10 enormously consequential things Biden can do without the Senate

[applegrove]

10 enormously consequential things Biden can do without the Senate

Joe Biden can have a consequential presidency even with a Republican Senate.

By Dylan Matthews at Vox

https://www.vox.com/21557717/joe-biden-executive-order-student-debt-climate

"SNIP......

Create a postal banking system

Many advocates and scholars, including Biden transition adviser and UC Irvine law professor Mehrsa Baradaran, have been pushing for years for the United States Postal Service to use its authority under existing law to offer retail bank accounts. The American Postal Workers Union has aggressively pushed for the idea in its negotiations with USPS, and it’s one of the Biden-Sanders unity task force recommendations from this past summer.

The idea is to provide free, or at least extremely low-cost, banking services to people currently outside the mainstream banking sector. Millions of Americans are un- or underbanked, due to either choice or lack of access. Overdraft fees, “monthly maintenance fees,” and other charges can make keeping even a basic checking account at a major bank a burden, especially since those fees are mostly paid by low-income people.

Many advocates and scholars have been pushing for years for the United States Postal Service to use its authority under existing law to offer retail bank accounts. Megan Jelinger/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

The push for postal banking has mostly come through legislation like Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) and Bernie Sanders’s (I-VT) Postal Banking Act, which could be combined with similar proposals to allow all Americans to create checking accounts at the Federal Reserve (perhaps post offices could be the retail interface to Fed accounts).

But as Bryce Covert notes in the American Prospect’s Day One package, an aggressive Postal Service leadership could make some moves in this direction on its own. This would require Biden appointing and confirming enough nominees to the Postal Service’s Board of Governors that could replace the postmaster general, Louis DeJoy, with a postmaster committed to implementing postal banking. There are three vacancies on the board currently, one seat that vacates in December 2021, and two that vacate in December 2022, giving Biden the ability to fill it with pro-postal banking governors during his first term.



.......SNIP"

[Cha]

1. KR!

[Progressive Jones]

2. Kick ! nt

[niyad]

3. KNR

[intelpug]

4. Postal Banking

Maybe not many will remember, but there used to be just such a thing a long time ago. I am nearly sixty and back when I was around 18 in the early eighties I briefly considered putting some money into what was called the "postal savings" at the time. I do not know now if It had anything like checking accounts, I rather doubt it, but it certainly offered a savings account option for sure. I brought it up to my grandmother at the time and she told me that she had at one time had a postal savings account of her own but later took it to a regular bank. I guess from listening to her It was a Roosevelt era creation to answer a need after the banks failed during the depression when people feared banks , the postal savings was considered a safe place to keep your money. I never did it but I very well remember a news story back then in the early eighties where the Federal gov decided to abolish it at the time because it was very little used anymore by anyone and frankly even then I doubt many people under forty or fifty knew anything about it.

[Tommymac]

5. Instead the daily USPS Informed Delivery Emails are now full of Advertisements

The one I got today is only junk mail - and every piece has a paid for ad by the junk mail sender in addition to the list of mail arriving.

I guess it's one way to make a profit, but I see DeJoy's greedy little fingers all over it.

[TomDaisy]

6. talking point I want to see: "CAFOs are America's wet market."

See how the radical right likes that one.

[Hekate]

7. KnR