Friends and Neighbors,
Join us tomorrow, Saturday, August 22nd from 11:00 am until 12 noon, outside the Chevy Chase, DC Post Office on Connecticut Ave. and Northampton St., NW, just south of Chevy Chase Circle in Washington, DC to show support for:
The constitutional mission of the U.S. Postal Service, including priority for the secure delivery of ballots mailed from state election offices to voters and mailed by voters to their state election offices;
The men and women who sort and deliver the mail;
The immediate halt to the removal and disabling of vital postal infrastructure, including public mail boxes, mail sorting machinery and equipment needed for speedy mail delivery;
The immediate repair and replacement of the above equipment and restoration of overtime;
Immediate passage of the Delivering for America Act & protection for USPS whistleblowers;
The immediate resignation or firing of Postmaster Louis DeJoy.
Please wear a mask; we will observe social distancing.
Teresa Grana & Erich Martel
For other nearby events: https://tinyurl.com/y6n72jym
Nearby events include:
Post Offices in:
Old PO (Trump Hotel), DC 20004
Towson, MD 21204
Columbia, MD 21045
Frederick, MD 21701
Rockville, MD 201851 (Twinbrook PO)
Calvert Distribution Ctr, Riverdale Park, MD 20737
North Bethesda PO, MD 20817 (adjacent to Home Depot)
Silver Spring, MD 20910
Diane Ravitch's blog 
If I lived anywhere near DC, I’d attend the event at the
“Old PO (Trump Hotel), DC 20004” –since DeJoy is a Trump appointee who just claimed that he never discussed what he was doing with Trump, which is challenging to believe, since Trump himself made it publicly very clear that he wanted to suppress the vote via vote by mail for his own political expediency.
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DeJoy replaced a professional Postmaster General who worked her way up through the ranks of USPS. The USPS is supposed to be no political.
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I can’t attend but I’ll be there mentally and emotionally.
THANK YOU 🙏 to everyone who comes and expresses what should be ringing out all over America. This destruction of the USPS has to stop.
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Here’s a succinct video from the WPost in which multiple USPS employees express shock about what Trump and his henchman, DeJoy, are DOING to the service:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/national/postal-workers-say-the-damage-to-usps-may-be-irreversible/2020/08/21/86b5eef5-82d1-42a9-b749-aa1a6cd3d5a6_video.html
Postal workers say the damage to USPS may be IRREVERSIBLE
August 21, 2020 | 10:04 AM EDT
The U.S. Postal Service has seen significant delays in mail delivery since the Postmaster General Louis DeJoy took over in June. Despite DeJoy’s announcement to suspend changes to the Post Office, postal workers say the damage has been done.
Between 600 & 700 high-speed, high-tech, barcode-reading, mail-sorting machines (which were each processing 10,000 “mail pieces” per hour at mail processing facilities around the country) not just “tarped” (tarpaulins thrown over the installed machines and the power plugs pulled from their outlets, allowing the machines easily to be returned to service) but JUNKED, disassembled, “thrown out back…rained on…you KNOW they’re not gonna be brought back to use… they’re selling some of them, for a few hundred dollars each: these machines cost a half million dollars each to install !…”
A related text report:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/08/21/dejoy-testimony-usps-senate/
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It’s come to this…citizens having to protest to support…the United States Post Office.
When I was a kid (here he goes, ha, ha) the post office in my New England town was a staid, clapboard little building with (always) a picture of the current president hanging inside.
But I never gave much thought to the picture of the president because what mattered was the people who worked in that building and who delivered our mail.
They were no-fooling-around, get the job done quietly workers.
Sort of reminds me of many of the people I STILL see taking care of the U.S. mail.
Then we have our buffoon, third-rate celebrity, liar-in-chief president -in stark contrast.
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John, you have brought back a memory. In the summer of 2002, my wife and I were on one of our extended camping trips. Up through the Adirondacks and the top of Vermont and New Hampshire. Through the middle of Maine and into the Maritime Provinces of Canada. Wonderful trip it was. A long trip, nightly pitching a tent in a new place. Stopping to explore wildlife refuges and state parks. A month of beautiful places ending the day before school started back before the burden of school reform made the teacher dread ruin every waking hour out of school.
But one memorable incident took place in one of those staid New England post offices. We were driving across the extremely rural part of central Maine and came to a post office. Small, white clapboards, tucked under a tree with a lady behind the counter who had been there long enough to know everybody in the area. I had one letter to mail. It took an hour. I learned about public boarding schools in the area where a long bus ride took the kids to a distant place for a week or more, depending on the amount of snow. I learned what people did and how similar they seemed to my own Tennessee neighbors. It was a perfect delight. I finally got back to the truck to find a sleeping wife who had missed it all.
Thanks for the memory of all that.
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Wonderful memory, Roy. Every part of it -except the dread of “school reform”, of course.
Usually, this time in August there’s the standard ‘back to school dread’ and nervousness, ha, ha..
In some ways, this time around we’re experiencing the “mother of all back to school dreads”. (But maybe we should leave the mothers out of it, as I sometimes tell students when their verbal playing around starts to escalate and hit too close to home….)
How about the “Trump of all Dreads”, since the people going back to school are facing such a huge, unexplored and,in the U.S., demagogue-intensified threat.
It would be nice if the standardized testing and other school “reform” blah, blah, blah gets thrown out classroom windows all.across America…at least we can do THAT for the kids this year. (Look out below!)
I’m thinking about ways to make this school year great for my students -despite this huge disaster of a pandemic/hornets nest our federal government has kicked – and kicked hard.
Hey, enjoy this summer day.
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We are already back in school, I teach three classes with both virtual and in-person students, trying to get a grip on the way I might have some success if the virtual thin happens en masse. I have been granted here in Tennessee a beautiful cool and cloudy summer day, absent the oppressive humidity that typifies our summers.
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Best of luck.
“Getting a grip” is right!
Suddenly, classroom teachers are also expected to be video producers and the stars of our own shows, too. Wow.
Wait to the kids see me. It will be like the weather forecast was done on TV back in the 1960s… I remember they had an actual map with clouds and the sun sort of velcro-ed on. Did fhe TV forecaster actually move that stuff around, too? The sounds too crazy to be true but it’s in my head….
Yeah, primitive, old-school, low tech TV…that will be me.
Take care
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‘Like Armageddon’: Rotting Food, Dead Animals and Chaos at Postal Facilities Amid Cutbacks
By Laura J. Nelson and Maya Lau, Los Angeles Times
21 August 20
Accounts from employees at California postal facilities provide a glimpse of the chaos amid both the pandemic and widespread cuts imposed by the USPS.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-08-20/usps-cutbacks-post-office-chaos
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People need to send a clear message that the USPS must remain a public service. Legislators must change the 2006 pension law that deliberately set the USPS up for fiscal failure. Both privacy and integrity are on the line. Thousands of small businesses would no longer be in business. Private companies would raise rates to make the cost of doing business prohibitive.https://ips-dc.org/how-congress-manufactured-a-postal-crisis-and-how-to-fix-it/
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Postalism
The US Post won’t do!
It’s Postalist, it’s true!
It’s Lenin rot!
A Commie plot!
That Patriots eschew!
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Postal Prez
Our Prez is going Postal
His Twitter finger twitches
His hits are coast to coastal
With boxes in the ditches
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Biden is a Postalist
Biden is a Postalist!
Kamala Harris too!
They’re mail and femail Socialists
In Bernie Sanders ‘ view
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USPR (Union of Soviet Postalist Republics)
The Postal Workers Union
A threat to all we cherish
A Soviet re Union
America will perish!
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Post Script
I’ve posted quite enough
On Postalistic stuff
It might be dumb
But now I’m done
With poems off the cuff
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DeJoy is conflict-of-interest incarnate. He holds enormous investments in competing delivery services and is yet another corporate minion sent to dismantle the public sector. We sink a lot of public money into the military/industrial complex – when will they be required to turn a profit?
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See charts in this thorough article from Steve Hutkins, editor of savethepostoffice.com.
Data provided by USPS, which tracks % on-time delivery wkly & reports results qtrly. Qytrly report including July isn’t out yet, but USPS provided wkly reports to him & in presentations to business customers. Despite pandemic, USPS was managing ontime delivery 90-95% — until July, after DeJoy was installed & implemented “efficiency”– canceling overtime, removing drop boxes, & destroying mail-sorting eqpt. Ontime delivery across the nation’s postal districts immediately tanked to 79%– in some districts as low as 70%.
Open link & scroll to Aug 21 article, “Watchdog asks postal regulator to seek USPS data on mail delays”: https://www.savethepostoffice.com
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So proud of my little NJ town, which already had 50 masked sign-carrying protesters marching in front of our PO yesterday, published on patch & tapinto. That was organized by “Blue Wave.” Today rallies are scheduled in nearby Highland Park and Hightstown by “Save the Post Office.” Hopefully there will be lots of local protests across the nation, & not just today. This should be local, widespread & ongoing– buttressed by flooding email boxes of legislators– until DeJoker is forced to replace all destroyed sorting eqpt, put back the drop boxes, & re-authorize overtime.
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From Axios:
House passes bill to give U.S. Postal Service $25 billion and reverse policy changes
The House voted 257-150 on Saturday to give the U.S. Postal Service $25 billion and reverse operational changes made during widespread mail delays. 26 Republicans supported the measure, but the bill is unlikely to move forward after a White House veto threat.
Why it matters: More Americans than ever are expected to vote by mail during the coronavirus pandemic, but on-time delivery for priority and first class mail has continued to drop since early July.
Six states are suing Postmaster General Louis DeJoy on the grounds that his cost-cuts were “unlawful” and designed to impede efforts to conduct “free and fair elections.”
Catch up quick: DeJoy this week suspended his proposed cost-cuts to the USPS until after the 2020 election to “avoid even the appearance of any impact on election mail.”
Democrats’ bill would keep USPS leaders from making changes that “impede prompt, reliable, and efficient services” to mail delivery through January 2021.
The bill would require all election mail to be handled as first class and ban removing or decommissioning sorting machines and collection boxes — following reports from Oregon, Montana, Manhattan and Pennsylvania that the Postal Service was unbolting and hauling away mailboxes…
https://www.axios.com/house-vote-mail-post-office-dejoy-trump-election-210d20cb-52ea-4af1-b0b0-04853b7b80e5.html?utm_campaign=organic&utm_medium=socialshare&utm_source=email
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