Letter: Congress needs to fix postal service

They say you know you’re old when you and your dog have the same favorite pastimes: taking frequent naps and watching for the mailman. As one of those old curmudgeons, I have to take exception to last week’s screed by Pete Radosevich on the U.S. Postal Service.

It is true that there is a lot of advertising in the mail: I get several catalogs

every week which go directly from my mailbox to the recycle bin, but I assume they must be making money from someone, or they wouldn’t be sending them. But so what? Do you want to stifle business? The trip to the recycle bin is not onerous. Junk mail serves a purpose.

I also get much of my medicine in the mail, plus my magazine subscriptions. That’s important to me. Again, as an old guy, I have difficulty in moving around. Going to a central location to pick up my mail is a nonstarter.

Pete mentioned that FedEx and UPS are successful companies. They are, because the rules were changed just so private companies could pick the low-hanging fruit, and leave the less lucrative market to the USPS. Did you know that these companies will send packages by USPS when it is more convenient for them to do so? Also, in 2006, Congress passed a law forcing the USPS to pre-pay their pensions for 75 years — no private corporation has to do that.

Transferring mail sorting to the Twin Cities area was part of the Republican plan to privatize the mail service. Not only was it more inefficient, it cost us local jobs. The fact is, the American Postal Workers Union is one of the last strong labor unions, and Republicans hate that.

I’m sure there are things the USPS could do to make the system viable, but that would require the people in charge to want to fix things instead of preparing it for privatization.

Kenneth Johnson, Cloquet