Selling off the Post Office: Berkeley calls out Richard Blum. 2006 law needs to be changed.
Truth: The Postal Service is being bled dry by a law passed in the 2006 lame duck session of Congress.
Senator Feinstein must take a lead in changing the 2006 law.
The USPS is managed by an independent Board of Governors of 11 members. Nine are appointed by the President, no more than five from one political party. There are three vacancies on the Board. Of the six presidential appointments, only one was appointed by President Barack Obama. The term of office of Dennis Toner, Obama's sole appointee, expires December 8, 2012.
Elections must have consequences. Surely the President should be able to make appointments to the USPS Board of Governors and just as surely Senator Dianne Feinstein must reconsider her qualms on filibuster reform. We are entitled in this democracy to have judges, agency administrators and Postal Service governors appointed by the President that we elected in 2008 and re-elected this November.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/12/01/1165912/-Selling-off-the-Post-Office-Berkeley-calls-out-Richard-Blum
madrchsod
(58,162 posts)blondie58
(2,570 posts)Inserted the poison pill in 2006. Sure, they need more freedom to earn more revenue, but they would be much better off if they didn't have to prefund health benefits for people who haven't even been born yet.
As a retired member of NALC #47,.I approve this message!
PATRICK
(12,228 posts)It would be a nightmare trying to insure continuity of basic service while holding up the juicy bits as corporate bait. Thanks to its successful, non taxpayer funded endurance, a lot of the easy profitability has flown away, the especially easy stuff facing stiff competition from electronic media. The chief value of the USPS is in fact its stand alone ability to actually reach every citizen every day with physical delivery even the rival package services(UPS etc) depend on. the mailers who seem poised to take front and center ownership of the system they have helped collapse and bankrupt with sweetheart rates and bulk center consolidations would be shooting themselves in the head, and in fact are complaining now about conditions they helped create. Success of privatization would slaughter their nationwide business. A typical bewildering madness.
It is too late for private profit. Too late to preserve universal cheap service with privatization. Too late to use any rationale about competition. The usual thing we hear about THAT is completely the complete reverse, how competition is threatening communication infrastructure.
The fact that what the result of breakup would mean does not stop the impetus of greed- and destructive hate. A few would get rich, get government funding by hook and crook, get higher rates fairly easily(but not enough to stop their whining!) get rich stock bubbles based on bells and whistles. Then collapse, CEO's slinking off to one of their billionaire mansions with postal sacks filled with gold. Loss of universal service, dependability, security, harm to advertisers and all who need to communicate to the people. IF they attempt to forestall stock manipulation and really really predictable cut and run profit taking you will only attract the most psycho risk takers. Those risk takers will count on their ability to hold mail service at a ransom to get money from the government and consumers and release them to get financing on the market. THEN they will fail, cut and run away with sacks of silver. Or go to jail.
Once a system like that is broken, equivalent to the overnight disappearance of toll free superhighways and rail, trying to reconstitute such an "old fashioned" system would be impossible to conceive unless ALL the idiots who let it happen are gone and unprecedented competence and civic commitment reigned. Of course that would be less likely to succeed than utterly blind and selfish privatization.
As to that 75 year paid in advance fund setting up the USPS system on the auction block to begin with, that is a slush fund prize taken from your purchase of postage to be awarded in the new spoils system of the 21st and last human century.