Going, postal

Kimberly Karol is president of the Iowa Postal Workers Union, and this is what she said on NPR:

"Mail is beginning to pile up in our offices, and we're seeing equipment being removed...that hinders our ability to process mail in the way that we had in the past."  Later she said, "I don't see this as cost-saving measures.  I see this as a way to undermine the public confidence in the mail service."

The far right long ago drew a target on the postal service, mostly because it undercuts their message that government is the enemy and can't do anything right.  No other enterprise on earth, private or public, is required to set aside pension funds for employees who haven't even been hired yet, or possibly born.  Besides, it has long been an employer of African Americans at wages that allow them to lead middle-class lives, sending their children to college and buying houses in the suburbs that Trump has promised to preserve as white enclaves.  That's because postal workers have a strong union.  Everything the Republicans hate in one envelope, which they've handed to Louis DeJoy to fold, spindle and mutilate.

In Washington state, where mail voting has been the norm for fifteen years, DeJoy's fuckery is far advanced, which means other states are or soon will be messed with.  Closing post offices and shortening hours -- where have I heard that before?  Removing or disabling sorting machines, now that sounds like the voting machines in Georgia as Brian Kemp sleazed his way from secretary of state to governor.  There is absolutely nothing Republicans can't corrupt.  As for DeJoy, he comes pre-corrupted, a major investor in private delivery companies.  Conflict of interest, how does it work?

Americans rarely think about the mail; it's just there, like running water (for most of us) or television.  Nobody really knows how much a stamp costs now -- they just say FOREVER, like the "war on terror."  Many people have never written a letter or paid a bill except online.  They probably think the post office only opens in December, like Christmas markets in European cities.  They certainly don't know the mail was important enough to be mentioned in the Constitution, or why there is still a Boston Post Road (King's Highway until Benjamin Franklin re-named it) in the Bronx.   It's time to pay attention.