Tag Archives: usps

Louie Louie

There is almost no current public information available about Louis Dejoy’s destruction of on-time mail delivery in the US or what anyone is doing to actually to stop it in time for tens of millions of mail-in ballots to be delivered on time to be counted in November. Try googling it and you’ll see what I mean. Why can’t the Postal Board of Governors fire Louie fucking DeJoy?

This is from a February 2021 article noting the then difficulty of Biden removing DeJoy (this was before several turnovers — and two ongoing vacancies — Tubervilled? — on the nine member Postal Board of Governors). It notes the tens of thousands of mail-in ballots delivered too late to be counted in 2020 as among the reasons for concern with having a corrupt, arrogant, defiant partisan mega-donor as US Postmaster General. Since then, mail service has been slowed considerably, and targeted by zip code, but even after six months in office, DeJoy’s achievements in slowing mail from selected “anarchist jurisdictions” was impressive.

. . . Improving the Postal Service would have an immediate, beneficial impact on almost every American’s life. But it can’t happen while DeJoy is in charge, and there’s no easy way for Biden to get him out of office. The new president will remain saddled with Trump’s postmaster general for at least a year—unless he decides that rescuing the Postal Service is more urgent than respecting its independence. . .

. . . In the week of Dec. 26, [2021] the last period for which USPS publicly disclosed its delivery rates [as of this Feb. 2021 article], only 63.87 percent of first-class mail made it to its destination on time across the U.S. The on-time delivery rate was even worse during that week in certain localities: It was only 29.97 percent in Baltimore, 32.32 percent in Central Pennsylvania, and 27.82 percent in Northern Ohio. Overall, in the fourth quarter of 2020, USPS never came close to the 96 percent on-time delivery standard that the agency sets for itself. . .

source

Here’s an April 2024 letter signed by a bipartisan group of 26 senators, urging DeJoy to consider the recommendations of the Postal Regulatory Commission (PRC) that he pause his Project 2025 Postal Service Rescue Plan (“Delivering for America”) until its delaying effects could be fully studied. DeJoy would not commit to abiding by the PRC’s recommendations. He did not.

Here is the sneering piece of shit’s May, 2024 reply to the policy-driven deterioration of mail delivery:

“Has anyone in Congress or the PRC ever worked to stem $160 billion in projected organizational losses, while overcoming the devastating impact to an organization that nearly $100 billion in previous losses inflicts?” DeJoy asked, before emphatically answering his own question. “The answer is no.”

He apologized for the “deteriorated performance” that has occurred and vowed to soon reverse it, while adding the change that is necessary is “hard, uncomfortable for everyone and encounters errors of varying magnitude.”

If USPS does not see a turnaround quickly, Congress’ patience could run thin and opt to take matters into its own hands. Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., has introduced legislation that would place new restrictions on the Postal Service’s changes.

source

That May, 2024 article begins:

In the face of mounting pressure from lawmakers of all political stripes, watchdogs, stakeholders and even members of its own governing board, as well as another financial quarter in the red, leadership of the U.S. Postal Service is doubling down on its controversial plan to overhaul the agency. 

Didn’t one of our greatest genius billionaire job creators buy the newspaper whose slogan is “Democracy dies in darkness”? While Democrats and anti-fascists celebrate Biden’s selfless decision to let Harris run for president, and many are flushed with excitement over her record fundraising in just a day and a half, there’s more than enough darkness here to allow a quick, choking death for democracy, come election day, when delivery tens of millions of ballots is in the hands of the psychopathic, partisan CEO pictured above and below.

Postal Regulatory Commission v. DeJoy

The following is from one of very few recent articles about our partisan postmaster, who comes across as pugnacious in his dealings with the Postal Regulatory Commission, and whose disruption of dependable mail service has, apparently, even aggravated House Republicans. This is from an organization called Government Executive, [govexec.com] (link below)

. . . The [Postal Regulatory Commission, PRC] commission made its recommendation after finding in the report that USPS in fiscal 2023 missed most of its goals for high-quality service performance; three of its eight goals related to customer service; and all of its goals related to maintaining a safe workplace, engaged workforce and financially healthy organization. 

DeJoy and PRC have been at odds for years, as the postmaster general has accused the regulators—and other stakeholders—of standing in the way of essential steps he must take to save the agency from insolvency. The new recommendation, however, marks the first time PRC has called for a pause to DeJoy’s signature plan. It follows the introduction of bipartisan bills that would restrict the Postal Service from carrying out its changes. 

In a recently introduced fiscal 2025 spending bill, House Republicans said they were “deeply concerned about the potential negative impacts” of DeJoy’s reforms. 

PRC flagged other aspects of DeJoy’s plan, including suggesting USPS consider whether its decision in recent years to increase prices twice annually “may accelerate electronic diversion resulting in adverse volume effects.” While postal officials have repeatedly highlighted its efforts to engage with its customers and employees over its plans, the commission said it has concerns about the “limited transparency” regarding the DFA and their “effects on service performance.” PRC recently pushed back on DeJoy’s rate increase strategy, saying postal management should exercise more discretion before continuing with its approach that “may be unprecedented in the history of the Postal Service.”

Many lawmakers and stakeholders across the postal community are imploring PRC to go further, calling for it to issue an “advisory opinion” on the totality of DeJoy’s DFA plan. 

Large-scale mailers and others that interact with the Postal Service regularly are hopeful an advisory opinion—while not enforceable—would provide a third-party assessment of the agency’s plans, evaluate its assumptions and potentially offer additional fodder to motivate either the USPS board of governors or Congress to intervene.

source

Why is this imperious MAGA mega-donor still in charge of crippling mail delivery ahead of an election with an expected 50,000,000 mail-in ballots? [1]

[1]

In 2020, during the depths of Covid, 66,000,000 votes were cast by mail, 43% of all ballots cast. (US Census)

34,248,000 mail-in ballots were cast in the 2022 midterms, 31.8% of 107,700,000 total votes cast in that high turnout midterm election  source 

Beyond that, numbers for mail-in voting have been on the rise in all elections since 2008. source

Louis DeJoy, stand back and stand by, redux

While corporate media, and panicking Democrats, are obsessed over why a successful president refuses to step aside even though wealthy donors are threatening to withhold $90,000,000 in pledged campaign funds unless he does (NY Times headline today), I am wondering about a more direct threat in the 2024 election.

Consider the ease with which a MAGA “public servant” with the power to easily do so, can nullify millions of mail in ballots by simply delaying their delivery for a few weeks, after four years of practice with random, inexplicable nationwide month-long delays in mail delivery.

Do you trust a Postmaster appointed by the “transactional” Orange Quid Pro Quo, a man who donated $2,500,000 to Trump and the RNC in 2016, to deliver millions of mail-in ballots in time to be counted in 2024? Personally, I’d like to see a little oversight of this smug, smirking corporate fucker.

The media, we should note, is silent about the threat DeJoy’s nationwide mail slow-downs pose for an election expected to be unaccountably close. Google him, not much recently written about the arrogant dickhead, in spite of years of controversy, ethics probes, Congressional hearings. The watchdog groups I’ve contacted in the last few weeks are silent, my elected officials are silent, in spite of repeated contacts with them. I suppose there will be media silence, if Trump manages to engineer an Electoral College victory, when millions of undelivered votes are discovered right before the Dictator on Day One is sworn in for his revenge tour.

Which is more important for the outcome, for the future of democracy, endless criticism of the effective incumbent because he is old and walks like an old man, or stopping a massive voter suppression scheme conducted under color of law?

Here are the two most recent media pieces about Trump megadonor Postmaster Louis DeJoy. The first is a July 8 op ed by DeJoy himself, published in Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post. All I was able to read (not climbing that particular paywall) was this wonderful opening:

Louis DeJoy is the postmaster general. I am fascinated by the U.S. Postal Service and its opportunities to serve the American people. Each day, our 640,000 employees operate 32,000 retail and …

The only other recent update on the pugnacious, partisan Postmaster is this report about the Postal Regulatory Commission urging DeJoy to put off his experiments with more budget cuts and policy changes to slow mail delivery until after the 2024 election. Predictably, the arrogant dickhead is doing what the hardcore right wing always does, staying the course.

Meanwhile, corporate media, keep doing your job to advance the interests of corporate persons. Those judicially created psychopaths are people too, with feelings, just like real, God-created people!

And now, let’s repeat, with the Orange Polyp:

Louis DeJoy, stand back and stand by.

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.