What’s Happening to the US Postal Service?

Today, I received an email from my bank informing me that the USPO will start delivering first class mail to addresses more than 300 miles away as much as two days later than it does now. The email contained a link to the post office explaining what it is all about.

The Postal Service will increase time-in-transit standards by 1 or 2 days for certain mail that is traveling longer distances [>300 miles]. By doing so, the Postal Service can entrust its ground network to deliver more First-Class Mail …

USPS explains why it is doing this:

The service standard changes that we have determined to implement are a necessary step towards achieving our goal of consistently meeting 95 percent service performance.

In other words, since it can’t meet its current service standards it will relax the standards rather than bring its service up to par. The real reason for this downgrading is that

In 2006, Congress passed a law that imposed extraordinary costs on the U.S. Postal Service. Title VIII of the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA) required the USPS to create a $72 billion fund to pay for the cost of its post-retirement health care costs, 75 years into the future. This burden applies to no other federal agency or private corporation.

It’s highly probable that the Republican majority in Congress intended to privatize the US Post Office, much like the United Kingdom privatized the Royal Mail Service. Instead of a public service, the Republicans in Congress anticipated that the USPS would ultimately to go bankrupt, to be sold to a profit-seeking corporation or financial institution. In the United Kingdom, the financial institutions that purchased the British post office saw a huge increase in its stock value in a single day: from 330p to 455p. In essence, the British government “effectively gave away £1 billion in public assets to those who already had money going spare.” I wonder how much money the future buyer of the USPS will net when when the buyer flips it the next day. Suppose a Chinese bank made the highest bid. What happens then?

Needless to say, the Royal Mail service is being cut back as this article is being written.

The cutback in service announced by the USPS is the direct (and predictable) result of the financial distress incurred by the post office in fulfilling requirements imposed by Congress that it fully fund employees’ pensions. Were the Postal Service required to fund pensions in accordance with commercially-accepted practices (pay as you go), it would have been making a profit instead of incurring the losses that it has been needlessly experiencing.

Under the current rules imposed by Congress, the postal service can only become worse and worse as it cuts back on services in order to make excessive payments to its pension fund. Unfortunately, the American public is uninformed of the change in the law, and even if it were informed, most persons would not understand its implications. All the public will know is that postal service is becoming less reliable and more expensive. The Murdoch media (Fox network and the WallStreet Journal) will blame this on the inherent “inefficiency“ of government services in general and will do their best to convince their readers and listeners that the only way it can be “saved” is to privatize it.

Only Congress can cancel these ill-advised plans and it will do so only if it feels public pressure to do so.

Buying the Government

Around March 23, 2017, one or both of the Koch brothers conveyed the word to congressional Republicans that they would discontinue the flow of campaign money until the Republican majority repealed Obamacare (the Affordable Care Act) and gave the wealthy a tax break. They got the tax break but the ACA was too popular to be killed. See the CNN report.

That means that the Kochs own the Republican Party and thus direct its policy decisions. Their hostility to the public good is difficult to comprehend. I suppose they have talked themselves into believing (like Dickens’s wealthy characters) that destruction of the safety net established by The New Deal will instill virtue in the citizenry. In the event that citizens do not become more virtuous, perhaps they would welcome a reduction in the surplus population.

Great wealth has always given the possessor a disproportionate amount of political power. The predictable result has been a congress that favors the rich and powerful at the expense of the middle class and the poor. The rich have been buying elections for centuries, even millenniums, to serve their private purposes rather than for the common good. The Kochs are faithfully carrying on the plutocratic tradition.

The Roman Senate favored the wealthy, but they had an excuse: they were the wealthy, almost all having inherited large estates.

Extreme wealth has invariably bred in its owner an acquisitiveness far beyond ordinary greed. Scott Fitzgerald observed it around a hundred years ago. Scientific findings support the notion that the rich are different from the rest of us. They genuinely believe that they are exempt from the laws of the realm and even from the obligation to conduct their businesses fairly and honestly.

Psychopaths, it has been shown, actually have deficiencies in empathy, evidenced by lesions in the relevant parts of their brains. I do not know if this is the case with narcissists, who exhibit similar characteristics. Both should be made ineligible for either public office or any other positions of authority where they can (and usually do) cause severe damage.

The Bible has much to say about the rich: “It is easier for a camel [or rope] to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God” [1].

It is difficult for ordinary citizens to comprehend the vast mental gulf that separates them from the super-rich, who are not only unconcerned with the welfare of the rest of us but are barely aware of our existence, other than as “resources” to be exploited for their benefit.

Beyond simple greed, however, there seems to be a kind of madness that causes a billionaire, who can enjoy a life of comfort and luxury on interest alone, to grasp so fervently at something for which he has not the slightest need.

Past societies have enacted numerous laws and created numerous institutions to keep psychopaths and narcissists in check, but these devices have eventually failed, either from the decline of the institutions or conquest from outside. The same thing happens over and over again with minor variations, and no society has yet come up with a permanent solution.

It seems that the U.S. is traveling down the same path as its forerunners. The plutocracy, rule by the rich, is rapidly becoming a kleptocracy, rule by thieves. Inequality increases continually, despite feeble efforts to halt its rise. Our government is paralyzed because the kleptocracy wants to keep it that way. And because the masses are distracted by the media and given an inferior education, they consequently do not realize what is being done to them. They lack the knowledge and the will to work towards a more democratic and equal society.

It cannot end well.

---

1. See, for instance, Matthew 19:24.. The Aramaic word for both “camel” and “rope” are similar. The thought is the same in either case.  ↩