Thursday, June 4, 2020

USPS Crippled When They're Needed Most



Part of demagogue and con man Donald "Putin's Puppet" Trump's election strategy is to delegitimize voting by mail as being rife with "fraud." By doing so, he wants to claim "fraud" if the election goes against him, and wants his corrupt enablers in Congress and at the state and local level to make it really hard to vote by mail. He's said before that making it easier to vote would mean "you'd never have a Republican elected in this country again."

It should come as no surprise that Trump and his Rethug enablers would like to cripple the U.S. Postal Service prior to the November elections, to undermine mail-in voting to boost their election chances. Recall that the original $2 trillion coronavirus relief bill contained funding for the Postal Service, but Trump threatened to veto the entire bill if aid to the Postal Service were included. That's how seriously he sees the threat to himself.

The Postal Service is struggling financially because of an insidious 2006 Rethug-imposed law that the Postal Service fund health care benefits for their retired postal workers -- most not even born yet -- 75 years in advance, something unique to government and the private sector. Those burdensome costs have transformed the Postal Service from a profitable operation to one struggling from year to year requiring infusions from Congress. By denying resources, and keeping the onerous burden of forward- funding benefits, Trump and his enablers plan to undermine the Postal Service and the elections in November.