Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Stuart Attewell (Paris, Fr)'s avatar

Talk about shooting the messenger....! Same attitude with his threat to ban Tik-Tok because the kids made him look like a clown at Tulsa. When I moved back to Paris from Washington the USPS faithfully and without charge redirected all my mail over the Atlantic for a year. The British Royal Mail wanted to charge me 250 pounds for the same service in similar circumstances without giving any guarantee of performance and the French would like to charge me 50 Euros a month just to ensure my Paris mail gets to me in Provence and IT DOESN'T WORK half the time. Saving the USPS and keeping it out of the Oligarchs' hands is an absolutely essential condition of maintaining freedom and democracy.

Expand full comment
Dirk Addertongue's avatar

I've read the past three days of Dr. Richardson's newsletter at a single sitting (I fell behind due to final exams and laziness) and now want to hide under the bed. But I've done that before, and have found that it gets boring after a while, makes my bones ache, and smells funny.

For some reason, the continued attacks on the Post Office grieve me more than anything else in these posts, even though some of the other recent acts by Trump and his supporters are a more direct threat to our republic. What they're doing to the USPS is a favorite oligarch scheme, one that's not just limited to Republican despots, unfortunately; although the Dems are many shades better than their Republican counterparts, they are, by no means, saints. (Hell's Bells, sometimes they aren't even "the good guys.")

It works very simply: (1) select an agency that some rich set of donors wants to buy or destroy, (2) mismanage, underfund, and place impossible demands on that agency, and (3) when it suffers the inevitable collapse, declare that it's a sign that government is inefficient and doesn't work, then (4) sell the assets to the rich donors in exchange for favors and campaign donations. This has happened at other agencies and is usually done without much fanfare, since few people outside of government service realize that the "deep state" Trump and his enablers rail about is simply the machinery of a functioning government.

I've often found it hard to think of anything I can do to support the USPS, besides vote and write letters to my representatives. After all, I don't send many letters or packages. I don't own a business that does. All I do is buy a fistful of pretty stamps every December for my annual Xmas letter, and I don't think that's going to keep them afloat.

But something did occur to me after watching an Amazon Prime truck deliver a package to my house yesterday. What if, whenever I bought something online, I chose the shipping option that routed it through the USPS? It may take a little longer (although it usually doesn't), but I'm seldom in a real rush and I'd rather support an organization that works for the whole country, instead of one, like FedEx or UPS, that works primarily for rich people.

So that's what I shall do, I shall henceforth use the United States Post Office for every shipping option. If we want the Post Office to remain, we have to use it, not just vote for representatives who may support it (although that's important, too).

Expand full comment
86 more comments...

No posts