Friday, February 8th, 2013
Stephan: I live on a rural island off the coast of Washington State, and for much of my young life lived in the rural Virginia Tidewater county of Gloucester. For four years I lived on a bus travelling the United States and Canada. All these experiences taught me why the Post Office is the only non-military guaranteed government service agency mentioned in the Constitution.
Post offices are gathering places in rural areas; they are the place for posting community events; they link a community together. And these functions have not been replaced by the digital world. Maybe some day but, at least in America, not now, or in the foreseeable future. Our aging, archaic infrastructure is deteriorating with increasing rapidity.
Only around 74 percent of the nation's adults had Internet access in their homes in 2010, the last year for which we have data, and 6 percent are still relying solely on dial-up Internet connections to go online, according to a Federal Communications Commission report that looked at broadband access. That means for rural families and businesses the Post Office remains a critically important lifeline.
As this report makes clear Congresspersons from the Right, who are the servants of their corporate masters, are trying to destroy the Post Office so it can be privatized. Just as is happening with the prison and educational systems. Once again, only citizen outrage and voting will stop this.
You know that feeling of pleasure you get when you see someone stand up to a bullying, incompetent boss? It’s viscerally satisfying, isn’t it?
That’s the way I felt this morning when I heard Postmaster General Patrick Donahue announce that the U.S. Postal Service intended to move forward with a plan to stop Saturday delivery of mail, effective sometime in August. In doing so, Donahue stuck his thumb in the eye of the U.S. Congress, the mail agency’s ultimate boss. Bravo, Mr. Donahue.
You may think I have incorrectly identified the incompetent party here. After all, it’s a deeply ingrained part of Americans’ worldview that our postal service is the epitome of inefficiency and bad management, the perfect example of a bungling, poorly run government bureaucracy. That view gets reinforced from all kinds of sources – jaded journalists, editorial cartoonists given more to clichés than to cleverness, free-market economists, and others.
And it’s certainly true that the Postal Service faces serious problems. Mail volume is falling. The organization’s annual deficits are rising. The postal system is slowly circling the drain. If you pay any attention to postal issues, you’re familiar with some of the proximate causes of these problems: Email is eroding […]
