Tag Archives: US Postal Service

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. 

The Latest in the Post Office Scandal

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We’re in the middle of a pandemic that the president has made incredibly worse. That means unprecedented numbers of voters will mail their ballots this year. Yet the president opposes giving the Postal Service the money it needs, even though he admits that a lack of funds will interfere with ballots being properly delivered.

CNN reports:

The internal watchdog at the United States Postal Service is reviewing controversial policy changes recently imposed under Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, and is also examining DeJoy’s compliance with federal ethics rules, according to a spokeswoman for the USPS inspector general and an aide to Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who requested the review.

Lawmakers from both parties and postal union leaders have sounded alarms over disruptive changes instituted by DeJoy this summer, including eliminating overtime and slowing some mail delivery. Democrats claim he is intentionally undermining postal service operations to sabotage mail-in voting in the November election — a charge he denies.

Agapi Doulaveris, a spokeswoman for the USPS watchdog, told CNN in an email, “We have initiated a body of work to address the concerns raised, but cannot comment on the details.”

Last week, Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, and eight other Democratic lawmakers asked the inspector general to launch an inquiry into DeJoy on a number of fronts, including the nationwide policy changes he’s made since taking over in June, as well as whether DeJoy has “met all ethics requirements”. . . .

It’s unclear if the inspector general has launched a full-scale investigation into possible politicization at USPS by DeJoy, a Txxxx ally and Republican donor, or if it’s just reviewing the matter for Congress.

CNN first reported earlier this week that DeJoy still owns at least a $30 million equity stake in his former company — a USPS contractor — and that he recently bought stock options for Amazon, a USPS competitor [and customer]. These holdings likely create a major conflict of interest, ethics experts told CNN, though DeJoy and USPS maintain that he has complied with all federal requirements. . . .

On Thursday, Warren said on Twitter that DeJoy’s “inexcusable” stock options in Amazon should be investigated by the watchdog after CNN published its report detailing the trades included in DeJoy’s financial disclosures.

The relationship between DeJoy and President Dxxxx Txxxx has come under intense scrutiny, given Txxxx’s repeated attacks against mail-in voting and USPS’ key role in delivering ballots.

News of the watchdog review comes one day after Txxxx brazenly admitted that he opposes much-needed USPS funding because he doesn’t want to see it used for mail-in voting this November. The pandemic has led to record-breaking levels of voting-by-mail, but Txxxx has tried to restrict the method because he claims it is rife with fraud and abuse, claims that CNN has fact-checked multiple times and are largely without merit.

Democrats pounced on Txxxx’s comments. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Democrats were pushing to include $25 billion for USPS in the next stimulus bill because that was what was requested by the bipartisan board of governors who run USPS and were appointed by Txxxx.

Further raising questions about the USPS showdown, the White House said Friday that Txxxx and DeJoy met at the White House last week, even though Txxxx said he “didn’t speak to the postmaster general” . . . a few days after their meeting.

A White House spokesman told CNN that their meeting on August 3 was “congratulatory” to celebrate DeJoy’s confirmation by the USPS board of governors, which occurred in early May. . . .

This week, DeJoy acknowledged to USPS employees that recent procedural changes have had “unintended consequences,” but described them as necessary.

“Unfortunately, this transformative initiative has had unintended consequences that impacted our overall service levels,” DeJoy wrote in a memo sent this week and obtained by CNN. . . .

Earlier this week, CNN reported on newly obtained financial documents showing that DeJoy holds a large equity stake in his former company, XPO Logistics, totaling between $30 million and $75 million. XPO is a contractor for USPS and other US government agencies.

USPS officials signed off on DeJoy’s financial filings and told CNN that he is in compliance with federal ethics rules. But several outside experts who spoke to CNN said they were shocked that ethics officials approved this arrangement, which apparently allows DeJoy to keep his XPO holdings. One expert even said, “this is a classic case for investigation by an inspector general” . . .

Raising further alarms, on the same day in June that DeJoy divested large amounts of Amazon shares, he purchased stock options giving him the right to buy new shares of Amazon at a price much lower than their current market price, according to the financial disclosures. . . .

In a tweet on Thursday, Warren blasted DeJoy, saying his decision to buy Amazon stock options was “inexcusable.” She also said the USPS inspector general “must investigate this corruption.”

Unquote.

Let’s see how long it takes for the president to fire the Postal Service’s inspector general.

In other news, the Postal Service sent a letter to 46 states saying “voters could be disenfranchised by delayed mail-in ballots” and is simultaneously “removing mail sorting machines from facilities around the country without any official explanation or reason given”. 

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.