Occupy Democracy – Pasadena joined the US Postal Workers at the Matthew “Mack” Robinson Post Office in Pasadena, on Tuesday 4-17-12 to protest the austerity efforts by the Post Master General Donohue and his Republican allies in Congress. They are trying to privatize our country’s post office in steps such that the service becomes so degraded that it is finally eliminated.
Below is the article in the online magazine – Pasadena Now.
Additional pictures from this action can be found by clicking the picture below:
We all need to spend some time considering the immediate problem associated with attempts by congressional Republicans and their enablers, particularly Post Master General Patrick R. Donahoe and his executive team. Both parties are attempting to shut down post office facilities and lay off postal workers to deal with a shortfall in the USPS that was artificially created.
Good, middle class jobs are at stake in our community. Good service provided locally to everybody in our community is at stake. Eliminating good jobs and degrading the service quality of the USPS is not the answer. This is especially true because the Postal Accountability Enhancement Act is the source of this manufactured crisis:
Passed in 2006 during a lame duck session of Congress, USPS was forced to “prefund its future health care benefit payments to retirees for the next 75 years in an astonishing ten-year time span” — meaning that it had to put aside billions of dollars to pay for the health benefits of employees it hasn’t even hired yet, something “that no other government or private corporation is required to do.”
The Post Master General, in trying to deal with this manufactured crisis, is ignoring this fact. The congressional Republicans are ignoring this fact to because it gives them leverage to do what they have always wanted to do: break the postal workers unions and privatize our postal service.
This is the bigger picture that our group doesn’t want to get lost in all of this. Our US Postal Service has a rich tradition and history of bringing our cities and towns together as well as being a vital connecting point within each of our communities. It is part of the public commons:
“the commons means everything that belongs to all of us, and the many ways we work together to use these assets to build a better society. This encompasses fresh air and clean water, public spaces and public services, the Internet and the airwaves, our legal system, scientific knowledge, biodiversity, language, artistic traditions, fashion styles, cuisines and much more. Taken together, it represents a vast inheritance bequeathed equally to every human—and one that, if used wisely, will provide for future generations.”
Standing up to congressional Republicans and Post Master General’s executive team is about preserving good jobs and good service from the post office. It’s also about protecting our public commons and preserving our sense of community in a world that too often seems set against them.
If you want to read more about this issue, I recommend these links:
Principles for Postal Service Reform
Congress’s War on the Post Office
Answering the lies that privatization zealots and FedEx are peddling
Postal Reform: Myths vs. Facts
These are a couple of blog sites dedicated to this issue. You can get some of the latest news and discussion from them:
http://www.savethepostoffice.com/
http://www.postalreporter.com/
http://www.apwu.org/index2.htm
You can also watch this video from Democracy Now :
