Post Office in Peril

The US Postal Service has been a bane of Republicans for many years now, and there are many details to that story that don’t fit into a single cartoon. Most notably, there was the 2006 Postal Accountability Act which placed an exceptional burden on the USPS to prefund retiree health benefits several decades into the future, without which the agency would have turned a profit many of the years it reported losses. The coronavirus pandemic poses new problems as mail volume plummets, and bailouts are given to other industries but not the highly essential post office. Then there’s Trump’s personal vendetta against Jeff Bezos and Amazon, as well as the need for mail-in ballots this November, which threatens the GOP’s stranglehold on power with, you know, democracy. Enter the appointment of $2 million GOP donor Louis DeJoy (oh the irony of that surname) as Postmaster General, replacing the first-ever woman to hold that position, who is retiring. The American Postal Workers Union has some concerns about this. Like I said, too much material for a single cartoon!

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