The USPS is about to declare bankruptcy. It’s at the center of the longstanding plans for disaster recover and has been since the Cold War. It’s the only institution that could (for example) deliver covid meds to every home in America in one day.
The proximate cause of the post office’s bankruptcy is the pandemic, but that is merely the finishing blow. The USPS was murdered in 2006, when Congress passed the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act.
The Act gave the USPS a mere 10 years to “prefund its future health care benefit payments to retirees for the next 75 years.” That is, to set aside cash to pay medical bills for future employees who hadn’t been born yet.
The Act gave the USPS a mere 10 years to “prefund its future health care benefit payments to retirees for the next 75 years.” That is, to set aside cash to pay medical bills for future employees who hadn’t been born yet.
The USPS’s murder is straight out of the neoliberal playbook: “1 Defund, 2 claim crisis, 3 call for privatizatization, 4 profit!”
As Lambert Strether points out, it was a bipartisan act of murder, cosponored by the “centrist” Democrat Henry Waxman.
Killing the USPS looms large in the Trump admin’s (nonmetaphorical, actual) privatization playbook, “Delivering Government Solutions in the 21st Century Reform Plan and Reorganization Recommendations”:
The proposals are for USPS to become a Wework clone or franchisee, but not to become a publicly owned bank - a common line of business for other nations’ postal services, natural based on the amounts of cash they handle.
The USPS is the nation’s second largest employer of veterans, with 630,000 employees. Trump is about to allow it to collapse so that UPS, Fedex and other private firms can skim off the most profitable parts of its business and leave rural Americans totally isolated.
The loss of the USPS would mean the loss of the last truly universal federal program in America and would unduly hammer the people whom Trump claims to love – veterans and rural voters.
I read a diary at Daily Kos which suggested that if half the households in America bought 2 sheets of Forever Stamps, for about 16 bucks, it would provide enough funding to keep the USPS alive.
How fucked up is this? We’re trying to save the fucking Postal Service, which is in the fucking CONSTITUTION, from Republican sabatoge.
There is no such thing as a moderate, or patriotic, Republican. They are anti-American Fascists.
don’t miss the fact that this is coinciding exactly with the push to increase mail-in voting, which would seriously jeopardize Trump’s reelection. you can’t have mail-in ballots if there’s no postal service, right?
Americans, please text USPS to 50409 and ResistBot will send a message to your senators and congressperson telling them to save the Post Office.
i did it yesterday and it couldn’t have been easier. my senators are both pieces of shit, but that doesn’t mean i’m not going to give them an earful about this.
Texting resistbot was SUPER easy, and I got an email reply from my senator’s office today confirming my email went through. Please do at least that!
“Nickel is a crucial element in stainless steel. Its chemical compounds are increasingly used in batteries for electric vehicles and renewable energies. It is toxic to plants, just as it is to humans in high doses. Where nickel is mined and refined, it destroys land and leaves waste.
In areas where soils are naturally rich in nickel, typically in the tropics and Mediterranean basin, plants have either adapted or died off. In New Caledonia, a New Jersey-size French territory in the South Pacific that has been a major source of nickel, botanists know of at least 65 nickel-loving plants.
Such plants are the most common metal-craving vegetation; others suck up cobalt, zinc and similarly crucial metals. With new electronics spurring surging demand for rare minerals, companies are exploring as far as outer space and the bottom of the ocean. Far less explored is one of humanity’s oldest technologies, the farm.
The language of literature on phytomining, or agromining, hints of a future when plant and machine live together: bio-ore, metal farm, metal crops. “Smelting plants” sounds about as incongruous as carving oxygen.”
