My apolitical sister asked me to explain the USPS issue to her. I need a succinct explanation

[irisblue]

Help me.

My mom, sister & I are in a text group(mom & sis are very hard of hearing, this is the best way for the 3 of us to talk). Mom ordered me a package 10 days ago, Mom has been asking the last 4 days if it is here yet. I told my Mom, "no you know the USPS is messing around with the mail, my city, Columbus, lost a bunch of sorting machines. A lot of mail is very delayed."

My mom knows what is going on with trump& his minions, but my sister is raising her grandkids, working a full time job & just unaware of the issue.

My sister asked me to explain the issue to her. I need a bullet point type summary to give her. Help please. You can send me DU mail if it is easier. I do not want to drown her in too much info.

[EarlG]

1. Succinct explanation:

Trump is trying to create chaos at the USPS so that people have a hard time voting by mail; if he loses, he'll claim the results of the election are illegitimate and try to stay in power.

[GreenPartyVoter]

2. A "broken election system" means a chance of fighting against a lawful won election. Trump

is sowing doubt by enacting measures that slow down and damage delivery service by trashing mailboxes and high speed sorters. Th usps handles millions of Xmas cards. Ballots are not a problem,except for trump, who enacted these policies in highly democratic areas. There’s a graphic floating around that proves this.

[Squinch]

3. The more people vote, the better it is for Democrats. The Republicans do everything they

can to cancel Democrats' votes. They gerrymander districts, close polling places, make people in Democratic areas wait hours and hours in line to vote. They do this hoping the Democrats won't vote.

The only way they can win is if they do extreme suppression of the vote.

This year, they thought they had it in the bag. Covid would keep everyone home, very few people would vote, and that would improve their chances.

Until the States started changing the rules and allowing people to vote by mail.

This makes it easier than ever for Democrats to vote, and it enraged and terrified Republicans.

So Trump fired the people at the top of the Post Office, the people who ran things, and replaced them with his toadies. The new Trump-appointed top guy is someone who runs a company that competes with the Post Office and who is very eager to make the Post Office fail, because that will make him very, very rich.

Trump and his toadies then set to removing the ability of people to vote by mail. They did it by removing mail boxes, destroying sorters, slowing down deliveries, not allowing carriers to finish their routes and who knows what else is going on that we aren't seeing.

All this will make it so that Trump will be able to manipulate and minimize the mail-in vote. He wants to do that because if fewer people vote, he has a better chance of winning. And who knows? He and his henchmen have no scruples. It wouldn't surprise me if we learned that they destroyed votes from blue districts.

[Squinch]

4. PS: they are able to do this because Republicans have had it out for the Post Office for decades.

I think this is because they would like to see it privatized so they could feed on it's carcass. But they were able to pass a law in 2006 that does this:

Then there is the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006 (PAEA), which some have taken to calling "the most insane law" ever passed by Congress. The law requires the Postal Service, which receives no taxpayer subsidies, to prefund its retirees' health benefits up to the year 2056. This is a $5 billion per year cost; it is a requirement that no other entity, private or public, has to make. If that doesn't meet the definition of insanity, I don't know what does. Without this obligation, the Post Office actually turns a profit. Some have called this a "manufactured crisis." It's also significant that lots of companies benefit from a burden that makes the USPS less competitive; these same companies might also would benefit from full USPS privatization, a goal that has been pushed by several conservative think tanks for years.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-04-04/congress-not-amazon-messed-up-the-u-s-postal-service

[OnDoutside]

5. Three reasons

1. To gut the USPS, so that it can be split up and taken over by private companies. A long term GOP aim.
2. To stick it to Jeff Bezos, whom Trump is fixated about, re USPS
3. Someone came up with the bright idea that taking out the sorting machines, would automatically slow the USPS to a standstill, with the knock on plan of targeted removal in Democratic areas.

[CrispyQ]

6. One party, the republican party, would like to privatize the postal service

so they can get their greedy little hands on the USPS pension fund and all that USPS real estate. Then they can sell it off for pennies on the dollar to their corporate/rich contributors, & then raise the price of a postage stamp to $1.50.

To do this, they have to convince Americans that private industry can do a better job than the USPS, so just like they do with government, republicans take a sledge hammer to it, so it doesn't work & then they say to America, see, government/USPS doesn't work. And the pisser is that so many Americans fall for it. The government, & the USPS, are not a business. Their mission is to provide a service, not turn a profit.

[stillcool]

7. It isn't succinct...

but I gathered some info together here: https://www.democraticunderground.com/100213912889

could find something in there

[LiberalFighter]

8. They are trying to privatize it so FedEx and others can get more business.

That would mean it would cost more to mail your letters. And more difficult for those areas that only the Post Office serves.

The Post Office is not in the business of making a profit. It is a service. Just like all of the other government agencies of which none are making a profit.

The reason the Post Office has been having financial problems is because of the requirement that Post Office workers have their health care costs paid up for 75 years. I believe they calculate each person until they turn 75. No other company or government agency has that requirement.

[ProfessorGAC]

10. One Add, Iris

The guy doing it is major donor to PINO, he's supposed to be doing it to cut cost & improve efficiency. But, one cannot improve efficiency by removing the equipment that improves efficiency.
He's lying!

[donkeypoofed]

11. "If mail-in voting is allowed there will never be a Republican elected in this country again"

DJT, Fox News, April 2020.


- that's all they need to know really