I did not know any of this beginning with the fact that the USPS has never taken one cent of taxpayer money.

These are just two excerpts of a great article I read after hearing some of this on a television news program. I believe it was MSNBC. 

“In 2006, the Bush White House and Congress whacked the post office with the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act–an incredible piece of ugliness requiring the agency to PRE-PAY the health care benefits not only of current employees, but also of all employees who’ll retire during the next 75 years. Yes, that includes employees who’re not yet born! No other agency and no corporation has to do this. Worse, this ridiculous law demands that USPS fully fund this seven-decade burden by 2016. Imagine the shrieks of outrage if Congress tried to slap FedEx or other private firms with such an onerous requirement. This politically motivated mandate is costing the Postal Service $5.5 billion a year–money taken right out of postage revenue that could be going to services. That’s the real source of the “financial crisis” squeez-ing America’s post offices.”

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” The killers are the outright privatizers who’ve pushed for decades to get the post office out of… well, out of our mailboxes. In the 1960’s, AT&T chairman Fred Kappel headed a presidential commission on postal reform, and he told a congressional panel, “If I could, I’d make the Post Office a private enterprise.” He couldn’t, but he did set down the marker that remains the Holy Grail of the corporate elite. Unsurprisingly, FedEx CEO Fredrick Smith (a former board member of the Koch boys’ Cato Institute) has been the leading corporate champion for, as he put it in 1999, “closing down the USPS.”

Read the entire article