Outraged over USPS developments

Last month I had trouble paying my light and water bill on time because it took forever to get the bill. My meter was read on July 17th, my bill mailed on the 20th, received the 29th. That bill took 9 days to get to me! It was already too late to pay online like I always do without getting charged a late fee! Hard to believe; yet recent changes and activities at USPS uncovered this past week provide a likely explanation.

1. Changes in staffing, overtime allowed, and time spent sorting mail, verified to me by more than one local postal worker;

2. At least 671 mail sorting machines have been removed or scheduled for removal from their current locations, some reportedly seen in dumpsters rather than transferred elsewhere as initially claimed;

3. Removal of deposit boxes in Arizona, Maine, Montana, New York, Pennsylvania, and Oregon;

4. On August 7, 9-week postmaster Louis DeJoy, major Trump donor and investor in several USPS competitors, met with Trump, later with the USPS board, and capped the evening with another Trump Friday Night massacre that reassigned or “displaced” 23 high-level USPS executives, concentrating all USPS control in DeJoy’s hands.

Wow! Then, in a USPS memo last week, DeJoy called the resulting delays “unintended consequences”. Either DeJoy is stupid — or he thinks we are.

How in the world does this make sense in the midst of a pandemic response already magnificently botched by this same administration — and on the cusp of a presidential election — unless the delays are specifically intended to both undermine confidence in the election and delay or disqualify mail-in votes?!

For some reason, Trump failed to note the Postal Service, an essential service for so many reasons is also the most trusted of all government services, with 91 percent approval in an April Pew poll. The huge public backlash over the latest events is, thus, no surprise. Yet I do not take any solace from the official postponement of deposit box removal until “after the election” or White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows’ promise Sunday that no more mail sorting machines will get dismantled.

Why? Because the President already made his intent clear last Thursday when he said, “Now, if we don’t make a deal, that means they don’t get the money. That means they can’t have universal mail-in voting, they just can’t have it.”

Fresh outrages arrive daily with this administration, but I have never been so mad, so livid, as when news started leaking out about these developments at USPS. This is so brazen, so in your face, that I feel like I’m living in a real-life “Animal Farm”!

Like many, I don’t enjoy the game of politics; that is not what makes me write. I write because I am terrified. I have never thought that the democracy I have enjoyed my entire life could crumble before my eyes.

Until now.

Paul Mack

Columbus

The Dispatch Editorial Board is made up of publisher Peter Imes, columnist Slim Smith, managing editor Zack Plair and senior newsroom staff.