Thursday, December 8, 2011

Time to Save the Post Office | Common Dreams

Time to Save the Post Office Common Dreams

Mr. Donahoe tells reporters that he is acting the way any beleaguered business executive would, even though he knows that the Postal Service is not just another big business feeding off corporate welfare. The USPS has not taken any taxpayer money since 1971.By contrast the federal government has taken money from the USPS and owes our Postal Service between $50 and $70 billion dollars in excess retirement benefits payments. The other overpayments to the federal government are for the unprecedented advanced payment of health benefits of future retirees of the next 75 years by 2016, amounting to $5 billion a year (Congress is considering a bill to rectify this problem). Without corrective legislation, the Postal Service says it would have lost $8.5 billion this year. (By comparison, in addition to lost lives and destruction, the Afghan War quagmire costs the U.S. taxpayer over $2 billion a week.)If all this sounds bizarre to you, it is. No other public department is a defacto creditor of the federal government. The USPS is a hybrid public corporation, created in 1970, from the old Post Office Department. It has been run into the ground on the installment plan by commercial competitors aggressively taking advantage of a weak-willed, unimaginative succession of postmaster generals ruled by a corporate Board of Governors ideologically rooting for corporate privatizers.

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