Tag Archives: Post Office

The Post Office’s Board of Governors Would Like To Hear From You

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The United States Postal Service, currently being undermined by the orange maniac in what is hopefully a self-defeating attempt to steal the election, is theoretically overseen by its Board of Governors. The Board only has seven members at the moment, five of whom are Republicans. One of the five is the Postmaster General, a wealthy Republican donor who had to be approved by the other members of the Board.

The Board’s current membership and the fact that the Board rarely meets suggest that putting pressure on the Board in order to protect the Postal Service won’t have much effect. But it won’t hurt to let them know how you feel about recent events, which include:

  • New work rules that prohibit overtime and require mail carriers to begin their routes before their trucks are fully loaded.
  • The removal of mail sorting machines and mailboxes all over the country
  • The abrupt reassignment of a number of experienced managers
  • Widespread delays, sometimes several days long, in mail delivery (affecting, for example, the Veterans Administration’s delivery of prescriptions to military veterans)
  • The cost of mailing a ballot being increased from 22 to 55 cents.
  • The president announcing that he won’t approve giving the Postal Service the funds it needs because those funds would help the Postal Service handle an unprecedented number of mail-in ballots (during a pandemic the president has made incredibly worse).

Someone on Twitter kindly supplied the contact information for six of the Board members, including their email addresses. I’ve added the Postmaster General’s:

  • Louis DeJoy, Postmaster General:  louis.dejoy@usps.gov
  • Robert Duncan, Chairman:  mduncan@inezdepositbank.com
  • John Barger:  barger.jm@gmail.com
  • Ron Bloom:  ron.bloom@brookfield.com
  • Ramon Martinez IV:  roman@rmiv.com
  • Donald L. Moak:  lee.moak@moakgroup.com
  • William Zollars:  DirectorAccessMailbox@cigna.com

The information on Twitter was hard to read and you never know how reliable anything is on the internet, so my apologies if any of these addresses are incorrect.

I’m going to send these gentlemen an email requesting that they call an emergency meeting in order to undo as many of the recent changes as possible, thus making sure that the Postal Service is able to fulfill its statutory requirement to “provide prompt, reliable, and efficient services” to its customers.

If you are represented in Congress by any Republicans, you might tell them to immediately approve the $25 billion legislation to fund the Postal Service that their president, one of the worst people in the world, opposes. 

Attacking the Post Office Means It’s Time To Impeach the Bastard Again

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Title 39 of the U.S. Code says:

The United States Postal Service shall be operated as a basic and fundamental service provided to the people by the Government of the United States, authorized by the Constitution, created by Act of Congress, and supported by the people. The Postal Service shall have as its basic function the obligation to provide postal services to bind the Nation together through the personal, educational, literary, and business correspondence of the people. It shall provide prompt, reliable, and efficient services to patrons in all areas and shall render postal services to all communities. The costs of establishing and maintaining the Postal Service shall not be apportioned to impair the overall value of such service to the people.

Title 18: says:

“Whoever knowingly and willfully obstructs or retards the passage of the mail, or any carrier or conveyance carrying the mail, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than six months, or both.

The Washington Post reports:

President Txxxx says the U.S. Postal Service is incapable of facilitating mail-in voting because it cannot access the emergency funding he is blocking, and made clear that requests for additional aid were nonstarters in coronavirus relief negotiations.

Txxxx, who has been railing against mail-in balloting for months, said the cash-strapped agency’s enlarged role in the November election would perpetuate “one of the greatest frauds in history.” Speaking Wednesday at his daily pandemic news briefing, Txxxx said he would not approve $25 billion in emergency funding for the Postal Service, or $3.5 billion in supplemental funding for election resources, citing prohibitively high costs.

“They don’t have the money to do the universal mail-in voting. So therefore, they can’t do it, I guess,” Txxxx said. “Are they going to do it even if they don’t have the money?”

Quoting Paul Waldman of the Post:

The White House made sure that grants for the Postal Service would not be included in previous coronavirus pandemic rescue packages (“We told them very clearly that the president was not going to sign the bill if [money for the Postal Service] was in it,” an administration official told The Post in April), and as the problems at the Postal Service worsen seemingly by the day, Txxxx is sending the same message about any new rescue bill Congress might pass.

. . . Txxxx’s partner in the project to destroy the Postal Service is Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, the GOP megadonor who has given millions of dollars to the Txxxx campaign and the Republican Party, and has been on the job for just two months.

Soon after taking office, DeJoy ordered a series of changes in policy that shocked postal employees. He banned overtime and told carriers to leave mail behind at distribution centers, causing it to pile up day after day. Employees also report that sorting machines that help speed mail processing have been removed from postal facilities. The inevitable result has been slower delivery, with letters and packages arriving late and many Americans simply not getting their mail every day. You’ve probably noticed it yourself.

The implications for the election, with unprecedented numbers of Americans wary of going to polls in the midst of a pandemic, quickly became clear. As The Post reported last month, “Postal employees and union officials say the changes implemented by [DeJoy] are contributing to a growing perception that mail delays are the result of a political effort to undermine absentee voting” . .

In 34 states, including the swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, ballots can’t just be postmarked by Election Day to count. It has to be received by Election Day. If you mail it three days before, thinking you did everything right, but it doesn’t arrive at the board of elections until the day after the election, it’s tossed in the trash.

This has all the makings of an election nightmare purposefully engineered by Txxxx and DeJoy. As they know full well, due to Txxxx’s relentless campaign to convince people that mail voting is inherently fraudulent (unless Republicans are doing it), Democrats are now far more likely to say they’re going to vote by mail.

This is election theft in progress. And as awful as that is, it’s made even more despicable by the fact that to rig the election, Txxxx is trying to murder a national treasure.

Unquote.

Txxxx swore an oath to faithfully execute his duties as president. If Congress can’t agree to do anything else, the House needs to impeach him again and the Senate needs to hold another trial. That will give this issue the publicity it deserves.

But since the federal government is now partly run as a criminal enterprise, if you can’t put your ballot in the mail weeks before the election, hand-deliver it to county officials or vote in person, like Sylvia Smiles, a 77-year-old retired teacher from Charleston, S.C., is going to do. I hope she also contacts her representatives in Congress!

Noam Chomsky called the Republican Party “the most dangerous organization in human history”, given it’s denial of climate change. We have an opportunity to damage it for years to come. Maybe we can even put it out of its misery. Together, let’s get it done this November.