No Accounts Count On Bad Accounting

President Donald Trump, with the complicity of Congressional Republicans, has been making good on the party’s long-time goal of destroying the U.S. governmental framework, weakening the infrastructure to give their corporate “donors” a free hand to pillage the country.

They claim that they seek greater efficiency. What they want is no oversight for their polluting pals or their equally polluted business practices. The recent dismissal of standing cases and federal investigations into corporate wrongdoing demonstrate the goal of their “efficiency.”

Greed rules – to the extent that one of the GOP’s long-time targets for greater efficiency is the United States Postal System, whose efficiency provoked draconian measures to concoct a false reading that Greed’s Own Party choruses and echoes as a ploy to put its money-making system into private hands.

The financial troubles that post office opponents cite rest upon a Congressionally-contrived accounting system.

Writing for Vice in October of 2020, Aaron Gordon detailed how the Treasury Department discovered in 2002 that USPS had overpaid into its pension funds and that, in fact, Treasury owed USPS $71 billion [later revised to $75 billion].

Congress sought to remedy the problem – without reimbursing USPS – with the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act, which “made the USPS put billions of dollars a year into a low-interest yielding account [to cover future health care costs] managed by the federal government, essentially transferring wealth from the USPS – which is technically an independent agency – to the federal government,” according to Gordon. “This wealth transfer simultaneously saddled the USPS with unnecessary debt making it harder for it to be an effective postal service and allowed Republicans to say the USPS is a failing institution to spur additional cuts and reforms.”

Gordon cited postal historian Philip Rubio as observing: “If you check the USPS figures for expenses v. revenue, and literature pertaining to same, since 2006, you will see a pattern: most years they finished in the black with a giant asterisk known as the [Retiree Health Benefits Fund] prefunding mandate.”

Gordon calls the PAEA “budget chicanery” in that future health care costs “are just that: in the future. It’s not money anyone owes anyone else any time soon. It’s just a guess about what will happen. To put it right next to current expenses and revenues as if these are debts the USPS has is Einsteinian in bending the fabric of space-time. It is an accounting lie.”

In 2012 former Postal Regulatory Commission Chair Ruth Goldway observed: “The Postal Service has been a kind of cash cow for the federal government for the last 40 years.”

The corporate overlords of the Republican misleaders claiming postal service non-profitability would like to herd that USPS cash cow into their corral. These privatizing privateers know the truth behind GOP propaganda.

On Feb. 27, Equity Research laid out just such a plan for Wells Fargo investors, citing Trump’s support for such corporate welfare, calling USPS “an obvious source of value.”

The American Postal Workers Union cites “nearly $80 billion in revenue each year. That is $80 billion in the public domain that Wall Street investors can’t get their hands on.”

Included in the post office plundering prospectus are selling off the USPS parcel service and “unlocking” about $85 billion in USPS real estate that stands ready to be “harvested.”

That spun off parcel service could result in price hikes up to 140% – “Better Parcel Pricing,” according to Equity Research’s message to those licking their lips at the trough of GOP grift.

Even if USPS were in the dire straits that “budget chicanery” erroneously suggests [It is not!], its value to Americans would justify its continuation as a service that we provide ourselves.

Government is supposed to work on the behalf of all citizens – not just the greediest among us.