Trump Is Rigging The Postal Service To Get Himself Re-Elected
And now with Trump proposing to delay the election itself, the stakes are higher than ever before.
| Jul 30 | 10 | 3 |
by Bob Cesca
WASHINGTON, DC -- When and if the votes are counted and we have a new president, Donald Trump and his fascist co-conspirators have to be held accountable for the unprecedented and entirely despotic actions they’ve taken since and even before the 2016 election. And now, with Trump proposing to delay the election, the stakes are higher than ever before.
As I’ve said repeatedly: the only way we can prevent another Trump is to forcefully slam the door behind this administration -- the “door” in this metaphor being a series of legislative reforms, constitutional amendments, and, yes, prosecutions of everyone who participated in the subversion of our democratic republic in the name of propping up our first presidential dictator.
One of the top shelf items on the list isn’t being discussed a lot, but it should be. You may have heard that Trump and his Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy, are busily crippling the U.S. Postal Service. Why?
Prior to the coronavirus pandemic, second quarter 2020 revenues for the USPS grew by more than $300 million from the second quarter of the previous year, totalling $17.8 billion. Likewise, 2019 revenues for the entire year were up more than half-a-billion dollars over 2018. It turns out, e-commerce from corporations like Amazon has significantly helped the USPS, with operative profits growing every year since 2012.
Are people mailing fewer letters these days? Sure. Is it seriously damaging the USPS? Not really. The major issue plaguing the USPS right now is a good problem to have: and that’s meeting its pension obligations to its retired workers. Solutions, however, include debt forgiveness from Congress and a $25 billion modernization grant. Given Congress’s spending on bailouts and tax cuts, $25 billion to help the USPS isn’t that much of a burden in the grand scheme. However, Trump, responding to the proposal, said, “The Postal Service is a joke.” Back in March, a bipartisan bill to infuse the Postal Service with $13 billion was killed by Trump.
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So, why then, did DeJoy decide to cut overtime for USPS workers, effectively slowing down mail delivery in the middle of a pandemic in which people rely more on at-home deliveries than ever before? And he did it at a time when the USPS’s profits are growing.
It’s all about Trump, of course.
First, Trump hates Jeff Bezos, mainly because he’s jealous of Bezos’s ridiculously ginormous wealth. Plus, the Mad King is pissed that The Washington Post, owned by Bezos, is mean to him -- you know, by printing the truth about what Trump is up to.
The head of the American Postal Workers Union, Mark Dimondstein, recently observed, “These changes are happening because there’s a White House agenda to privatize and sell off the public Postal Service.” But since the USPS is still quite popular, they’re afraid to do it in one big move. Instead, they’re rigging the game by holding back deliveries and pissing people off. Then, when the time is right, boom. It’ll be fully privatized.
Put another way: slowing down service actually hurts profits, and that’s the point. Starve the beast. If people are pissed off about slower-than-usual service, they’re more likely to use non-USPS solutions like FedEx and others. The USPS suffers and the suffering turns to irreparable damage until it’s sold off for parts.
The third and most obvious reason, to me at least, has to do with the election. Every decision made by the administration has to be viewed through the prism of re-election, so it could be deliberate move by Trump and DeJoy to sabotage the mail and, with it, the absentee voting process -- taking a giant cartoon-sized wooden hammer to the entire operation in order to help Trump win re-election.
If this is part of DeJoy’s equation, and we have no reason to believe it’s not given the Trump administration’s track record, the president is using his authority to directly disenfranchise American voters by blocking their ability to cast ballots on time. I mean, we only need to see that DeJoy gave Trump $1.2 million in donations for his campaign to know where the Postmaster General’s loyalties are. By the way, prior to running the USPS, DeJoy was tasked with raising money for the ill-fated Republican National Convention this year. He’s also donated millions to the broader GOP.
In other words, DeJoy has invested a mountain of cash to re-elect Trump and he’s clearly not about to let something like efficient mail delivery stand in his way. And if they can privatize the entire shmear, too, well that’s a bonus.
Strangely, knowing how 34 states, including DC, offer absentee voting without an excuse, Trump is shotgun-blasting the service in a way that’ll also thwart his own fanboys from casting ballots as well. Then again, the lower the voter turnout, the better Republicans tend to do, even if their own people are hindered.
The consequences for the rest of us are grim. What happens to people who use the service for prescription deliveries or paychecks? And knowing the loyalties of the Postmaster, how can we possibly be confident that our ballots will get to where they’re going, and with a reasonable delivery time? We can’t. Trump is spreading his disgusting taint everywhere, meddling in areas that were never mandated by his illegitimate electoral victory. There was no “silent majority” outcry to murder the USPS. Nah, this is another masturbatory Trump revenge project: screwing Bazos and rigging the election, with a little far-right privatization orthodoxy as a side dish.
The only way to overcome DeJoy and Trump’s illegal and punishable malfeasance here is to get your absentee ballot and to mail it right away as soon as ballots are made available -- as soon as early voting begins. The sooner ballots are in the hands of your county boards of elections, the sooner they’ll be counted and Donald Trump will, himself, be screwed. We’re not powerless here. Trump can’t stop you from voting unless you wait until the last minute. Don’t. The mail is crippled by Trump’s cheating, but we don’t have to be caught in his trap. Not this time.
(Photo by Pope Moysuh on Unsplash)
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| 10 | 3 |
What happens if disgruntled or political postal workers find mail-in ballots and hide them--like Newman did in the Seinfeld episode?
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“this is part of DeJoy’s equation, and we have no reason to believe it’s not given the Trump administration’s track record”
This is unfortunate phrasing. It’s weak justification for the conclusion. It leaves impression you don’t really have support for your conclusion.
The “And we have no reason to believe it’s not“ is used by folks like Fox News types as justification for believing all sorts of ridiculous things. It’s basically forcing any counter argument into proving a negative. “Obama is coming to take your guns! Can you prove he’s not?“ “I have a list of names. The state department is filled with pinko communists. You can’t prove it’s not, so we have to naturally conclude that it is.”
Far better (and more accurate) would be “And we have every reason to believe it IS, given their track record.“
(Why appear nitpicky or pedantic and bring this up? Because it actually is important. Using phrases like “and we have no reason not to believe it“ suggests we don’t really have a strong argument and we undercut ourselves. That we don’t really fully believe what we’re saying, or, as I commented in another article here yesterday about using “without evidence“ that we’re afraid of speaking directly and offending somebody.)
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