[Heyitsrick]

Originally Posted by Bucco

The question that began this was....WHY NOW

Why start turmoil just weeks before a large mail in ballot situation is to unfold. Was this not a problem before...you say it was....WHY NOW

Does not even make good business sense. Unless...

My question is why are some peddling this ongoing ideological conspiracy?

Let's take a trip in the time machine back to the "WHY NOW" date of December 5, 2011. My memory's a little foggy on this, so perhaps you can remind me who was president at that time.

Here's an article from "The Atlantic", that publication that's not known for supporting our current president:

The Atlantic - Who Killed The Postal Service?

Salient quotes from that December day in 2011:

Originally Posted by The Atlantic 12/5/2011

Today, the Postal Service announced roughly $3 billion in service cuts that will slow down the delivery of first-class mail for the first time in 40 years. Starting in April, it plans to shutter more than half of its 461 mail processing centers, stretching out the time it will take to ship everything from Netflix DVDs to magazines. One-day delivery of stamped envelopes will all but certainly become a thing of the past.

Originally Posted by The Atlantic 12/5/2011

The announcement is just the latest sign of a sad and increasingly dire fact: the Postal Service is in shambles. This past fiscal year, it lost a mere $5.1 billion. In 2012, it's facing a record $14.1 billion shortfall and possible bankruptcy. In order to turn a profit, Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe says the agency needs to cut $20 billion from its annual budget by 2015. That's almost a third of its yearly costs.

How did it come to this? The culprits include the Internet, labor expenses, and, as with pretty much every problem our country faces now, Congress.

Originally Posted by The Atlantic 12/5/2011

THE INTERNET KILLED IT

In the days of yore, sending letters by mail was pretty much the most efficient way to communicate in writing. Then the Internet happened. Although total mail volume stayed relatively steady until 2006, it has dropped an astonishing 20 percent in the past five years. More important, first-class mail, the Postal Service's biggest moneymaker, has fallen 25 percent during the past decade. That's a huge problem for its bottom line. The agency now delivers far more "standard mail" -- what most of us call junk mail -- than first-class mail. According to Businessweek, it takes three pieces of junk to equal the earnings from a single stamped first-class envelope. J. Crew catalogs and pizza menus alone won't pay the bills.

Originally Posted by The Atlantic 12/5/2011

LABOR COSTS KILLED IT

Yet even as its profits have dwindled along with the mail it handles, the agency's labor costs have remained stubbornly high. Salaries and benefits make up 80 percent of the Post Office's budget. By comparison, FedEx spends 43 percent of its budget on labor, while UPS spends 63 percent, according to Businessweek. Why the disparity? As the magazine put it, "USPS has historically placed the interests of its unions first." For years, it has happily negotiated contracts with generous salary increases and no-layoff clauses.

That seems to finally be changing. As part of his budget-cutting campaign, Donahoe is looking to slash roughly 220,000 of the Postal Service's 653,000 employees. About 100,000 of those cuts would happen through attrition. Meanwhile, Donahoe has asked Congress for permission to break the no-layoff provision of the service's current contracts so it can let go the additional 120,000.

You get the picture. "WHY NOW" isn't really "now", is it? These have been ongoing issues with USPS for quite some time.