Postal Service looks to end at-your-door mail

If you’re moving to a newly built house, say goodbye to mail delivery at your door. And if some House Republicans get their way, all door-to-door mail delivery will go away.

The U.S. Postal Service is marching towards a more “centralized delivery,” where residents pick up their own mail from clusters of mail boxes located in their neighborhood. Local postmasters are sending hundreds of letters to fast-growing communities, warning that cluster boxes will be the way mail will be delivered to new developments.

In the past year, the cash-strapped Postal Service has been asking companies in industrial parks and shopping malls to also adopt this form of mail delivery.

But Rep. Darrell Issa, the California Republican leading the House effort to save the postal service, wants more. He has made doing away with doorstep delivery a key part of his bill, which would require everyone to get mail at a curbside box or from a cluster box. Read more >>

Shorthanded Police Ask Mail Carriers, Garbage Collectors To Help Spot Crime

The shorthanded Antioch Police Department is enlisting the help of local garbage collectors and letter carriers tospot crime on city streets.

Employees of the local trash collector, Republic Services Inc., as well as U.S. Postal Service employees have been given tips on how to act as effective witnesses to crimes. The program, dubbed “We’re Looking Out For You” aims to add some experience eyeballs looking out for the city’s 105,000 residents.

As part of the training, drivers received a list of questions designed to help them identity criminal activity, as well as a laminated copy of the police department’s non-emergency phone number.

“It’s a huge resource multiplier for us,” said Lt. T. Brooks of the Antioch Police Department. “These are people who are actively engaged in the community and are actively participating in making Antioch a safer place.” Read more >>

Postal Service backs down on cutting Saturday mail

The beleaguered U.S. Postal Service backed down from its cost-saving plan to eliminate Saturday mail delivery, acknowledging that Congress barred a move that supporters said was essential to addressing the agency's dire financial condition.

Despite the retreat, the governing board said Wednesday that it's not possible for the Postal Service to meet its goals for reduced spending without altering the delivery schedule. Delaying "responsible changes," the board said, only makes it more likely that the Postal Service "may become a burden" to taxpayers.

The Postal Service said in February that it planned to switch to five-day-a-week deliveries beginning in August for everything except packages as a way to hold down losses.

But that announcement was a gamble. The agency essentially was asking Congress to drop from spending legislation the longtime ban on five-day-only delivery. Congress did not do that when it passed a spending measure last month. Read more >>

Councilman Proposes Email Tax To Fund Postal Service

A Berkeley city councilman has suggested that a tax on email may be wise way to help fund the United States Postal Service, according to the blog Berkeleyside.

District 8 Supervisor Gordon Wozniak, who represents an area that includes the Claremont Hotel and the eastern end of the UC Berkeley campus, made the comments Tuesday as city officials moved to halt the sale of a Post Office building on Allston Way due to a decline in business.

“There should be something like a bit tax. I mean a bit tax could be a cent per-gigabit and they would still make, probably, billions of dollars a year…And there should be, also, a very tiny tax on email,” Wozniak said at Tuesday’s meeting.

Wozniak said this would not only help fund the cash-strapped post office, but also discourage spam. According to Berkeleyside, the idea was even studied by the United Nations in 1999 as a means of funding global communications infrastructure. Read more >>

Postal Service Prepares for Second Default in Two Months

The U.S. Postal Service will default this week on a $5.6 billion congressionally mandated obligation to pre-fund retiree health benefits, marking the second time in two months the cash-strapped agency has done this.

The Postal Service last month failed to pay $5.5 billion for its fiscal 2011 prepayment obligation, which originally was due in September 2011 but was deferred by Congress until Aug. 1. That was the first time it ever defaulted on a payment to the Treasury Department. The $5.6 billion due this week, on Sept. 30, represents this fiscal year’s obligation.

Before this year, Congress helped USPS defer pre-funding payments required by a 2006 congressional mandate. Postal reform has challenged this Congress. Lawmakers warn that when they revisit the issue after the November election they likely won’t reach agreement on as major an overhaul as some deem necessary. USPS lost $5.2 billion in the third quarter of fiscal 2012, $2.1 billion more than during the same time period in 2011. Read more >>

Post office nears historic default on $5B payment

The U.S. Postal Service is bracing for a first-ever default on billions in payments due to the Treasury, adding to widening uncertainty about the mail agency's solvency as first-class letters plummet and Congress deadlocks on ways to stem the red ink.

With cash running perilously low, two legally required payments for future postal retirees' health benefits - $5.5 billion due Wednesday, and another $5.6 billion due in September - will be left unpaid, the mail agency said Monday. Postal officials said they also are studying whether they may need to delay other obligations. In the coming months, a $1.5 billion payment is due to the Labor Department for workers compensation, which for now it expects to make, as well as millions in interest payments to the Treasury.

The defaults won't stir any kind of catastrophe in day-to-day mail service. Post offices will stay open, mail trucks will run, employees will get paid, current retirees will get health benefits.

But a growing chorus of analysts, labor unions and business customers are troubled by continuing losses that point to deeper, longer-term financial damage, as the mail agency finds it increasingly preoccupied with staving off immediate bankruptcy while Congress delays on a postal overhaul bill. Read more >>

They've turned Lady Liberty into the Whore of Babylon

Image via WikipediaChoice comment from Slartebartfast regarding today's ADP report:

Wake up and smell the coffee. No MOPE here. The "Market", has been reduced to an irrelevant anachronism by the Fed's constant manipulations. They believe that if the stock market is up people will believe the economy is OK, and therefore it magically will be OK.

Actually they're onto something if you understand that economics is entirely a social phenomena and no kind of science. While they are correct that an economy is driven entirely by perception, they are wrong in their belief that stock prices alone form those perceptions. The greatest fundamental of any social activity is fair play. If the game is rigged everyone eventually quits playing.

Every day the Fed goes in a prints another truckload of FRN's they drive another stake in the heart of the economy. Every time another banker gets a billion dollars for producing absolutely nothing the real economy takes another sucker punch in the chops. It can only go on so long before the 100th monkey realizes it's all rigged and the whole society picks up their peanuts and walks away.

It has happened many, many times in history. The only reason it hasn't happened here yet is that the crooks have been trading away the good name of the US of A - which used to stand for something in the world. Now we are rightly seen as THE global source of tyranny and corruption. They have turned Lady Liberty into the Whore of Babylon. Soon we will realize that is what we have become and this game will be over but good.

So feel free to waste your time looking at graphs and rolling the dice in the rigged, looser's game of the Markets. Take what meager pile of paper winnings you may or may not be allowed to walk away with by the floor boss and continue to make believe that it's all reality. The damage has been done, and soon, very soon, you will see the whirlwind come upon us that we all so richly deserve.