Steve Hutkins continues to pull together all the strands of the Postal Service financial debacle at his blog, Save the Post Office.
Here's one simple action: send letters with love for the postal workers.
http://www.savethepostoffice.com/...
Meanwhile, the village of Still Pond in Maryland continues to try to save the building in which its post office was located:
Our Maryland nonprofit, Still Pond Preservation Inc., really could use donations of any size between now and Oct. 1 as we try to raise more than $50,000 to buy it.
http://www.stillpondmd.com/...
We are about 12 percent of the way to our goal. We know that most of our donations have to originate locally, but if you like old country stores or want to support a village revitalization effort, please visit.
More below the fold.
I'll just mention in passing that the Direct Marketing Association has managed to deep-six a USPS revenue increase. No, the best plan is to fire employees and close nearly 5,000 post offices.
Sound familiar? (See Steve's blog for more).
The USPS Propaganda Machine
The USPS has a full-court press, a cascade, of identical talking points emanating from its management. If you, for example, Google "USPS Freda Sauter," the PR employee for the Baltimore Region, and observe the content-free comments that she has consistently supplied to news outlets.
I received a three-paragraph FOIA response letter the other day with this non sequitur making up paragraph 2:
Sent: Tuesday, August 16, 2011 12:06 PM
Subject: FOIA Case No. 2011-FPRO-01023 - Proposal to Close Still Pond Post Office
This responds to your Freedom of Information Act dated July 11, 2011 ...
By way of background, under the Postal Reorganization Act of 1970, the Post Office Department was reformulated as the United States Postal Service. The Postal Service is an independent establishment of the executive branch of the federal government, and its Postmaster General is appointed by the Board of Governors, not the President of the United States. Our mission is to provide postal products and services. We serve over 7 million customers daily at more than 30,000 post offices. As a wholly government-owned entity, the Postal Service is not supported by tax dollars, but by revenue generated through the sale of postal products and services.
I'd credit USPS employee Richard Di Giorgio with this masterpiece of English prose, except I'm certain it came around in a memo from the Top Brass.
By the way, when I spoke to him on the phone the week before, his main concern seemed to be to complain about his 75-mile commute to work. He didn't mention whether that was one-way, by car, on the train, or what, but I'd say it shows that morale is pretty low down there at what less reverent postal employees call "Elephant Plaza."
That would be the USPS headquarters and Death Star, at L'Enfant Plaza in D.C.
Here's a lucid explanation of why, like the "deficit crisis" in Congress, this whole thing is nothing more than a trumped-up manufactured difficulty.
Here's how Steve explains it. It all starts with, guess what, A Dysfunctional Congress:
Steve e-mailed me to note that this post is by an Anonymous Postmaster: "Thanks for all the great plugs on the Kos. One minor correction, though. That piece you quote starting Congress owns the Postal Service — and it owns the problems was not written by me, but by a guest blogger, the anonymous postmaster."
Congress owns the Postal Service — and it owns the problems
The current deficits attributed to the Postal Service arise not from falling revenues, overly generous employee compensation, or too much capacity, but rather from accounting transfers to the Treasury mandated by Congress. The plain and simple fact is that Congress, essentially the owner of the postal system, has extracted billions of dollars of profits and value from the Postal Service. The bottom line is that the Postal Service is not only doing fine — its surpluses are being taken by Congress and used to mask other budget deficits.
The supposed deficits the Postal Service has been running are attributable to three related accounting issues: (1) the overly ambitious pre-funding schedule of retiree health benefits mandated by Congress in the 2006 Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA), (2) the over-funding of both the Civil Service Retirement System (CSRS) and Federal Employees Retirement System (FERS), and (3) the methods used to determine potential liabilities due to workmen’s compensation.
All of the deficits of the last five years can be attributed to these accounting issues, rather than, as the Postal Service would have us believe, the recession and “electronic divergence” to email and the internet. That is not to say that there won’t be deficits in the future, but these will be completely attributable to the panicked and ill-considered response of postal management to the deficit problem, a response that has seriously undermined public confidence in the system.
A failed vision
These accounting problems are only part of the story .... [click for the rest] ....
When All Else Fails, Change The Rules
Steve's recent post, here, shows that the Postal Regulatory Commission is pushing back on behalf of you and me. The PRC is an oversight body with, particularly, the job of handling citizen appeals against local post office closure.
I won't repeat what Steve explains ... let's just say in true bureaucratic fashion the USPS brass have tried to change the rules for closings and appeals to their own benefit.
Write to them now, by fax, on paper, by e-mail.
And please, remember Still Pond and donate. We take PayPal.