Save the United States Postal Service and Defend the Vote! by Dave LIndorff
(2020-08-19 at 00:06:41 )

Save the United States Postal Service and Defend the Vote! by Dave LIndorff

No cuts in service, hours or staffing for 6 months, and make it a public bank too!

The old Fishs Eddy Post office, affixed to the home of then Postmaster Robin Arnoldine

Fishs Eddy, 13774 -Over the last 15 or so years, I have had two post offices vanish from towns I live in.

The first was in Maple Glen, PA, a small town we moved to when we left Hong Kong in 1997.

The town center, where the post office was located, is basically a triangle of shops, including a gas station, a car wash, a Supermarket and strip mall, and another small strip mall, as well as four banks.

For the first eight years we lived here, it was very convenient to have the post office. It was a place to buy a money order, or postage stamps, to send packages or larger envelopes that required weighing, particularly for sending abroad, It was also a social center. You got to know the postal workers, and they knew everyone, so it was a nice spot to pick up the local news. When it closed during the Barack Obama administrations round of cutbacks in funding for the USPS, it was a big loss.

The next nearest postal station to us at that point was several miles away - too far to go to by foot or bike, unless you had lots of time to spend in the effort which we seldom had.

The second was in a little hamlet called Fishs Eddy, up in the Catskills in what is known as the Southern Tier of New York State. Fishs Eddy, with a population of under 200 people, has a long history. Located on the old and now defunct B&O Railroad which ran along the East Branch of the Delaware, it used to cater to vacationers from New York City, but now, its hotels and B&&B establishments gone, the only employer in town is a family-owned lumber mill. The population of the place is well under 200.

Back in 1984, my wife and I spent everything we had ($16,500 at the time) and bought a run-down little Methodist church in town which needed urgent care to prevent part of the roof from collapsing and also to replace one wall of the stone cellar of the adjacent rectory, both of which I took care of promptly thanks to a $3000 loan from our bank.

It is hard when you are a denizen of New York City, to be accepted in a small piece of Appalachia like Fishs Eddy, where everyone is either related in some way, or knows each other since birth.

One reason we managed to fit in was our neighbors, the Rosengrants, a congenial family with several cute kids slightly older than our own daughter, who knew everyone in town who became friends right away.

The other was the local Post Office, with its delightful Postmistress, Robin Arnoldine.

Robin knew everyone, of course, because everyone in the town proper got their mail from a free lockbox in the one-room office which was on the end of the trailer that Robin and her husband Gary called home. She was our source of news about goings on about town. I learned that "going to get the mail" was not just a ten-minute round-trip walk and a quick hello to Robin. It was at least a half hour of conversation, and not just with her, but with other folks who would come in for their mail while I was there.

It was at the post office where we would learn if someone had died in town, or gone to the hospital, or why the paving of the old dirt and cinder railway right-of-way that one could drive to get to neighboring East Branch up river from Fishs Eddy, was a disaster waiting to happen (the Township of Hancock had not put down a good gravel bed under the macadam and had laid the tar on too thin, so it would be doomed to frost heaves and cracks with the first frosts of winter). Robin knew everything there was to know about Fishs Eddy, and everyone got their news with their mail.

But as Robin got close to retirement, and she and Gary started thinking about retiring and moving to Binghamton, 45 miles up the highway, to be nearer to their kids, it became clear that the post office would not last. With the Barack Obama administration looking at ways to cut the federal subsidy to the United States Postal Service, small rural part-time post offices - particularly those that were rented to the USPS by the owners of homes like Robin, or to small shop owners - were being shuttered.

The community, learning the USPS was planning to shut down the Fishs Eddy PO, and with it the towns own zip code, was angry. People wrote to their local Republican congressman, to their two Democratic Senators, and to their state representative and senator asking for help, but in the end the closing happened.

As a sop, the USPS agreed to set up, in the neighboring town of East Branch four miles away upriver, a separate wall of boxes for those in Fishs Eddy who still wanted a post office box. Those boxes would retain the Fishs Eddy zip code, though the post office building they were in had the East Branch zip.

It was better than nothing, but driving eight miles is a long haul to get your mail each day, so many people stopped going daily. Older folks who did not have a car had to depend on some neighbor bringing them their mail. And the postmaster of East Branch was nowhere near as knowledgeable a news source about Fishs Eddy as was Robin.

The social order began to break down.

Without the post office, it was a little like the towns heart had been ripped out.

Postscript: We did get a post-offie back a few years ago. After a lot of letters and cajoling of politicians, the USPS rented space from the Town of Hancock on the site of a daycare building in town, and put up a dedicated small building as a post office. It is not quite the same. The people who serve as postmaster keep changing, and generally are not from town. But at least we do have our own post office back, at least for a while.

I am writing this because the Donald Trump administration is taking the defunding of the Post Office to a whole new level. No longer is it just a matter of saving money, which was bad enough under the Barack Obama administration and the GW Bush administration before it. Now it is political, with Donald Trump admitting that he does not want the USPS to be able to handle mailed in ballots this November.

He claims that mailed ballots are open to fraud, though the five states that have been using all mailed ballots or primarily mailed ballots in their elections, like Oregon and Colorado, have had no problems with fraud, and have, in fact had higher election participation than most US states- which is the real reason Donald Trump and Republicans do not like by-mail voting.

The Republican Partys main support is from older white males and to a lesser extent white females. That population cohort is on a demographic decline, being replaced by younger voters who skew Democratic or independent, and by people of color, who likewise tend to vote Democratic. Depressing democratic votes has become an existential strategy for the Republican Party, and preventing successful mail moving is part of that strategy.

The thing is, though, that Donald Trump and Republicans in the Senate are shooting themselves in the foot on this one, because older people depend on the post office far more than young people. Not only is the Post Office a place to get out of the house and to meet friends and pick up on local gossip. It is also how they get their medications, their magazines, letters from friends and family, and often also their Social Security checks. The older of the elderly also rely on the mail to vote, and they take voting seriously.

Woe to those who try to take all that away from them!

It is worth noting that the United States Post Office was established by the First Continental Congress in 1775, even before the writing of the Declaration of Independence. Benjamin Franklin was named the first US Postmaster General. While Franklins tenure in that position lasted only a year, he left his mark on the institution, insisting that the postal rate be affordable to all, not just the wealthy, and that it serve all Americans, not just those in the cities. Mr. Franklin saw the Post Office as a way to unify the disparate populations of the US states and territories, and he was right. It did that. Not just over distances, but also in individual communities, as explained above.

The institution has been tested with the introduction of competition from private delivery companies like FedEx, UPS, and now Amazon, but it remains essential. Those like Donald Trump who would privatize it entirely in the name of "efficiency" or cost savings, or for political reasons must be resisted.

The real answer to the Post Offices funding woes has been successfully discovered long ago by the countries of Europe as well as Taiwan and many other nations: allowing the Post Office to also be a public bank.

I saw how that works as a Fulbright professor living in Kaohsiung in southern Taiwan in 2004. I would go to the local university postal station to mail some letters and along with postal clerks, there were windows for the post office bank.

Usually the lines were longer at the bank windows than at the letter windows. I got an account there with a pass book. It was great for cashing my paycheck, changing money, and other business. My Taiwanese friends told me that they always put their savings in the Post Office bank for the higher interest they got, and that they also got the mortgages for their flats from the Post Office bank because it had the lowest rates and best terms.

This idea has been proposed and is favored by the Postal Workers Union, but is bitterly resisted by the powerful United States banking industry, which fears the competition would put it to shame. That effort should be crushed by popular demand.

Having seen how the banking industry destroyed the United States economy in 2007-8 and then lobbied for government handouts that left it even more concentrated and powerful after coming out of the Great Recession than when it suffered the Fiscal Crisis, we should all just say enough!

We need a national public bank, and it should belong to USPS. Most of the Post Offices funding problems would vanish if it were also a bank.

Not only that, but many rural communities that do not even have a bank would suddenly have one in their little post office!

So enough of the talk about crushing the post office.

Let us all demand a public post office bank, and let us demand an end to any postal cutbacks, in offices, personnel or overtime, until this election is over and this presidential term is ended.

Reprinted here with the permission of "This Can Not Be Happening" The only news organization in the United States to be labeled a threat by the Department of Homeland Security!!