One thing we’ve learned for sure this year is that no national crisis is too awful to keep Trump & Company from exploiting it for their plutocratic political purposes.
Obviously, COVID-19 is a God-awful crisis, having killed more than 90,000 Americans as of May 18 while also killing much of the U.S. economy. It couldn’t be worse.
Or so we thought.
Then, late one night deep inside the White House, a dim bulb flickered in the President’s head: “Eureka,” Trump exclaimed, “here’s our chance to kill the U.S. Post Office!”
No matter who you are, how rich or how poor, living in teeming inner cities or in isolated rural reaches, postal employees are on the job to deliver your mail, medicines, food, household necessities, election ballots, and other basics.
Yes, of all the things a President might focus on during a devastating pandemic, hijacking the Postal Service, bankrupting it, and then privatizing its profitable functions has become a top priority for this brooding madman. Bizarrely, Trump has long been fixated on and flustered by matters of postal management. Specifically, he rants that the post office should charge higher prices to ship packages for Amazon, and he bemoans the fact that postal workers are unionized and earn middle-class wages.
In April, with our economy collapsing under the weight of COVID-19, Trump struck. Like nearly every business, the Postal Service had suffered a crushing loss of customers and needed emergency funding to keep America’s mail moving.
In response, Congress quickly proposed a bipartisan $13 billion postal lifeline as part of its $2 trillion national rescue package. That gave our piqued President the rope he needed to strangle the agency. “No,” he said, threatening to kill the whole bill if it included a pandemic grant to save the Post Office.
The U.S. mail service, however, is enormously popular and an essential part of our nation’s economic and social infrastructure, so Trump can’t just blatantly choke off its survival funds. Instead, he’s taking the agency hostage, offering to approve a $10 billion “loan” from the Treasury Department—contingent on the Post Office agreeing to his draconian demands that it raise postal prices, gut postal unions, and cut services.
Trump’s provisos are postal poison pills, for they would destroy the agency’s morale and service, undermine popular support, and clear the political path for profiteering corporations to seize, privatize, and plunder this public treasure. In early May, Trump took a big step in this direction by appointing crony Louis DeJoy, a North Carolina businessman and top GOP donor with no Post Office experience, as his new postmaster general.
Here’s how I feel about the value of our nation’s postal service: “The humble Post Office is a community fixture, a civic inheritance, a rural lifeline, and one of the last vestiges of a shared civic culture in America. Tolerate it, treasure it, and don’t let the vicissitudes of global capitalism, contempt for government, or a viral outbreak take it away.”
Those are my sentiments, but not my words. They’re from an April 17 piece in The American Conservative magazine, calling on people of all political persuasions to save this vital public institution.
The men and women of the postal service have been steadfast in their duties, especially in times of national emergencies including wars, financial crashes, and plagues, literally delivering for the American people. In today’s terrible pandemic, as corporate executives and government officials shut their doors, some 600,000 of these workers have kept communication and commerce flowing.
No matter who you are, how rich or how poor, living in teeming inner cities or in isolated rural reaches, postal employees are on the job to deliver your mail, medicines, food, household necessities, election ballots, and other basics. A stamp is cheap, yet the wear, tear, and cost for the postal workforce can be high. For example, as of late April, more than 1,200 of them had been infected by COVID-19, and at least forty-four died.
Yet the entire public system is now under direct attack by an outbreak of Trumpista vitriolitus, an inexplicable form of personal animosity emanating from the White House.
To help stop Trump’s power play to set himself up as America’s postal potentate and privatizer-in-chief, get information and campaign resources from the American Postal Workers Union and the National Association of Letter Carriers, at USMailNotForSale.org.