https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/08/07/postal-service-investigation-dejoy/
In 2016, the Russian Internet Research Agency worked behind the scenes to get elected Vladimir Putin’s chosen U.S. presidential candidate. A federal grand jury later indicted 13 Russians and three Russian entities for “informational warfare.” As special counsel Robert Mueller warned, the Russians would do it again.
“We assess that Russia is using a range of measures to primarily denigrate former Vice President Biden and what it sees as an anti-Russia ‘establishment,’ ” reads a statement issued Friday by William Evanina, National Counterintelligence and Security Center director.
The shadowy sabotage is the least of it in 2020. The Trump administration is not only saying the quiet parts out loud, but sabotaging the election out in the open. Since yesterday, there is more detail on how the Trump lackeys are trying to wreck the U.S. Postal Service in advance of millions upon millions of ballots dropping into mailboxes.
Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer met this week with Trump Postmaster General Louis DeJoy and put in writing his confirmation that he had, contrary to earlier denials, instituted “reductions of overtime availability, restrictions on extra mail transportation trips, testing of new sorting and delivery policies at hundreds of Post Offices, and the reduction of the number and use of processing equipment at mail processing plants.” All of which “now threaten the timely delivery of mail — including medicines for seniors, paychecks for workers, and absentee ballots for voters.”
Deliberately slowing down the mail may be illegal, but David Dayen at The American Prospect doesn’t expect Attorney General Bill Barr to come knocking even if Republicans from rural districts complain. Dayen also reports something perhaps more nefarious noted in the (paywalled) Capitol Forum:
The Postal Service has informed states that they’ll need to pay first-class 55-cent postage to mail ballots to voters, rather than the normal 20-cent bulk rate. That nearly triples the per-ballot cost at a time when tens of millions more will be delivered. The rate change would have to go through the Postal Regulatory Commission and, undoubtedly, litigation. But the time frame for that is incredibly short, as ballots go out very soon.
A side benefit of this money grab is that states and cities may decide they don’t have the money to mail absentee ballots, and will make them harder to get. Which is exactly the worst-case scenario everyone fears.
The Friday night news drop brought word DeJoy is shaking up management at USPS, introducing more uncertainty within a month of the first absentee ballots mailing out in North Carolina (September 4) and consolidating his power:
Twenty-three postal executives were reassigned or displaced, the new organizational chart shows. Analysts say the structure centralizes power around DeJoy, a former logistics executive and major ally of President Trump, and de-emphasizes decades of institutional postal knowledge. All told, 33 staffers included in the old postal hierarchy either kept their jobs or were reassigned in the restructuring, with five more staffers joining the leadership from other roles.
“Deliberate sabotage,” said Rep. Gerald E. Connolly (D-Va.), chair of the House subcommittee responsible for postal oversight.
DeJoy told a postal board of governors meeting Friday he is committed to fixing “a broken business model” not coping with a decline in first-class and business mail. In the coronavirus pandemic, however, package deliveries to Americans are up more than 50 percent.
If there is anyone who knows how to break a business or a country it is Donald Trump and his merry band of well-heeled incompetents. Half a year is gone, $3 trillion in national wealth, and 160,000-plus Americans while Trump golfs and preens for the cameras among his paunchy, white golf buddies. Testing remains slow, contact tracing cannot keep up, and 30 million are unemployed, Dana Milbank observes. Trump’s “bomb-throwing new chief of staff” blew up the latest round of talks for extending relief to beleaguered families.
Kids slated to return to school under pressure from the Trump administration fear bringing the virus home to their mothers.
But the attacks on the postal system really get under my skin, and not just because of the election. “Broken business model,” my Aunt Sally. The postal service is not a business. Was never intended to be, any more than the military. A college friend who went full-tricorn-hat T-party under Obama argued on Facebook that the government shouldn’t be doing anything not specifically authorized under Article I, Section 8. That is the section authorizing the Post Office, as well as containing the second reference to the government having a duty to provide for the “general Welfare” of the people, something he did not support.
God help us, some free marketeer decides the Pentagon should operate at a profit. Watch military conflicts spike across the globe as capitalist arms merchants with dollar signs in their eyes create even more blood-soaked markets for themselves than they have now.
Trump keeps issuing diktats as though he is CEO of America, Inc., if not king. Well, those who thought America should be run like a business got what they wanted, didn’t they? Those that are still alive, anyway.
UPDATE: Contact your congresscritters and complain loudly about DeJoy’s sabotage of USPS.
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