Post Office saboteurs.

• Author: Hightower, Jim
• Position: Vox Populist

What does fifty cents buy these days? Not a cup of joe, a pack of gum, or a newspaper. But you can get a steal of a deal for a fifty-cent piece: a first-class stamp, plus a nickel in change.

Each day, six days a week, letter carriers traverse four million miles toting 563 million pieces of mail, reaching the very doorsteps of our individual homes and workplaces in every single community in America. From the gated enclaves and penthouses of the uber-wealthy to the inner-city ghettos and rural colonias of America's poorest families, the U.S. Postal Service literally delivers. All for forty five cents. The USPS is an unmatched bargain, a civic treasure, a genuine public good that links all people and communities into one nation.

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So, naturally, it must be destroyed.

For the past several months, the laissez-fairyland blogosphere, assorted corporate front groups, a howling pack of Congressional rightwingers, and a bunch of lazy mass media sources have been pounding out a steadily rising drumbeat to warn that our postal service faces impending doom: It's "broke," they exclaim. It's "near collapse." It's "a full-blown financial crisis!"

These gloomsayers claim the national mail agency is bogged down with too many overpaid workers and costly brick-and-mortar facilities, and it can't keep up with the instant messaging of Internet services and such nimble corporate competitors as FedEx. Thus, say these contrivers of their own conventional wisdom, the postal service is unprofitable and is costing taxpayers billions of dollars a year in losses.

Wrong.

Since 1971, the postal service has barely taken a dime from taxpayers. All of its operations--including the remarkable convenience of 32,000 local post offices--are paid for by peddling stamps and other products.

The privatizers squawk that USPS has gone some $13 billion in the hole during the past four years and that a private corporation would go broke with that record. (Actually, private corporations tend to go to Washington rather than go broke, getting taxpayer bailouts to cover their losses.)

But the postal service is not broke. Indeed, in those four years of loudly deplored "losses," the service actually produced an $800 million operational profit (despite the worst economy since the Great...