So today, I emailed my Congressman (an idiot by the way)
wrote a letter to the editor of the local paper and posted on Facebook. I will email my equally idiotic Senators later today.
We live in Blount County, TN. We live out in the country. Our mail used to be delivered by carriers who have to provide and maintain their vehicles. Our last mail was delivered Tuesday the 10th. On Wednesday, I put a piece of mail out to be picked up, a bill payment. Later that afternoon I saw a US Mail truck zip by without stopping. Friday, I took that mail out of the box and drove to the post office in Maryville. We have a Maryville address. I spoke to a "supervisor". I was told that half of their carriers were out for various reasons. When I mentioned the mail truck he informed me that those are for Amazon deliveries (which I knew) and that "Amazon has priority, it is in the contract". We have had no mail delivery since and I checked with neighbors who agreed. I was shown at the PO, really large Amazon boxes that were needing to be delivered. One of them would have filled that mail truck. He also said that their sorting equipment measured up to 40# and some of them Amazon boxes were heavier than that. He also said he could not find subs....well at 20$/ hr and having to maintain a vehicle that is adapted, that is just not realistic for part time work.
The Post Office is in the US Constitution. Amazon is not. I know that many assholes in the GOP have been trying to destroy the postal service so they can make if profitable for them and their pals for years. The cost of mailing a letter has gone up many many times recently, but it still cheaper than a letter via UPS or FedEx.
I am furious. I can decide to pay bills online or by direct withdrawal but MANY PEOPLE CANNOT DO THAT. We can rent a PO box and drive to town 15 miles every day and back home 15 miles just to get our mail.
Why have we not been able to remove Dejoy and get some sanity back in the USPS????
= new reply since forum marked as read
$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$.
Since the UPS, Fedex and Amazon trucks go down my street regularly there's no need for the mailman to deliver Amazon packages.
But here's what I wanted to mention: it's about the USPS barcode label that's stuck on my mailbox. Every day the mailman came to my door and scanned the barcode label on the mailbox to prove that he was there. Even when there's no letters to pick up or deliver, he still scanned that barcode.
But this past summer I noticed that he wasn't doing that any more. He skips my house when there's nothing to deliver, and therefore my letters don't get picked up. (It's not a problem for me because I rarely mail anything.) I asked my mailman, don't you have to scan the barcode? and he answered, "Oh we don't do that anymore. That program is over."
So now I watch for his truck parked down the street, and I go out and hand him my letters. Otherwise they might sit in my mailbox for days. The only reason I can do this is that I'm retired and home during the day. If I were still working, I'd never know why the mail wasn't picked up.
https://forgeorganizing.org/article/roots-and-reasons-privatization
This excerpt originally appeared in The Privatization of Everything: How the Plunder of Public Goods Transformed America and How We Can Fight Back published by The New Press. Reprinted here with permission.
A Very Brief History
Understanding privatization means understanding that it is first and foremost a political strategy. It was born this way, and so it remains, but it has also become a grab for billions of dollars in contracts and fees. In the years since it sprang from the mind of Milton Friedman as a way to undercut government “monopoly,” it has also become a way for profiteers to tap into the $7 trillion of public revenue (which swelled to $9 trillion during the COVID crisis) spent by local, state, and federal government agencies each year and carve out a piece (sometimes a very big piece) for themselves. Privatization has also in recent history become remarkably bipartisan—Democratic president Bill Clinton arguably did more for the privatization project than did his Republican predecessor Ronald Reagan. And it has become surprisingly pervasive, to the point where there are now 2.6 times as many federal government contractors as there are government employees, and there is literally no public good that is not at risk of being privatized. But it started very humbly, with ideas from the conservative intelligentsia that became a way to achieve political ends without incurring public disfavor.
School Choice and the “Iron Fist” of the Bureaucrats
In the 1950s, conservative economist Milton Friedman felt increasingly out of step with what he saw as “the general trend in our times toward increasing intervention by the state” and “the trend toward collectivism.” He strongly preferred a government that provided only enforcement and avoided providing any services. Yet he also believed that democratic governments tend to naturally grow larger due to self-interested groups and the self-preservation instincts of politicians and bureaucrats (in Friedman’s imagination, people often seem incapable of acting for the common good). Privatization was an effective, though imperfect, counterweight to these tendencies. In his landmark 1955 essay on school choice, Friedman admitted that few citizens would want to do away with universal public education, and suggested providing parents with “a specified sum to be used solely in paying for [their child’s] general education” and allowing them “to spend this sum at a school of their own choice.” This would satisfy a public desire while preventing the growth of bureaucracy. Sixty-two years later, President Donald Trump chose a secretary of education whose only experience in education was her advocacy for Friedman’s ideas, now packaged in the consumer-friendly term school choice.
Friedman’s vision for market-managed public services was remarkably clear-eyed; he was under no illusion that any profit-generating enterprise would act for the common good. He lambasted the very idea that a business could have social responsibilities, and insisted that executives have responsibilities only to the business owners. To even suggest a responsibility to something larger was to invite “the iron fist of Government bureaucrats.” So Friedman’s voucher-supported private schools, despite taking public money, would have zero responsibility to the public. The implications were clear by the time Friedman’s essay was published. Brown v. Board of Education had already spurred a “school choice” movement in segregated states. Private schools, bereft of social responsibility, offered something their white customers wanted—segregation— and politicians hoped to support this deplorable choice with public money in the form of vouchers. The racial implications of privatization should have been perfectly obvious to a man of Friedman’s intelligence, but they apparently did not enter his thinking until someone pointed them out to him, after his landmark essay was largely complete. The issue of how the free market encourages racial segregation gets no more than an awkward footnote.
Outside of Friedman’s self-generated bubble, school choice was a raw expression of white supremacy. The white parents of Prince Edward County, Virginia, were happy with their public schools until the court forced those schools to accept black children. Vouchers came into play as part of a segregationist strategy that started with the county’s pulling funding for all public schools. Next came a “tuition grant program” that gave parents vouchers up to $150 for private school. White parents rallied together to create a “segregation academy” that could legally bar black students. Prince Edward County ultimately closed its public schools completely and chained their doors. This example inspired racists everywhere; in 1969 over two hundred segregation academies were thriving in the South, and seven states had instituted voucher programs. The Prince Edward County school story offers a clear example of the ways in which privatization helps the powerful and well connected circumvent civil rights and the law. Putting public goods in private hands helps them evade accountability and protections. It prioritizes individual choice, even if that choice is one of racial oppression. While Friedman first devised privatization as a way to avoid the iron fist of government, his vouchers merely forged another fist, one specifically designed to curtail the rights of African Americans and other racial minorities.
The Reagan Revolution and Privatization’s “Golden Opportunity” .................
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