by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist
The United States Postal Service, quietly and with plenty of malice aforethought, raised the price of a first-class stamp by over five percent yesterday. The jump in actual money was three cents - from fifty-five to fifty-eight cents per letter.
Three cents is significant, at least to me, because that was the entire cost of mailing a first-class letter when I was but a lad in the 1950's. I can still hear that righteous howl that rose from the land when the government, our government, raised the price of a first-class stamp from three cents to an outrageous four cents on August 1st, 1958!
When that raise in postage occurred, I had a step-uncle-by-marriage who was functioning as a mailman in California. I remember him regaling us with stories about how certain people had reacted to the increased price of stamps. He told about one elderly lay who had gone out and purchased hundreds of three-cent stamps before the rates went up, because she believed that she could keep using them until she ran out!
Oh how we laughed about that one!
But sometime about half-a-century later the US Postal Service gave that a rethink and decided that perhaps it might be a workable idea to not put a price on stamps, and actually let people use their old stamps even if the rates went up. They called them "Forever" stamps, and once they were purchased, at whatever price, they were good forever, no matter how much the rates increased in the interim.
That sounded like a better deal than it actually was. Ordinary consumers might be able to stockpile a sheet or two of stamps, but most went on just buying them as they needed them. It was the rich folks and corporations who could buy in gross and actually save lots of money on postage.
"Forever" stamps had one other huge advantage for the Postal Service. By removing the price from the stamps, most people lost track of what stamps actually cost, and it became much easier for that government bureaucracy to slip in a rate hike - as it did yesterday!
The current head of the US Postal Service is our "postmaster general," a major Republican political donor from North Carolina by the name of Louis DeJoy. He was appointed to that post by Donald Trump in a blatant attempt to destabilize and cripple the one government agency which much of the country relies upon daily. Trump, who was feuding with Amazon.com and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, thought that if he could gain some political control over the post office with the appointment of DeJoy, he could then interfere with shipping agreements between that agency and Amazon and thus get into Bezos's pocket. He also saw control of the post office as a way to curb voting-by-mail, a process that tended to favor Democratic candidates.
DeJoy did embark of what appeared to be a program to wreck the US Postal Service by destroying equipment, selling off vehicles, closing facilities, and not replacing essential staff. In addition to hobbling the agency that he was, at least in theory, hired to manage, DeJoy has also been accused by some of using that position to feather his own nest. Earlier this month the USPO revealed that it has signed a contract that will pay $120 million over the next five years to a logistics company that used to be owned by DeJoy and his family - and which still has financial ties to DeJoy's family through expensive rent agreements.
Many thought that Biden entered the White House earlier this year with a public mandate to remove DeJoy from his oversight of the USPS, but as of yet Team Biden has been unable to get rid of him.
In this age of electronic communication, wealthy plutocrats may mot be as dependent on the hard-working men and women of the US Postal Service as they once were, but millions of their country cousins still find a bit of happiness and hope in their daily walks out to check the mail. Joe Biden needs to figure out a way to fire Louis DeJoy before the man completes the mission that Donald Trump brought him in to do.
America needs a fully functioning postal system. Anything less will impact our ability to stand tall as a free and vibrant democracy.
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