Video: The Ed Show- Postal Service A Political Target

this doesn’t get enough conversation. i want to talk about the republican mission, and that’s exactly what it is, to take down the post office. congressman darrell issa, congressman of the house oversight committee, is leading the charge. he says he’s trying to save the post office, but in reality, he is pushing a bill to absolutely destroy it. this is just the beginning. if darrell issa has his way, with more than 3,000 post office branches will be shut down across the country, most of them in rural communities where they need the service. and 200,000 post office jobs would be lost. yeah, they kind of like that too. and there really is no reason for any of this. republicans will tell you that the postal service is just in huge trouble because they’re losing money. about $20 billion over five years. but here’s the thing that they’re not telling you. the reason the post office is losing money is because of a 2006 law passed in the lame duck session of a republican congress. what the heck is this all about? this is what pays for the post office operations, right here. it’s these things called stamps. they still work in america, i use them damned near every day. here’s why republicans want to kill the post office. they want to privatize everything they can get their hands on. they want to privatize the postal service so their corporate boys down the street here can make more money. they want to destroy union infrastructure. they hate unions any way, shape, or form. because it’s a dues thing. and they want to destroy a voting bloc.

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34 thoughts on “Video: The Ed Show- Postal Service A Political Target

  1. This video is the closest thing to the Gospel in telling the truth about the Republican ‘s and the Post Master General’s plan to privatize and destroy the Postal Serviceas we know it. They created a false deficit to speed up their plan to sell off the service piece by piece so their rich friends can buy it and make more money. The existence of the Post Office is provided for in the constitution. that should be stressed as well as it’s supposed to be a non profit service set up for the American public.

  2. Resident Officer Restructuring
    Whereas: The APWU membership continues to shrink at drastic rates.
    Whereas: The amount of National Resident Officers has not decreased at all while their represented members have.
    Whereas: Compared to our sister Postal Labor organizations we are exceptionally top heavy with National Officers.
    Whereas: It makes fiscal sense in the current climate to have this discussion.
    Be it resolved: that the APWU restructure the resident officer structure as follows and institute (by updating the constitution appropriately) said structure effective for the 2013 National Election.
    Eliminate the position of Industrial Relations Director and merge these duties into the Executive Vice President position, to include the oversight of the industrial relations department. Increase the Executive V.P. salary by 15%.
    Eliminate the position of Asst. Legislative Director.
    Eliminate the Director of Organization position, the Research and Education position and the Human Relations position. Create a position titled Union Growth & Improvement Director which will be responsible for all aspects of the three eliminated positions. This positions salary would be the same as the individual salary of the positions it is replacing plus 15%. This position would replace the Industrial Relations Director on the executive board.
    Decrease the amount of Clerk craft assistant directors from 3 to 2.
    Decrease the amount of Maintenance craft assistant directors (currently 2) and National Rep at Large (currently 1) to just 1 assistant director. The lone assistant director would assume the duties of the National Rep. at Large.
    Eliminate the assistant MVS craft director position. Change Article 21 (c) by deleting “the Assistant Director of the MVS division” and replacing it with “the National President will appoint a current MVS NBA as the Director of the MVS division and he/she”.
    For the purpose of clarity, no member running for any of the above mentioned positions (excepting the V.P. position) will be considered the incumbent in any 2013 election literature including the ballots.
    For the purpose of expediency the membership would ask that the Secretary/Treasurer be responsible for making appropriate housekeeping changes to the following Articles (7, 8, 9, 11, 13, 21, and any others missed herein) to align them with the results of this resolution.

  3. Why is no one talking about the $200 a day they are paying supervisors to go on a detail. There seems to be money for that but not for anything else. Why award someone a job and then send them some other place to work. It is a shell game.

  4. I think the national union officers should drop back to part time and head over to the nearest PDC and start feeding DBCS’s as NTFT’s

  5. We need more APWU commercials now that we have all that extra dues assessments money! Why not put some cameras in union offices all over this great land so we can see those stewards hard at work! Yeah – the ones with the superseniority that are gonna bump you when they close up IPDC!

  6. Ed Shitz is a spittle-spewing hate monger. One needs a spit shield when listening to him just to remain dry. How does anything he says make it to the mainstream?

  7. Wage slave- you seem to be the one who is out of it. People “depend on this for universal communication?” Where are they? Bulletin… most of them DON’T USE IT. FYI- I was a rural carrier for ten years, so I know all about that end of the operation. Since you probably don’t know, most services that a person can get at a local post office can be done through the rural carrier. You know, the “post office on wheels.”
    At one of the town meetings that they had for an office that is on the closure list, one reason stated by the townspeople for us to keep the office open was that it is where people meet and talk in the morning. For this we should spend thousands to keep it open? At another office, the people actually said that they would prefer that it close, as the hours that the office is open do not work very well for them being able to get their mail.
    Should all offices on the closure list be closed? Probably not, but there sure are some that make no sense whatsoever to remain open. Closing offices is nothing new, it’s been done for decades. Are we supposed to keep them open just because they currently are?
    You seem to think that the rural carriers will disappear just because the office closes. They will just originate out of another office. How is that a problem?
    You seem to think that it is OK to continue as is, even though far fewer people want or need the service we provide. The USPS is a business. How does any business survive while operating like that?

    Diamond tony- you seem to be the one who needs to do some research. From Jan. 2007 to Jan. 2011, the D rats had control of both houses of congress, by large majorities. And for part of that time, they had 60 in the senate. I apparently must remind you that 60 is a filibuster proof majority. Remember Obama care and its 60 votes? And for two of those four years, they had the Communist in Chief as well. So, if they are “for the working man” as you and Mr. Ed seem to want to think, where were they?

  8. I think the main problem is the Post Office is run like a service, which is what the wording in the laws say the Post Office is suppose to be, but it is expected to make money like a business. The military losses more money in 1 day than the Postal Service losses in a year, but no one is saying the military should make money.

    If the Post Office was allowed to follow the same rules as every other business and not prefund retirement for 75 years in a 10 year period the Post Office would be near break even, and that is while keeping prices lower than their competition. UPS and Fedex need to make a profit for their shareholders while the Post Office only needs to break even.

    As a average citizen have you price compared how much you pay to ship UPS or Fedex compared to going to your local Post Office? and I don’t mean UPS store. For something that costs me $18.20 at the Post Office it cost me $25 via Fedex or UPS, and imagine if the Post Office was not around how much it would cost through those 2 business, and the service I have received the last 2 years from alternate services has been horrid. Does UPS or Fedex have a rule against ringing doorbells? Ring the damm door bell before you sit my $600 laptap on the porch. When I pay for overnight service and I wake up 8 AM to get the product, and then hear the truck drive off without knocking or ringing the bell and a note left on my door saying sorry they missed me I get a little ticked .

    Summary, if you want the Post Office to be run like a business then quit running it like a service. Congress is the main problem not the post office.

  9. Ciff Guffey really cares

    All, Liz has an idea and would like some feedback in regard to your Local’s

    interest. At the National Convention after the Parade of States, she want to

    set up Regional hospitality parties, at the same location of the Parade of

    States. It would be called Regional Street Parties. We have a band called

    Haute Chili. Food wagons will be available to buy food and they will have Bars

    set up.

  10. one more thing diamond tony…i think it is dumb to think that the democrats are our allies in our struggle to survive. The first two years of this administration they had large majorities in both chambers and did nothing for us…while the unions sat silently on the sidelines and did not provide any legislative pressure on our so called allies to relieve us from the burden of the PAEA…which they voted for.

  11. hey diamond tony, the PAEA went down over a two day period by a voice vote, in both chambers and no records were kept as to how each member voted. It was voted for “Unanimously…as in completely agreeing with” in the senate. It also had two democrat sponsors and two republican sponsors. To lay the PAEA at the feet of the republican party is a lie in and of itself. the only way you would know how a member voted is if they admit it…like the democrat senator in youngstown ohio who said he thought it was a good idea at the time.

  12. “I think it is just plain DUMB to say the Republicans want to get rid of the Post Office. That’s just stupid. I agree the pre-funding should be stopped but why blame it on the Republicans. You guys (democrats) had the Senate AND the Congress for EIGHT YEARS. You did nothing about it then. No, you wait till you can blame someone else. That sure sounds familiar, Someone in the White House keeps doing that.”

    This is a flat out lie!! The Dems NEVER had control of both houses of congress, let alone for eight years!!

    You cannot control the Senate short of having a super majority. Dems never had this. Republicans simply fillabustered anything and everything that the Dems wanted to pass. Without the supermajority, no party has “control” of the Senate and without that, nothing will get through if the minority party at the time doesn’t want to allow it.

    Good lord, do some research!!!!

  13. I think it is just plain DUMB to say the Republicans want to get rid of the Post Office. That’s just stupid. I agree the pre-funding should be stopped but why blame it on the Republicans. You guys (democrats) had the Senate AND the Congress for EIGHT YEARS. You did nothing about it then. No, you wait till you can blame someone else. That sure sounds familiar, Someone in the White House keeps doing that.

  14. Monetary Incentive Negotiated For Retirement, Separation
    APWU News Bulletin #02-2009, Aug. 24, 2009 | PDF
    APWU-represented employees who retire or separate on or before Nov. 30, 2009, will receive a monetary incentive of $15,000, in accordance with an agreement negotiated by the union. The incentive will be paid in two installments to eligible employees.
    “This agreement [PDF] achieves a long-standing objective of the APWU,” said union President William Burrus.
    The incentive will be offered to eligible full-time employees who terminate their service through regular retirement, Voluntary Early Retirement, or voluntary separation. (Eligible PTR and PTF employees will receive proportional percentages of the incentive.)
    To qualify for early retirement, employees must have at least 20 years of service and be 50 years of age or must have 25 years of service at any age. (The annuity is reduced 2 percent for each year workers are under 55.)
    Eligible employees who do not qualify for regular or early retirement but wish to receive the incentive may resign.
    Not covered by the agreement are employees who were issued a notice of discharge on or before Aug. 24; MPE 9s, ET 10s, and ET 11s who cannot be replaced without training; Operating Services employees; employees in the Accounting Services section of the IT/ASC bargaining unit, and Transitional Employees.
    Eligible full-time employees may, at their option, end their service on or before Sept. 30, or they will be assigned a date of Oct. 31 or Nov. 30 by management, based on operational needs. Employees will be paid $10,000 within two pay periods after separation, and will receive an additional $5,000 on Oct. 29, 2010. Part-time employees will be assigned a date of Nov. 30.
    Negotiations over the agreement, which was finalized Aug. 24, took two months, Burrus said. “Our goal was an incentive of 50 percent of a year’s salary. Because of the difficult economic times, however, the agreement had to be structured to avoid adding to the deficit. Nonetheless, we feel that the settlement will provide a modest incentive to employees to end their service.
    “The USPS financial condition is precarious,” Burrus said. “The congressionally-imposed obligation to pre-fund retirees’ health insurance benefits has caused tremendous deficits over the last two years, and without legislative relief, improvement is not in the forecast.
    “Management has been forced to reduce costs, but unfortunately, the cuts have been applied disproportionally to bargaining-unit employees, especially to those in mail processing,” the union president said.
    “Because our contract prohibits layoffs, the only means for cutting work hours have been to reassign full-time employees and to reduce the hours of PTFs,” Burrus noted. “Excessing and work-hour cuts cause severe hardships for our members,” he said, “so finding a way to make voluntary complement adjustments became an urgent matter.”
    If more than 25,000 employees indicate they wish to accept the offer, the parties will discuss implementation, based on a proportion of the number of employees in the complement of the APWU and Mail Handler crafts. Mail Handlers are expected to receive an offer virtually identical to the APWU-negotiated agreement.

  15. Shuga, please don’t scare an old man with a statement about Joe Biden taking over……….Check out this hypothetical… Take your pick, either Joe or Howard Dean commited a crime. DNA was taken as evidence and both men were arrested.

  16. No need to keep the management we have that has always been abusive and corrupt, need to clean house, offer Early Outs, the USPS never really changed, they lied about it, but the corruption in management which has been protected by the OIG and Inspection Service ( real law Enforcement?), will continue, the good old boy network will continue, unless real Privatization is accomplished, why is it we all say change, and the Workplace environment is ready to explode into “Going Postal”, this USPS is a ticking time bomb, Management needs to be replaced from top to bottom, and the Unions also, the two are a deadly combination, Customer Service is dead, the USPS is dead, a real company with proficient workers and managers needs to be instituted in its place.
    Congress is blind to the coming disaster,The NALC strike and demonstrations on April 12, 2012, will do absolutely nothing but hold up legislation, and the death spiral will continue.
    How many older clerks were excessed to the carrier craft and made it, very few, very sad , and the APWU said;, but you have a job, but not for long, goodbye career, unless you get Disability retirement.

  17. Cliff Guffey -APWU, Fred Rolando -NALC, corrupt, dues hungry, power hungry, but the membership?, Oh yeah, we care!, just keep paying dues, work environment deteritorates into Postal Violence, keep paying dues, when will members learn, these Unions are not the Unions that at least tried to protect us, why try to stop the Early Outs/ VERA’s ?, so we can stay and pay dues ?, so Rolando and Guffey can roll in the dough!.

  18. You are exactly right on point! Darrell ISSA do not care anything about the Postal service mail delivery or the impact it will have on over thousands of workers livlhood! Him and his cronies do not care about american taxpaying citizens, getting their mail in a efficient manner or how much it will cost to receive their mail if the Postal service close down! They want to privitize the Postal service, so rich men like himself can own it, hire workers making minnimum wages and pocket the profit! This was Bush plan in 2006 when this was implemented! Shame on the republicans and democratics who are sitting back, doing nothing to stop it! Don’t we already have enough unemployed workers now, who are unable to draw unemployment, based on the new laws that have been put in place! Thank you Ed for standding once again for the Postal unionized workers! Shame on congress!

  19. Sad when white men fainted when they heard the voice of the Obama, he is a Jimmy Carter, and I wonder , if he was found to have doctored documents and is illegal, i hope it is all a joke, then something would be very wrong if the FBI,CIA,NSA, and all of Homeland Security let him in the White house, this would be Armageddon, all of the Law Enforcement and spy agencies would have to resign, something is very wrong here, but Obama will not see the end of his term, Biden will become President.

  20. @tom on Friday:
    You must not have been paying taxes for too long….my tax rates as well as those who work with me are LOWER THAN THEY USED TO BE. Do you do your own taxes and do you keep records of your Tax Filings?? I do…
    YOUR Local and State Taxes have gone up, but not your Federal Taxes….OUR FICA alone has gone down due to the Tax Holiday the DEMS have offered and the Prez jawboned and twisted arms of the Rethugs to get. Your statements are just not true about “Democratic Taxes”.
    @Gipper’s Ghost on Friday:
    The USPS is exactly what it IS, not what YOU think it is.
    The Postal Service IS just that….a transportation and delivery SERVICE….people pay to have the US Postal SERVICE to take their MAIL and deliver it to ANYWHERE in the world….including A STOP AT EVERY DELIVERY POINT IN AMERICA if need be to get the MAIL home.
    “rural post offices” are the “home” to RURAL CARRIERS that deliver to all the small town folks of America….YOU whine about them being “…lucky to do $5 in business.” when in ACTUALITY they exist to render ALL THE SERVICES THAT THE USPS IS CHARGED BY THE CONSTITUTION TO DO.
    Hey “Gipper”, what do you do with RURAL AMERICA?? Forget about those folks?? Just concentrate on URBAN AREAS and NEAR RING SUBURBS???
    Hmmmmmm…..sounds a lot like UPS or FedEx to me….

    I am frankly tired of hearing RANDIAN STYLE BULL SHIT from people like you who want to CHUCK THE BULK OF AMERICA to the dogs….Folks that can’t see the REAL PURPOSE of this over TWO HUNDRED YEAR OLD trusted edifice that America depends on for LOW COST UNIVERSAL COMMUNICATION.

    I started as a CARRIER TEMP years and years ago. Get a life “Gipper”….walk a route or DRIVE a route for a while and see WHO YOU SERVE on a daily basis….talk to them….LISTEN TO THEM and hear what they say.
    I can guarantee that NONE OF THEM will tell you they don’t want or need their Post Office because it only MAKES FIVE BUCKS….that’s not why we’re here.

  21. Letter Carriers President Says S.1789 has Vision, Will Solve USPS Problems and offer Voluntary Early Retirements.
    April 6, 2012 by postal
    Filed under: NALC, postal, postal news, press releases, usps 
    WASHINGTON, April 6, 2012 — In Speech at Rutgers, NALC President Calls on Congress to speed up and Draft Comprehensive Reform, and offer craft employees Early Retirement Incentives.
    Fredric V. Rolando, president of the National Association of Letter Carriers, said Friday that Postal Service legislation pending before Congress has long term vision and is urgently needed.
    Instead, he said, Congress and Postal Service management are so focused on cutting costs — including ending Saturday delivery, closing hundreds of post offices and other facilities, delaying delivery times and eliminating 150,000 jobs — that the inevitable result will be more long-term damage.
    Degrading services to residents and business will only drive customers away from the Postal Service, further reducing revenue and eventually destroying the world’s best and most-affordable delivery network, Rolando said. It also will threaten the 7.5 million private-sector mailing industry jobs that depend on a robust Postal Service.
    Rolando spoke at the Advanced Workshop in Regulation and Competition sponsored by the Center for Research in Regulated Industries at Rutgers University at Newark, N.J. His union consists of 284,000 active Carriers.
    A successful business plan, such as S.1789, he said, would be “strategic” and “far-sighted” and would better leverage the Postal Service’s unique and universal last-mile delivery network; expand the range of services it can offer; and give the Postal Service more flexibility in pricing its products, and would alleviate excessing of employees to distant places, by offering a decent incentive to retire, such as the ones being negotiated by his union and the APWU for April 2012.

  22. Ed Schutlz is nothing but a blithering idiot without an unbiased bone in his body. Maybe he ought to go into one of these rural post offices that are “needed” and watch the postmaster do nothing but sit around most of the day. Some days they are lucky to do $5 in business. Yes, that’s five dollars. Yet, we should spend tens of thousands each year to keep each one of them open. He’s on PMSNBC, what more would you expect from him. This is the same network (NBC) that edits 911 tapes to make it look like someone is racist.

  23. We are rapidly heading back into feudalism. Both parites are trying to kill the middle class – Democrats with excessive taxation and the development of a bloated welfare state. Republicans with legislation to make us all minimum-wage Wal-Mart employees, while they give tax incentives to ship our tech jobs overseas and free rein to the rich fat CEO’s. And worst of all? We stupid middle classe Americans continue to divide ourselves nearly equally between those two parties, thus nullifying any “voting block” power we might otherwise have. Sad! Tuly sad!

  24. Issa won’ t run for President, he can’t beat Jeb Bush. Issa lost the California Governor recall election to someone that can’t say California.

  25. I love you Ed Shultz, thank you for speaking up for us postal workers, we wish we could speak up for ourselves, but law prevent us from speaking, anything we say in the public we have to first get permission. I watch your show every night if I knew how to use the twitter,I would tweet you, keep up the good work.

  26. The more they shut the faster the VERA, Ed !, we hate the God Damn Place!, God Damn The Post Office !

  27. Get your Hoodie and take your Skittles and iced tea, and don’t let the Zimmerman get you !
    Today, 9:50:53 PM
    – Like – Reply – Delete

  28. It is obvious that Darrell Issa plans to run for president in 2016, he is placating the republican big money machine. Issa will stop at nothing to promote himself,birth control,USPS, anything to strip services and rights of the citizens to grab power.

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