Don't Let Business Lobbyists Kill the Post Office

Reader Supported News
Matt Taibbi

Postal officials say they must close about 3,700 underused post offices (there are 32,000 nationally) while offering alternative services through local businesses. They also want to consolidate hundreds of regional processing centers and eliminate Saturday mail deliveries.

n aide to Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont was warning me about this last week. There are organic reasons for all of this: The U.S. Postal Service is staring down the same barrel trained at our magazine and newspaper businesses, i.e. its revenue model is being wiped out by the internet.

But politics also plays a huge part in this. In 2006, in what looks like an attempt to bust the Postal Workers' Union, George Bush signed into law the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006. This law required the Postal Service to pre-fund 100 percent of its entire future obligations for 75 years of health benefits to its employees - and not only do it, but do it within ten years. No other organization, public or private, has to pre-fund 100 percent of its future health benefits.

"No one prefunds at more than 30 percent," Anthony Vegliante, the U.S. Postal Service's executive vice president, told reporters last year.

The new law forced the postal service to come up with about $5.5 billion a year for the ten years following the bill's passage. In 2006, before those payments kicked in, the USPS generated a small profit. Not surprisingly, the USPS is now basically broke.

The 2006 law also bars the Postal Service from offering "nonpostal services," which means the USPS can't, say, open up a bank, or an internet cafe, or come up with any new entrepreneurial ideas to generate new income, as postal services do in other countries.

The transparent purpose of this law, which was pushed heavily by industry lobbyists, was to break a public sector union and privatize the mail industry. Before the 2006 act, the postal service did one thing, did it well, and, minus the need to generate profits and bonuses for executives, did it cheaply. It paid for itself and was not a burden to taxpayers.

Post offices also have a huge non-financial impact: In a lot of small towns, the post office is the town, and shutting them down will basically remove the only casual meeting place for people in mountain areas and remote farming villages and so on. Of course, there's always one Wal-Mart for every dozen or so post offices, so people I guess can drive the extra twenty miles and meet there ...

This is a classic example of private-sector lobbyists using the government to protect its profits and keep prices inflated. Sen. Sanders is pushing a bill that would delay the end of Saturday delivery for two years, and prevent a number of post-office closings, but the writing is on the wall, unless there's a public outcry. So definitely write your congressman and ask him to roll back Bush's idiotic law, and at least give the Post Office a chance to sink or swim on its own.

Why is the Federal Reserve Propping Up the Bank of Libya?

John Nichols
The Nation

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders has for months been leading the charge to expose the sweetheart deals the Federal Reserve has worked out for multinational banks and corporations at the same time that working Americans, small businesses, local governments and schools boards struggle to stay afloat financially.

Sanders has tried to make the point that it is simply absurd for the Fed to bail out foreign firms and bad banks and to provide them with low-interest loans at the same time that they are reaping massive profits – and at the same time that federal, state and local governments are supposedly broke.

The Obama White House and other members of Congress grudgingly went along with a proposal Sanders made, as part of last year’s Wall Street reform legislation, to force the Fed to reveal its previously secret bailouts and backroom deals. But, for the most part, official Washington has been slow to share the Vermont senator’s outrage.

They may change now that Sanders is exposing what may be the most unsettling Fed deal yet.
On Thursday, the senator asked Federal Reserve officials to explain why they provided more than $26 billion in credit to an Arab intermediary for the Central Bank of Libya. According to a review by Sanders’ office, the Fed made at least 46 emergency, low-interest loans to the Arab Banking Corp., in which the Central Bank of Libya owns a 59 percent stake.

Sanders is particularly interested in learning why the Libyan-owned bank and two of its branches in New York City were exempted from sanctions that the United States imposed several weeks ago on Libyan businesses controlled by Colonel Moammar Gaddafi and the dictator’s associates.

 At the time the sanctions were imposed, President Obama said: “The Libyan government's continued violation of human rights, brutalization of its people, and outrageous threats have rightly drawn the strong and broad condemnation of the international community. These sanctions therefore target the Gaddafi government, while protecting the assets that belong to the people of Libya.”

But what’s the point of sanctions if they don’t crack down on the dictator’s bank?

“It is incomprehensible to me that while creditworthy small businesses in Vermont and throughout the country could not receive affordable loans, the Federal Reserve was providing tens of billions of dollars in credit to a bank that is substantially owned by the Central Bank of Libya,” says Sanders.

The senator is also asking Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner – a long-time Fed retainer -- to explain the Arab Banking Corp. was borrowing money at almost zero interest from one arm of the government, the Fed, at the same time the Treasury Department was borrowing money at a higher interest rate.
Good questions these. And Bernie Sanders ought not be the only one asking them. Congress should be grilling Geithner and Fed Ben Bernanke on the Fed's Libyan connection and why sanctions don't seem to apply to bankers with friends on Wall Street -- and in Washington.

It's Called Class Warfare

Lobbyists Working on Behalf of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Kill Jobs Bill

American Free Press

A SERIES OF MAINSTREAM MEDIA reports have revealed how the U.S. Chamber of Commerce recently mobilized its army of lobbyists to fight Senate legislation that would bring once-outsourced jobs back home to the U.S.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is a nonprofit 501(c)(6) that purportedly works to promote businesses and jobs in America. Today, however, the organization is increasingly coming under fire for backing multinational corporations and the outsourcing of American jobs to third world countries. The bill in question was the Creating American Jobs and End Offshoring Act (S. 3816), sponsored by Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.).

According to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), one of the bill’s cosponsors, the measure would put an end to the assistance Washington has been giving Big Business to move American jobs overseas.

Among other things, it gives companies a two-year payroll tax break when they hire new employees to perform services in the United States that had previously been done abroad.

It also eliminates the tax break—a corporate subsidy—that companies get for closing down factories and moving them abroad. Says Sanders: “The bill prohibits a firm from taking any deduction, loss or credit for amounts paid in connection with reducing or ending the operation of a trade or business in the U.S. and starting or expanding a similar trade or business overseas.”

Finally, the bill closes down a federal tax subsidy that has been rewarding U.S. companies that move their factories to foreign lands. “Under current law,” says Sanders, “U.S. companies can defer paying U.S. tax on income earned by their foreign subsidiaries until that income is brought back to the United States.”

This is known as “deferral” and puts American companies at a distinct disadvantage because they are responsible for taxes no matter whether they sell their wares or not. At a time when unemployment is at a record high, the bill should have been a no-brainer for legislators when it came up for a vote. But only eight senators sponsored it—all Democrats except for Sanders, a Vermont independent.

But even worse, neither Democrats nor Republicans could get the 60 votes necessary to pass a cloture bill to get it to the floor for a vote.

That’s because the Chamber of Commerce, which donates heavily to Republicans and Democrats, came down hard against it. This should not come as a surprise, considering it has been revealed that the Chamber of Commerce has been receiving significant funding from companies in foreign countries. According to the left-wing populist organization, Think Progress, the chamber has been accepting millions of dollars tax-free from companies in China, India, Bahrain, Egypt and Russia, among other countries, and then funneling that money into U.S. political campaigns in violation of federal election law. In return, the chamber has become a vocal proponent of globalism, which includes sending U.S. jobs abroad and hiring cheap labor.

In a letter to Congress, U.S. Chamber of Commerce President Bruce Josten displayed his complete incompetence, his disdain for American workers and his utter lack of patriotism by claiming that bringing much needed jobs back to the United States would not really help the U.S. economy.

“Replacing a job that is based in another country with a domestic job does not stimulate economic growth or enhance the competitiveness of American worldwide companies,” Josten scribbled. So what does Josten suggest Congress do to help Main Street America and boost the economy? He says Congress should make permanent the tax breaks for the two-percent of the American population that earns more than $250,000 a year.

The insanity of Josten’s claims is revealed in the fact that consumer spending accounts for 70 percent of the U.S. economy. In plain English, that means, if there are no jobs for working-class Americans, there is no more United States.