As the nation reels from the double whammy of COVID-19, and protests and demonstrations sweep the country, the nation appears more divided than ever. As historians remind us, if history doesn’t repeat, it at least rhymes.
The dissention of the 1960s over race relations and American involvement in the Vietnam War preceded Generation X and the Millennials, but aging baby boomers remember it well. We of the “Silent Generation,” and those of the older “Greatest Generation” who are still around, recall the dissention in the early 1950s over President Truman sacking the popular General MacArthur for his unwillingness to follow orders of Truman and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and for his “end arounds” in going to his supporters in Congress. As significant and historic as that action was, it is relegated now to little more than a footnote to history.
Political division, protests and demonstrations are not new. Nevertheless, this current dissention based on unresolved issues regarding racial justice is deadly serious, and requires top national leadership that is clearly lacking.
Is there anything on which this divided nation and its divided polity can agree? There are a couple of things on which high level Democrats and Republicans purport to agree: criminal justice reform, and rebuilding our infrastructure. There has been some initial progress, however limited, on criminal justice reform. There is absolutely no reason why those with non-violent drug offenses should spend years in prison.
Republicans and Democrats purport to agree that we need to upgrade our infrastructure, including roads, highways, bridges, water and waste disposal systems, and all the rest of it. But nothing is happening, even as China is proposing projects as dramatic as rebuilding Asia’s ancient Old Silk Road.
There is another matter on which Americans of all persuasions agree, but on which our national politicians do not — preservation of the U.S. Postal Service. The majority of Americans basically like the Postal Service; it is among the most cherished government agencies. But even with that, our nation’s most powerful Democrats and Republicans cannot agree that the U.S. Postal Service should be saved.
The U.S. Postal Service has long been under attack by Republican members of Congress; Republican orthodoxy would privatize every public service with the possible exception of the military. Some Republicans would even privatize that if they could.
The Republican-controlled Congress in 2006 forced the USPS to fund the pensions for its 663,000 workers 75 years in advance, placing an enormous burden on the service. Half of the postal workers are people of color and 100,000 are veterans. The Postal Service is unionized, automatically making it a target of anti-union, anti-labor Republicans.
President Trump has waged a special attack on the USPS, a personal vendetta, insisting that “The Postal Service is a joke.” Trump’s phony allegiance with labor is a total sham. But his antipathy to the USPS goes beyond typical anti-labor Republican dogma; it is intensely personal.
Trump alleges that that the USPS gives Amazon’s Jeff Bezos money-losing rates on delivering packages. Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post. Trump, the “strong man,” whines that the Washington Post fails to give him the deference he thinks he deserves. Trump insists that the USPS should raise prices of package delivery by a factor of four.
When the Cares Act was negotiated, the White House threatened to veto the rescue package if it included a penny of assistance to the USPS. A compromise of sorts got the White House to agree to up to $10 billion in loans to the Postal Service, subject to approval by the Treasury Department.
That was a trap laid by Trump and Treasury Secretary Mnuchin. Fears are that the administration will use that $10 billion as leverage for decisions on setting major contracts and collective bargaining strategy, the latter leading to effort to crush postal workers’ unions and possibly installing Trump cronies in the agency.
The USPS has a financial problem, made worse by COVID-19 and decline in volume of mail that has reduced revenues. However, the USPS was not designed to be a profit-making enterprise. It was designed to provide a service throughout the nation, including to sparsely populated rural areas that could never be profitably served by a profit-making enterprise. Nevertheless, it is the only government agency that is now demanded by Congress to turn a profit.
The 2006 law requiring the USPS to prepay 75 years’ worth of employee retirement benefits, unlike any other government agency or private company, costs the service billions each year. Without that, its operating losses would be greatly reduced.
Demise of the USPS would undoubtedly hurt rural areas the most, areas that cannot profitably be served by private profit-making enterprises such as United Parcel Service or FedEx — areas containing Trump voters. People in rural areas, especially, depend on the Postal Service to deliver essential packages, such as medicines.
With the USPS, you can send a post card from Key Largo, Florida to Nome, Alaska, for 35 cents, and a letter from Caribou, Maine to sparsely populated range country of Nara Visa, New Mexico, for 55 cents. Unprofitable? Sure, but the system was not originally designed to make profits — it was designed to be a public service, to serve the entire nation equally.
The Trump/Republican effort to destroy the Postal Service is undoubtedly amplified by its possible role in vote-by-mail during fall elections if made more necessary by the pandemic.
The USPS was a major factor in the development of this nation. It remains an essential part of our national infrastructure. It remains a source of employment with a living wage throughout the nation.
The Congress and the President should cease placing unreasonable demands on the USPS with the intent of destroying that historic institution. It is perfectly rational to, if necessary, augment financing of the USPS to ensure that it continues to serve the nation at large.
— John Waelti’s column appears every Saturday in the Times. He can be reached at jjwaelti1@tds.net.
