‘We deliver’ NOT!
Why the Post Office can’t deliver the
mail
By James Bovard
Monday, April 29, 2013
The
Justice Department on Tuesday joined a lawsuit accusing
Lance
Armstrong of defrauding the
U.S.
government. The
U.S.
Postal Service spent $40 million sponsoring
Mr.
Armstrong’s bicycling team from 1996 through 2004, including the
years when he won six Tour de
France
titles.
Mr.
Armstrong is being sued under the False Claims Act, which could
provide the feds with triple damages if they win more than $100
million.
The cycling champion recently publicly confessed to using prohibited
substances while racing, violating the agreement his team had with the
feds. He and others engaged in a long series of denials and charades to
cover up their cheating. The
Justice Department’s court filings charge that
Mr.
Armstrong and co-defendants “knowingly conspired to present or cause
the presentation of false or fraudulent claims, or to make, use, or cause
to be made or used, false records or statements material to false or
fraudulent claims.”
As someone who has written about the
Postal
Service off and on for 35 years, that conspiracy charge sounded to me
like a good summary of the
Postal
Service’s own public relations strategy. The
Postal
Service has been caught time and again lying about its delivery
speed.
The
Postal Inspection Service concluded that
Postal
Service advertisements for Priority Mail falsely implied that two-day
national delivery was guaranteed even though postal officials knew that
delivery routinely takes three or more days. However, as
Postal Regulatory Commission Chairman
Ruth Goldway observed, because the
Postal
Service is a federal agency, it “does not have to … comply with the
Federal Trade Commission’s truth-in-advertising rules.”
Nothing that
Mr.
Armstrong did has hurt the
Postal
Service’s image 1 percent as much as the perpetual, intentional
slowdowns of first-class mail. At a high-level meeting in 1969, postal
management decided “to no longer strive for overnight mail delivery and
to keep this a secret from
Congress
and the public,” according to
The
Washington Post. In 2000, four years after it began sponsoring bike
racers, the
Postal
Service quietly slashed delivery targets in much of the nation for
first-class mail scorning a federal law requiring the “highest
consideration” to providing speedy mail delivery. First-class mail
delivery is now more than 20 percent slower than it was in the 1960s. In
late 2011, the
Postal
Service suggested it might phase out next-day mail delivery across
the board and recently proposed ending Saturday delivery.
Shortly before it began sponsoring a bike-racing team, the
Postal
Service was a poster boy for the Clinton administration’s
“Reinventing
Government” campaign. President Clinton declared, “There’s no reason
that we can’t have a post office where you always get served within five
minutes of the time you walk up to the counter.” This made a nice
applause line, and the
Postal
Service made a brief, half-hearted effort to fulfill that pledge.
Postal management “solved” that problem a few years ago by removing
clocks from post office lobbies around the country making it more
difficult for customers to track delays.
The
Postal
Service has often acted as if mail delivery is a mere nuisance
distracting from a single-minded pursuit of pensions. The Government
Accountability Office (GAO) reported in 2006 that the
Postal
Service fails to “measure and report its delivery performance for
most types of mail.” The GAO also found that the
Postal
Service’s “outdated standards are unsuitable as benchmarks for
setting realistic expectations for timely mail delivery, measuring
delivery performance or improving service, oversight and
accountability.”
Mr.
Armstrong has never been accused of throwing tacks in the road to
sabotage competitors, but this is the first refuge for the
Postal
Service, and its lawyers are faster than its carriers. The
Postal
Service has a monopoly over letter delivery (with a limited exemption
for urgent, courier-delivered letters costing more than $3). No matter
how often the
Postal
Service slashes its standards, it’s still a federal crime to provide
better mail service than the
government. The
Postal
Service even tried to claim email was a violation of its monopoly,
but the Federal Communications Commission rebuffed that power
grab.
In its lawsuit, the
Justice Department claims that the
Postal
Service is entitled to “recoup the tens of millions of dollars” the
service paid
Mr.
Armstrong’s team “based on years of broken promises.” At this point,
there is no longer any doubt that the cyclist is a liar. It is difficult
to see how his chicanery hurt Uncle Sam, in contrast to the individuals
that Mr.
Armstrong maliciously sued to punish them for telling the truth about
his doping. It never made any sense, though, for the
Postal
Service to bankroll a bicycle-racing team at the same time that its
own employees were widely perceived as a bunch of slackers.
While the
Justice Department has unlimited resources to pursue
Mr.
Armstrong, there is no way for average Americans to recoup all the
losses they have suffered from delayed mail, lost letters and damaged
packages thanks to the
U.S.
Postal Service. Nor will Americans ever have a chance to vigorously
cross-examine a long series of postmaster generals and their
congressional accomplices who drove the
national mail service into the ditch. The False Claims Act should be
amended to permit Americans to sue federal agencies and drop legal
hammers on political appointees who try to sweep truth under the
rug.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/apr/29/we-deliver-not/#ixzz2RsQ9JzEv
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