To The Editor:
It’s like thousands of their counterparts around the country, the Bennettsville station and its postal workers are a public treasure, literally delivering for the people – no matter who they are, how poor they are or where they are. Hardly an impersonal franchise that peddles stamps, a post office is a place where town people from all walks of life regularly cross paths, maybe have a bit of conversation and begin to see each other as neighbors in a shared community. 3,700 offices across the country under review for closure. Budgets, you know. USPS is running about 5 billion a year in the red, explained a postal spokesperson. While Congress and the postal service’s top bosses busy themselves by continue to pretend that the massive boulder of manufactured debt hung around the neck of USPS isn’t there. You see, far from being broke, as the right wing anti-government crowd ceaselessly claims, the Postal Service annual revenue greatly exceeds its operating cost these days, generating an impressive operating profit of 1.4 billion, yet the service appears to be sinking in red ink, thanks to one outside factor: malicious congressional meddling.
While Washington has loudly insisted that our public mail network must sink or swim on its own as a business, getting no taxpayer subsidies, Congress quietly intervened (directly and massively) in the service’s business in 2006 to rip a Titanic-sized gash in its balance sheet. That Fall the Bush-Cheney regime and lobbyists for postal corporatizers pushed a lame-duck session of Congress to ram the “Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act” into law. Some enhancement! The law mandated that the service must pre-fund all of its retiree benefits for the next 75 years. And pay for it within 10 years. That’s criminally outrageous! No other business or government agency has to pre-fund for even one year, much less seven and a half decades. This adds an unbearable, artificial, government-manufactured debt of more than $5 billion a year to USPS – accounting for 100 percent of its current “losses.”
Excuse me, but the only important part of the service is – hello – its service. Kill off the community facilities and the dedicated workers who deliver, and what’s left of the P.O.? Nothing – which is precisely why the extremist, anti-public ideologues and corporate profiteers keep chanting their “shrink to survive” mantra.
Part One.
Average American,
John T. Nickoless
951 Burnt Factory Rd.
Bennettsville, SC 29512