Wednesday, April 18, 2018

Let's All Go Postal


Image result for cartoon of privatising the Postal  ServiceAre you ready to give up the only delivery service all Americans have? Imagine someone going to your home and personally delivering to your home your stuff and having an office in every neighborhood to bring your stuff to go to other places. Sounds like a great service   that is being ignored lately and is in serious trouble of going bankrupt. Yes, I am talking about our Postal Service. Right now it seems that the only thing we all rely on is our smart phones where we can pay our bills, do our banking and investments, text people and even send pictures. Do we even need the Postal Service in America anymore? Meanwhile it is the only long time established service that goes to each and every home regardless of easy or difficult location.
The politics of the postal service is heating up. Something has to be done to make the service profitable again. Since 2010 there hasn’t even been any real leadership in the United States Board of Governors in the Postal Service. The Board is hugely important because it sets rates and signs off on personnel decisions. All of a sudden the Postal Service is getting a lot of attention because the President has been tweeting about it. On March 31, 2018 Dumb Donald tweeted that Amazon is robbing the Postal Service blind. Meanwhile his tweets was really an attack on the owner of Amazon who also owns The Washington Post that reveals on a regular basis all that is wrong with this Administration. Trump loves to take swipes at all who are critical of him being the Master of Self-Promotion that he is.
His tweets have opened some serious discussions about the Postal Service that has been ignored for a very long time. Senator Bernie Sanders has some ideas as to how we can save this unique service that all Americans have and should be saved since things to help us are going away rapidly in society. He wants to offer wrapping services at the Post Office to expedite our stuff to go places. During Christmas time lots of people like to mail gifts. Imagine just leaving our stuff there and they will box and ship. Sounds like something we all could enjoy. All we need is a Congressional mandate.
The facts are that the Postal Service is a huge business. It employs more than 645,000 workers. It has well over 157 million delivery sites. It owns 231,000 vehicles to deliver your stuff anywhere. So, in this internet smart phone age it has billions of dollars in revenue shortfalls since it basically delivers only your junk mail these days. So what are our choices to save the service? Expand its services or take it out of the government’s hands? President Trump wants to privatize everything. Just like the Veterans Administration, just like Medicare, just like Public Schools he wants private companies to take over the business of running things. So would a private business owning the Post Office deliver mail to someone who lives out of the way on a dirt road? Hell no, that wouldn’t be profitable meanwhile people in poor rural areas need their mail.
The Postal Service could instead of ruining our already established employees and easy to reach locations could expand going to the Post Office to doing other things we need like banking services. Post Offices in other countries already offer banking services. Our Senators need to get going on this issue and do something to save stuff for Americans instead of closing down established services we all enjoy.

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