“A civilized society is one whose members do not humiliate one another, while a decent society is one in which institutions do not humiliate people.”
Preserve the People’s Post Office: Let Us Do Meaningful Postal Reform
Mark Jamison It is said the Postal Service is mired in debt, that it is unsustainable, a burden to the American people. This is the position of the current postmaster general, supported by the board of governors who hired him and by a treasury secretary who seems to be the chief architect of the current assault on a cherished national … Read More
Congress tries again: The Postal Service Reform Act of 2016
The House is looking at another postal reform bill, but does it have a chance of becoming law? A lot of money has been spent lobbying Congress for legislation to fix the USPS, with not much to show for it. wo weeks ago the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform released a draft of “The Postal Service Reform Act of … Read More
Can it get much worse? The Senate tries postal reform, again
BY MARK JAMISON The Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs finally took up its postal reform bill at a markup session on Wednesday, January 29. The new S.1486 the committee took up is significantly different from the Carper-Coburn bill released last August. The current version, aka the substitute bill or the managers’ amendment, has introduced changes to the … Read More
Postmaster General pledges no post office closures during postal reform but closes post offices anyway
On September 19, Postmaster General Donahoe testified to the Senate Homeland Security Committee about the state of the Postal Service and the dire need for legislation. During his testimony, the PMG made a pledge not to close post offices or processing plants while Congress debated postal reform. It’s not a pledge the PMG is likely to keep. In fact, he … Read More
A Commonsense Approach to Postal Reform: Congress should fix the problem it created
A couple of weeks ago, New York Times columnist Gail Collins wrote a piece entitled "Playing Post Office," in which see played "Let's fix the Postal Servce." Needless to say, she didn't know what she was talking about. But her piece got John Flattery, president of Central MA Area Local APWU motivated to write a well-informed and lucid editorial about … Read More
The Senate does postal reform: Highlights and low points of the Carper-Coburn bill
Senators Tom Carper (D-Del.) and Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) have introduced their version of postal reform legislation, the Postal Reform Act of 2013, a.k.a. PRA and S.1486. A summary is here, and the whole bill is here. The new bill contains several changes from the earlier Senate bill, S.1789, that should bring the House and Senate closer together and make the passage of … Read More
Murderous Reform: A Plan to Privatize Postal Profits at Public Expense
BY GRAY BRECHIN The National Academy of Public Administration has released a “Work-in-Progress” report entitled “Restructuring the U.S. Postal System: The Case for a Hybrid Public-Private Postal System.” The Academy is now embarking on a study of this proposal, which would privatize a large portion of the country’s postal system. The Academy’s study is billed as an “Independent Review of a … Read More
Looking back on postal reform: Where were you in 1976?
As the debate over postal reform shifts to the House and the rhetoric heats up a few more degrees, this might be a good time to take a step back and look at a little history. In many ways, history is repeating itself, and a look back may give us some sense of where things are headed (or not). In … Read More
Why Postal Reform Will Fail
BY MARK JAMISON By any meaningful measure, whatever postal reform bill emerges from the current legislative process, it will be insufficient to staunch the flow of blood draining from the Postal Service. More likely than not, the bill will facilitate the destruction of a national treasure by strangling the principles that support its existence. Postal reform is going to fail … Read More
The Senate does postal reform: An overview of S.1789
If all goes according to plan, Senate bill S.1789 will come to the floor for a vote this week, perhaps as early as Tuesday. The “21st Century Postal Service Act of 2012" is sponsored by Senators Lieberman, Carper, Collins, and Brown. (A good summary of the bill is here.) Though a few shades better than what Darrell Issa and the … Read More
