Janine Jackson: One congressman said it would be “a surprising act of sabotage” if the new chief of the United States Postal Service is allowed to push for major changes. Big Trump donor – surprise – Louis DeJoy issued a series of memoranda, disclosed to the Washington Post, calling for significant operational changes, including overtime restrictions that many, including the Union of Postal Workers, argue that they would delay mail delivery, while Donald Trump withholds crucial support for the USPS pandemic, depending on whether increase prices. “Sabotage” starts to sound like a pretty apt description.
But what we should know is that this direct attack on the Postal Service, while it can be felt particularly acutely during a pandemic and an election in which the most reasonable response is to vote by mail, is absolutely nothing new, just the latest Iteration of a decades-long assault on the U.S. Postal Service, with some characters and some ideas that, unfortunately, you may be familiar with.
Lisa Graves is executive director and editor-in-chief of True North Research, and author of the new report, The billionaire behind efforts to kill the U.S. postal service.. She joins us now on the phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Lisa Graves.
Lisa Graves: Thank you very much for inviting me.
It’s like the slowest daylight robbery in history, this effort to privatize the United States Postal Service. Something about a federal agency that serves everyone and doesn’t make rich people very rich just annoys some people. We can’t cover every minute, of course, but it takes us through part of the story and the key players in this effort.
Of course. What we discovered in our research was that Charles Koch, one of the richest billionaires in the world and who runs one of the world’s largest private corporations, Koch Industries, has been making efforts by people who have been working to privatize The Postal Service. for more than five decades, basically. So we trace Charles Koch’s first funds from the Reason Magazine and the Reason Foundation, as it was working to popularize the term “privatization” and specifically target the Postal Service for privatization. Furthermore, after Charles Koch became the largest funder of the Libertarian Party, his platform included the direct abolition of the Postal Service.
Then, in the 1980s, his right hand went to a commission, created by Reagan, which also demanded the privatization of the Postal Service. Then his group brought on board the Reagan administration official behind it, a guy named James Miller, who continued to push for postal privatization during the 1990s.
He was rewarded with a seat on the Board of Post Governors during the George W. Bush administration, led in part by Susan Collins of Maine, and then used his position as chair of that board to fuel this effort in 2006 to charge our Service. Postcard with extraordinary and unprecedented debt, to pay future health benefits for retirees in 50 years. And that debt has really been a major hurdle for the Postal Service in recent years, and it includes his current book.
So, he has a decades-long campaign, powered by Koch men, to privatize the most popular government agency, the one that serves more people than any other agency in our entire government. And now, with the help of Trump and his political appointee, Lou DeJoy, trying to make the Postal Service less effective, we have a combination of forces that puts our Postal Service at serious risk.
I wanted to highlight in one part, the Postal Improvement and Responsibility Act, because we often hear in the press that the problem is that the Postal Service simply cannot compete with UPS and FedEx; but that’s part of the reason why people call this a manufactured crisis. But it often appears, if it appears, as an accusation by some critics, or is somehow only a minor part of the story. Can you talk a little bit more about that pre-financing requirement?
Of course. This pre-financing requirement was imposed after other insiders from George W. Bush discussed the privatization of the Postal Service and felt that having potential future liabilities would be an obstacle to privatization. So the next thing that happened was that James Miller pushed through Congress this effort to transfer that debt, or that possible future debt, to a fund. And what he did was take huge amounts that the Postal Service had in savings, put that into that account, and impose a payment of almost $ 5 billion each year for those future obligations. It was really designed to make the Postal Service more attractive for privatization.
And Susan Collins instrumentally helped with that, along with Mitch McConnell, who strongly supported James Miller’s appointment to the Board of Post Governors.
And then you have the person who is now in command of the Senate, who is in a position to do the right thing for the American people and for the people of the cities and small towns everywhere, to save the Postal Service. Instead, you have someone who has worked behind the scenes to assist in this effort, to weaken our Postal Service.
No private company and no government agency have any requirements for that type of future financing, nor to carry that responsibility on their books. And removing those assets from the Postal Service deprives you of additional liquidity, to help you modernize your fleet, for example, your postal trucks, to make them more fuel efficient, to modernize.
So, you have a situation here where this Postal Service is the backbone in many aspects of the key parts of our economy, of the distribution chains in our country, the processing of hundreds of millions of pieces of mail, things that cannot be replaced by email, personal prescriptions, and checks and goods. In this pandemic, these postal workers have been at the forefront as essential workers, delivering deliveries to neighbors across the country, yet they are being attacked by the head of their own agency, trying to deprive them of the ability to deliver mail. on time, as people expect.
Corporate media often convey, tacitly or explicitly, the idea that whatever it is, the private sector does it better, and whatever it is, it must be assumed that the government is ruining it. That’s the kind of fancy vibe, even before it hit the news. So, perversely, those who want a public service to remain public are seen as embedding ideology.
But who imagines that Charles Koch is putting all that energy into something that It is not Do you support the ideologies that we see reflected in your investments elsewhere? And part of that is not being a big fan of democracy. But also, and not talked about often, you don’t care about the particular human beings who would be hurt by eliminating the US Postal Service either, and not only people trust it, but workers too, right?
So is; The Postal Service employs more than 500,000 Americans. It is the second largest civilian employer in the United States. And unlike Walmart, which is the largest employer, Postal Service workers are not subsidized with public assistance because of super-low wages, as Walmart has paid its employees.
Instead, it has a highly diverse workforce. In some cities, a significant portion of workers are African-American, such as in Chicago. As a workforce that has 100,000 of its former military veterans, it has a tremendous track record. It is the most popular brand in the United States and the most trusted government agency. And yet, largely because a billionaire has focused especially on the extreme privatization agenda, he has unfortunately been able to translate that fringe idea from those stripes into domination within the Republican Party. And that is at odds with a long history of bipartisan and transpartisan support for this vital public service that, in fact, the private sector cannot improve, gouge for us, which charges much more, as we already see in the prices charged, in my opinion, by FedEx and UPS for other deliveries.
And those who are not encouraged to go down those rural roads, where the post office goes, just because that is part of their job.
Exactly. And so many times Congress has talked about the importance of the Postal Service as uniting the nation, making sure that every American, no matter how remotely alive, no matter how big the city is, even through hurricanes like Katrina, to Through pandemics like this crisis, you have postal workers who have worked to deliver the mail, it rains or shines, and you make sure that people’s mail reaches them and that their ballots, for example, reach the secretaries of the courts. Therefore, they are a vital function in our society, they should not be privatized. And this effort by Trump, McConnell, and others to really move the Postal Service toward privatization is a fundamental rejection of this central institution that was actually named and created in our United States Constitution.
The American Postal Workers Union is fighting; there is a worker-led coalition, US Mail Not for Sale. What can people do to be part of the rejection of this assault on the United States Postal Service?
I would really urge everyone to call on all members of Congress, regardless of party, demand that they protect the Postal Service, demand that the Postal Service receive some funds as part of these Covid relief measures. That you receive some ability to take out some loans and free yourself from this unprecedented debt obligation. I also think, frankly, that they should ask for the resignation of the Board of Governors that approved Lou DeJoy for this position, because we need someone in charge of the Postal Service who is dedicated to preserving and expanding it as a vital element. public service. And also, when you call and request support for the Postal Service, I ask you to revoke that 2006 Law, which also prohibited the Postal Service from offering banking, coffee, or other services that would help strengthen it. and more flourishing, and it is also an undue limit on Postal Service activity that people may need and want.
WWe have been talking to Lisa Graves of True North; are online at TrueNorthResearch.org, and you can find the summary, The billionaire behind efforts to kill the United States Postal Service, at InThePublicInterest.org. Lisa Graves, thank you very much for joining us this week CounterSpin.
Thank you very much. It was an honor to keep going.
