Tag Archives: history

from my letter to the board of postal governors re: replacing Looey DeJoy

It turns out there is currently a quorum of postal board governors, five of the seven appointed by President Biden, who can remove Trump megadonor Louis DeJoy as Postmaster. Been working on a letter, asking them, essentially, what the fuck? Here are the first few paragraphs:

Dear Governor (name):

I am writing to urge you to act to immediately to do whatever is necessary to replace Trump mega-donor Postmaster Louis DeJoy, who has effectively ended faith in the US Postal Service by severely disabling its formerly reliable service in multiple ways. It is essential that he is replaced while there is still time to protect the right to vote by mail in 2024 from Mr. DeJoy’s highly effective efforts to slow mail delivery to nullify those lawfully cast ballots.

The current Postmaster has introduced complete unreliability to a postal service that, until his stewardship, was remarkably consistent in its timely delivery of billions of items daily. I am 68 and have used the mail regularly since childhood. Until Mr. DeJoy took over the Post Office, delivery time was virtually always 3-5 days, over many decades. The US Postal Service, our democracy’s longtime dependable delivery service, relied upon by millions for checks, medications, letters, information, money orders, gifts, etc. has been under attack by the far right for years [1].

I understand that, due to Republicans blocking President Obama’s five nominees for the Board of governors that President Trump appointed seven governors and that they selected Trump nominee mega donor Louis DeJoy as Postmaster. President Biden’s appointment of five governors restored a quorum that could remove Mr. DeJoy. I don’t understand why a proven partisan like Mr. DeJoy, a man who has objectively done such damage to the Post Office, is still in position to continue crippling the business that he is CEO of.

I would greatly appreciate an explanation of why, two continued vacancies on the Board of Postal Governors aside, the present quorum of governors is allowing the clearly partisan Postmaster to exercise seemingly unchecked power as he hobbles mail delivery ahead of an election, expected to be close, that will feature millions of mail-in ballots.

As Postmaster, Mr. DeJoy has disabled dependable mail delivery and undermined Americans’ faith in the safety and efficiency of the USPS, under the color of “cost cutting” to reduce the Postal Service’s gigantic, legislatively imposed deficit [see footnote]. Reasonable hope of anything arriving by mail within any kind of predictable time frame is gone nationwide. Mr. DeJoy’s determined, successful efforts to hamper mail delivery appear to be part of the far right’s familiar, long-running attack on “the administrative state” – attack an institution, gain control over it and cripple it (see, e.g., the 118th Congress).

These are a couple of paragraphs I removed from the draft (I originally thought I was writing this letter to my senators and congressman):

It is a tribute to the power of propaganda, Rupert Murdoch, incendiary lies spread on unregulated social media, a brazenly partisan, aggressively activist Supreme Court, its 6-3 majority all members of an extreme right judicial fraternity, the deliberate destruction of norms, ethics, long held notions of civility and citizenship and the unlimited, tax-deductible dark money of America’s most reactionary oligarchs, the ravenous greed of corporate mass media, that the upcoming election, based on the relative accomplishments of each of the candidates while in office (one running, counterfactually, on denying he lost the previous election to the incumbent), can even be remotely close.

Personally, I think Biden wins by fifteen or even twenty million votes, but as history shows, the power of dead slaveholders gets the last word, with the Electoral College. Even a 2,000 vote margin, surgically spread across enough districts in a few key states can bring us, with mathematical precision, Project 2025. Heaven help any American with reservations about a dictatorship of the corporate/White Christian Nationalist right, massive deportation camps for millions and all the rest. Heaven help Rosie O’Donnell and the thousands on that enemies list with her.

Here is the footnote:

[1] I could not resist including this pertinent bit of context (even as I know some of it was finally addressed in The Postal Service Reform Act of 2022):

Committees of Correspondence were essential for organizing in the period leading up to the American Revolution, illustrating the danger this citizen ability to freely communicate poses to those who would be tyrants. The radical right’s project of undermining “the administrative state” made the USPS a logical target.

As you no doubt recall, at the end of the Bush/Cheney lame duck 109th Congress, by voice vote in the House and unanimous consent in the Senate, legislators passed the Postal Accountability Enhancement Act of 2006. The law imposed a mandate on the USPS that applies to no other business in the world, requiring it to pre-fund its pension and health insurance for retirees to the year 2056, ensuring the pension rights of postal workers not yet born while imposing ten years of pension prepayment costs, at $5,500,000,000 annually, on the Post Office, a self-sustaining government agency that gets no taxpayer funding. Suddenly there was a huge USPS deficit and an urgent need to cut costs regarding mail delivery, if not privatize the Postal Service outright.

You can’t argue with Nazis

A Nazi has a closed mind and a simple, even if irrational, explanation for everything. They will repeat their mantra over and over again in response to any point you try to raise. It is futile to argue with Nazis, but it is essential to persuade anybody who is not a Nazi that Nazis are fucking Nazis.

If you are anti-Nazi, you might as well ask a Nazi why they never investigated Hunter Biden for taking $2 billion from the murderous Saudi dictator while Hunter’s father was the president of the United States. Or why their partisan six-year investigation into Hunter and the new Benghazi Commission for grounds to impeach Joe, based on a reliable source (now indicted) who spouted Putin‘s hand fed propaganda, does not turn up the heat to the boiling point to finally lower the boom on the evil Hunter Biden, and the hundreds of viciously anti-Christian billionaire Jews (not to mention Chinese communists and Ukrainian fascists) who prop him up.

If somebody’s last word in every discussion is a variation on “I will never listen to you, asshole, no matter what, because I am right and you suck cocks in hell, along with your so-called facts” I would say it’s time to talk to somebody else. You cannot persuade somebody who is a Nazi that there is anything wrong with being a Nazi. Anybody who can’t see that there is something wrong with being a Nazi is a fucking Nazi.

My best advice, once you see a door is closed with a fanatical insistence on the door slammer’s righteousness, and the endlessly asserted claim that you are a completely delusional asshole, if not also a poisonous fucking Jew, see that closed door as a very good thing and keep on walking.

Political pundits often suck ass

I sent this email to a friend just now, in response to a couple of political opinion pieces he’d sent me.

These are all good points that you raise. The US has the lowest rate of social mobility, people born in poverty becoming middle-class, of any wealthy country.  Privilege is perpetuated by law (as you say, they killed the Death Tax) and elite institutions, like Harvard, that are not available to any but the top recipients of an excellent education (and funds for public education are constantly being hijacked by Christians and others to pay for their private schools), or those whose families have a connection or are generous donors.  (Example, Jared Kushner, C yeshiva student, Harvard alum after felon dad Charles gives the school a few million shekels)

There are a lot of factors about why things are so fucked up and so demonically divided right now. Of course Fox is a huge and horrible one, for the reasons you describe.  It’s really grotesque how much influence one ninety year-old billionaire reptile can have on the media for the entire world.  Neither of these big picture articles about our current crisis (Mother Jones or Stephens) even so much as mentioned one of the scariest elephants in the partisan divided room:  the many-headed nightmare emanating from climate change, global warming, increasing deadly storms, sea level and ocean temperatures rising and ocean ecosystems desalinating as ice caps melt, drought, floods, wildfires and famine and eventually no food or living space for tens of millions, and then billions, displaced by rising sea levels and unlivable heat and turned into roving hordes of hungry on-the-move cannibals, and a final world war caused by scarcity of things like now monetized water.  Talk about a refugee crisis, they’ll probably decide to nuke these ravenous cannibal migrants. Talk about elites.

My problem with Bret Stephens is really the same problem I have with Mother Jones. They are pushing a thesis, motivated by an ideological position, so Stephens talks about these corrupt, cancelling, illiberal  radical left elites out of touch with the person who’s lost his job in middle America, completely disconnected from the millions of deaths of despair, and the murders, and the hopeless lives of millions of abused Americans, but he is also one of the same corrupt , out of touch elites, being a respected opinion writer for the New York Times.  Both he and the Mother Jones writer resort to simplified arguments that leave out nuance and tremendously important details to advance the particular case they are making.

The Mother Jones guy dismissed the idea of any kind of conspiracy at play in the crisis that our country has come to, pointing out, irrelevantly but at length, that belief in conspiracy theories is about the same as it’s always been, even if the wife of history’s most corrupt Supreme Court justice is a far right Christian political operative, on the board of the influential, secret nonprofit Council for National Policy, who brokered the deal between Donald Trump and the evangelical leaders in 2016, was in and out of the West Wing regularly during 45’s administration (and heads would always roll when she left) and also was in a religious frenzy in the Jesus-invoking texts to the Chief of Staff as Trump’s January 6 coup was sputtering, in the hours and days after she attended the Big Guy’s rousing speech in the freezing cold earlier that day.    Then all White House phone logs, texts, secret service texts and calls, irretrievably deleted, all Homeland Security heads’ communications also gone, from the hours before, during and after the riot at the Capitol for which hundreds are being, eh, vengefully held hostage.  There are complex right wing conspiracies at work all around us (for example, the association of Republican state attorneys’ general that met to work out how to limit drop boxes and things like that prior to the 2020 election, are probably meeting right now, the fake electors, election deniers overseeing upcoming elections, continual destruction of evidence, lies about the existence of evidence never produced, etc). and it doesn’t take Oliver Stone to tell you that.

Stephens does something similar when he focuses on the corrupt idiot asshole privileged  heads of elite institutions (accurate enough)  and uses them to prove his larger points that misguided, hypocritical, often tyrannical liberals suck and only sober conservatives like him see the world as it actually is and are prepared to lead it (debatable, like all political positions).  

The worst one in this category, for my money, is fucking David Brooks, who also writes for the New York Times.  I avoid his stuff the last few years, too aggravating to read that know-it-all’s confident conclusions about his opinions.   The insidious thing about Brooks is that he can make very reasonable points while he hides his ideological agenda most of the time but then sometimes it just pops out in a grotesque, tell-tale aside, like nonchalantly dropping in a gutter formulation of what’s wrong with poor people in terms of their moral character.

Anyway, it’s occasionally interesting to read some of this stuff, but I don’t put any more stock in the opinions of these folks that I do in my own reading, thinking and talking to people whose opinions I respect. Political commentators are in the business of simplifying things, convincing readers of their astuteness and expertise, and making difficult, complicated, scary things seem to make sense, but the version of reality they give you is always missing essential ingredients that you need to have a nuanced, really intelligent conversation about the subject. That’s just one reason I resent these fucking pantloads.