Oct 05 2011
Postal Service Faces Cuts in the Face of Manufactured Fiscal Crisis
The world’s seventh largest employer is being hard hit by a combination of politics and corporate influence. The US Postal Service, which employs more than half a million people, is facing a number of challenges. In September, the US Postmaster General sent a warning to Congress that the USPS was facing bankruptcy, and a spokesperson from the Government Accountability Office said that the USPS’s model was “broken.” This led President Obama to assert that the Postal Service should eliminate its Saturday delivery service in order to stay afloat. However, what few government officials say in public is that the USPS’s financial woes stem directly from government mandated restrictions. In 2006, Congress passed a law requiring the agency to pre-fund 75 years worth of its workers’ health benefits in ten years. The USPS is the only agency forced to set aside what amounts to $21 billion in benefits for future coverage for its workers. This amount is roughly equal to the $20 billion financial hole the USPS is in. Additionally, the postal service is required by law to not reduce its prices. It is also subject to government regulations that favor private for-profit competitors like UPS, Fed Ex, and Mailboxes etc, who intensely lobby Congress to limit the USPS’s services. In the past few years USPS has had to lay off or retire 100,000 workers. Fredric Rolando, the president of the National Association of Letter Carriers says that the new proposed cuts to service will result in a dismantling of the postal service as we know it. Postal workers held rallies in Congressional districts across the nation last Tuesday against the service cuts. Consumer advocate Ralph Nader told the Huffington Post, “[t]he post office is being pushed to the cliff, into the abyss. The ultimate goal is shrinkage — continual shrinkage and private businesses pick up the cream.”
GUEST: Fredric Rolando, the president of the National Association of Letter Carriers
Find out more at www.nalc.org.
4 Responses to “Postal Service Faces Cuts in the Face of Manufactured Fiscal Crisis”
The P.O. has been a cash cow for the Govt. for 40 years!The current “crisis” is manufactured…and what is sad is that the press is falling for it and is even in on it!The P.O. is being used to make the Federal deficit look smaller than it really is!Without the meddling of Congress, the P.O.would have an almost $1B profit over the past 4 years…NOT an almost $21B loss!Wake up America and find out the REAL truth,not what the poiticians and the press are feeding you!
The PMG was even espousing the REAL truth up to about a month ago…then someone must have told him that this “crisis” could easily be blamed on the craft employees of the P.O.(i.e. Labor)!So now the PMG is blaming everything on Labor,and is enlisting Congress and an unwitting public in his scheme to break the Postal unions,and the press just eats it up!
The P.O. has been paying Billions upon Billions into the Treasury for 40 years and now everyone is labeling any help they may receive a “taxpayer bailout”,when in fact the P.O. has NOT received any money from the taxpayer in 40 years!They only need to be able to tap into some of the funds in the employee retirement and healthcare funds(in which both funds are over-funded by tens of Billions of dollars!These are P.O. funds earned by the P.O.;these funds were not paid by,and are not owned by the taxpayer!
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