USPS is a Constitutional Imperative: Adding Banking to Post Office Services is Only a Good Idea if it Helps Community Banks and Credit Unions — not if it helps the megabanks gain even more control over our lives

As with most political debates we are being presented with a false choice.

We either give up the post office or make it profitable. Really?

Maybe if we focused our attention on the service that the post office provides and made it more likely to be even more indispensable to our lives, we would also find ways to offset the expense of this service in addition to taxes. The current political decision to knee cap the post office isn’t helping matters. We need it for lots of reasons and privatizing or monetizing essential services makes money the object instead of the service. 

The Post Office is a governmental service. The conversation about the post office has lately been all about what it costs to produce this service. Whether it is self sustaining or not is irrelevant. We depend on it. We expect it as citizens. We don’t expect the military to be self sustaining. We don’t expect Medicaid to be self sustaining. Why single out this long standing governmental service as a target for converting it into a business model?

There is only one explanation — it is serving the the ambitions of someone who will profit from its extinction.

This is like the privatization of prisons. It converted the service to money. With money as the object, private prison companies obviously were incentivized to lobby to make more things that people do illegal and punishable with prison time.

Presto we had crime bills that put more people in U.S. prisons per capita than any other country on earth — costing the states and federal government hundreds of billions of dollars to put away people who were found guilty of possession of some illegal substance. Each prisoner costs $30,000 per year on average. Politicians fly under cover of law and order, but they are actually conserving nothing and simply responding to campaign contributions from people who want to get more rich by receiving taxpayer money for something that ought not to exist at all.

The recent suggestion of making the post office into a banking institution or a vehicle for banking institutions to offer services is a false choice. Like privatizing other essential government services it seeks to convert the  essential service into money. The service will thus suffer and along with it everyone who depends on it for sending and receive communications, voting, prescriptions, packages etc.

Most people do not know that if you send something by US Postal Service it is legally presumed to have been received. Private carriers enjoy no such presumption because, simply stated, they have not proved they are worthy of that presumption. But the USPS has done so since the first Postmaster was installed in 1775. Do we really want to screw around with that? It IS dependable and any suggestions that it is not, are just now arising after nearly 250 years because someone is afraid of losing an election if all the ballots are counted.

Bottom Line: USPS was not started (pursuant to specific mention in the US Constitution) because it would or could be a profit center. It was started as  an essential trusted governmental service that enhanced trust in government to provide that service. It credentialized the new US government and gave it credibility and strength. So whatever it costs, we need it as much as we need the military. 

The current banking suggestion has some merit — only if it enhances the strength and competition in the marketplace by community banks and credit unions. Contrary to another popular myth that is pushed by the mega banks, the smallest bank has access to all of the technology and backbones for electronic funds transfer as the largest. There is no difference.

If using the postal service offices as extended branches capable of providing services to community banks and credit unions is the result, then competition will re-enter the marketplace and control by the mega banks will decline. This could have the effect of allowing real securitization of debt to be explored rather the the current fake and fraudulent scheme. 

Here is another idea I recently heard from a postal employee. The current service of Certified Mail Return Receipt Requested could be digitized with the same fee because of its intrinsic value. That would reduce the cost of the service to nearly zero and probably increase demand for the service producing more net revenue for the post office.

But what we should NOT be doing is providing the mega banks with yet another vehicle to control the financial  marketplace which in turn cedes control over the economy and thus society and government. That needs to stop and there is no better place to start that resistance than the preservation of the constitutional imperative of the US Postal Service.

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