after numerous instances of being hacked, compromised). Prescription drugs are also a critical delivery component, and as noted in the WSJ main news section yesterday ('Mail Order Prescription Delivery Up', p. A8):
"More patients are turning to mail or courier to get their prescription drugs during coronavirus lockdowns, a shift from the traditional visit to a pharmacy that is expected to endure after the pandemic subsidies."
All of the above delivery examples add up to some 472 million pieces of mail processed and delivered each day - an achievement neither FedEx or UPS could accomplish at the same low rates. This is also probably why the National Security Council identified the delivery of postal services as an "essential service".
This nefarious, disgusting plan embodied in the 2006 law ultimately has led to increasing debt and the future projections of Post Office obligations - with the Righties yelping about a need for "privatization". The key malignant component was prohibiting price increases of postal service products to compensate for having to fund future pension liabilities.
All of which shows the Right's crusade is bogus.
As Jim Hightower had written in his 2014 article, despite all the media and comedians blabbering - the Post Office is actually profitable. Really? Yes! As Hightower put it, the vermin behind this are the usual suspects: Anti-government right wing ideologues who wouldn't know the Constitution if it was imprinted on their brains, to pseudo-market liberalization fanatics (like Stossel) who go nuts just hearing the word "government" and degenerates who've long had a boner to disparage and demonize the U.S. Postal Service - which is just about the most faithful, consistent agency in the entire government.
Most of these idiots trying to bring the Post Office down (including Dotard) don't even understand its basis. That's how uneducated and semi-literate they are. In regards to Trump's cynical recent moves, Jim wrote in a smirkingchimp.com blog post:
"The U.S. mail service, however, is enormously popular, so Trump can’t just blatantly choke off its survival funds. Instead, he’s taking the agency hostage, offering to provide a $10 billion “loan” from the Treasury Department — contingent on the public entity agreeing to his draconian demands that it raise postal prices, gut postal unions, and cut postal services."
The most despicable aspect of the Swine-in-Chief's fell moves is the extent to which they damage his own base, rural voters - assuming they succeed. One can only hope his imbecility will rebound on him in the fall, as his actions now put more "nails" in his electoral coffin. As another blogger, Michael Winship, put it:
"There must be one mission above all, one goal supreme: Vote this monster out of the White House. And along with him, tow to the nearest dump the clown car of malefactors who gave him license to cripple our republic."
See also:
And:
When one beholds nutso political chicanery like this - as well as shuttering Social Security Administration Offices (via inadequate budget funding), one can grasp why the political fabric of this nation is so badly torn.
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