By Kevin Zeese
ITS OUR ECONOMY: The Congress passed an unnecessary law requiring the Postal Service to prefund its pension benefits for 75 years through a $5.5 billion annual payment. The Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006 (PAEA) is the only one of its kind for a government agency and no such requirement exists in business. The Post Office is paying for postal workers not even born yet.
As a result of this law the president, Congress and Postal Service are talking about more cuts to post offices and postal workers as well as reductions in services with shorter hours and less days of mail. This will make the Post Office, which has the distinction of being a government agency specifically mentioned in the U.S. Constitution unreliable. (Article 1, Section 8, Clause 7 empowers Congress to establish the Postal Service.) People will blame the Post Office when in fact this was the deliberate destruction of the Post Office by elected officials. Why?
Peter Orszag, Obama’s former OMB director, now a vice chairman of corporate and investment banking at Citigroup, has let the cat out of the bag writing: “Congress should now privatize the U.S. Postal Service,” i.e., given over to Federal Express and UPS along with a tax payer subsidy. The Postal Service does not receive a subsidy it operates from the revenue it receives from its products and services. Orszag even mentions that one of the assets for a corporate takeover is their “overfunded pension plan.” Has the government been fattening up the Postal Service so when they privatize it their friends in big finance get a plump cash cow.
As was noted in another article we published on this issue: “In July, USPS began closing offices around the country to meet the annual [pension] payment. By the time current downsizing plans are completed in 2014, Americans will see 229 processing plants closed and 28,000 jobs lost. In June, ten USPS employees launched a multi-day hunger strike to protest the cuts.”
