Last week, the US Postal Service announced that it wil
l end Saturday service, cut 150,000 jobs, and close thousands of post offices around the country, starting in August. Packages will still be delivered, but letters, utility bills, and your Netflix DVDs will only now arrive at fewer destinations on fewer days per week.To supporters of the welfare state, this signals yet another incursion of the profit-driven corporate model into government services.The postal service, after all, is not a corporation — it literally is part of the federal government’s executive branch, explicitly authorized by the constitution and tasked with providing universal and affordable mail service. While wealthy city-dwellers can arrange to have their correspondences FedExed or iPhoned, rural Americans and those with limited access to technology depend on the USPS for basic communication with the rest of the world.
by now we have all read about congress putting an unimaginable weight on the PO all born of a plan to take it over and privatize, which means you will pay to get your mail if they succeed in privatizing it.
then big business gets a even bigger grip on your wallet.
The Postal Service’s current financial trouble stems from the declining revenue brought in by “snail mail” coupled with a Congressional mandate that all employee pensions be fully funded 75 years in advance. Over the last few years, since postage revenue peaked in 2001, the USPS has been borrowing from the Treasury, and in 2012, it hit its borrowing limit of $15 million.But this limit is entirely arbitrary, and as with the hysteria over the similarly arbitrary fiscal cliff and debt ceiling, the insistence on profitability from government agencies ignores one of the key advantages of government institutions — their lack of a profit motive. Unconcerned with the bottom line, government institutions can focus on providing key services free of market whims.
if we don't stop them we will all owe our lives to corporations and they know if we don't there is no free ride.
