what's more to know about the US Postal Service shitshow?

 

Comrades,

It comes as no surprise that the Orange Guy from Twitter should order his henchmen to strangle the time honoured US Postal Service of funds to commit widespread voter disenfranchisement across every one of The Great 50 states. Never mind that the Post Master General is a "Trump mega-donor" in the form of the bald, beady-eyed, cat's-arsed Louis DeJoy. A third rate apparatchik who wouldn't know which way is up on a postage stamp. Anyone who's seen that first class movie about voting, Lincoln, will know that that particular Republican President wasn't averse to flinging the odd Post Master's comfortable life-time sinecure in the way of wavering voters in Congress on the slavery question. So if "The Party of Lincoln" has been into vote buying from day one, why should vote denying be any different? And this was back in the day when the Post Master General was a cabinet position, on the same level as say, the Secretary of War. It wasn't until 1971 that Richard "Tricky Dicky" Milhous Nixon decided that the PMG would no longer have a seat in the inner circle. Until now.

Everyone knows at least a little of the storied history of the mail in America - the Pony Express and all that - but never mind that the USPS is now a gargantuan, no doubt Byzantine, bureaucracy. The accusations by acolytes of The Donald that there is too much waste and mismanagement are probably true. How can there not be with 30,000 post offices, half a million posties, and a mind boggling 142 billion items delivered last year? Show me any other vast, complex public service that doesn't have the same problems. But to rob it of $25B in the Time of Corona is not only plain mean & vindictive, but the Fascista don't even bother to disguise the fact that it's all been carefully designed to prevent as many Black Democrat voters as possible from having their valid votes counted. Electoral hanky-panky knows no bounds, but this one's close to taking the biscuit for bald faced blatancy and bastardry.

And it's never been easy to vote in The States. Ever. Election day is always the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November after all. Schemes for voter disenfranchisement have been around since the Miracle of Democracy kicked off in the USA, it's all part & parcel of the caper. Every state has different rules. Some allow anyone to cast a "mail-in ballot", in other states (like Australia) you need a valid excuse to lodge a postal vote, while in six states postal voting is all but impossible because of the number of flaming hoops you have to jump through to get an exemption from turning up on the day. It's the same for in-person pre-poll voting - different everywhere. Voting in person is no less difficult - not enough polling stations is a common complaint. Sometimes the booths are all but inaccessible - you have to more or less hike there. Some Supervisors of Elections who may or may not be on the take indulge in simply not printing enough ballot papers for the number of registered voters - so polling stations close early when they run out. In some states you need photo ID to vote, others you don't. And, you can also casually roll up on the day only to find you have been struck off the electoral roll for not paying a fine or some other kind of minor misdemeanor, or indeed for no discernable reason at all. Some states even routinely pull tens of thousands of voters off the rolls simply because they haven't voted for a while. You have to be eternally vigilant that you haven't been rubbed out, as there's no obligation on the state to tell you.  Gerrymandering is rife and who knows how much ballot stuffing goes on - but the one thing that everyone knows is that co-ordinated postal vote electoral frauds are extremely rare. Vlad The Impaler of the Kremlin certainly swung a helluva lot more votes the way of his best pal DJ Trump! in 2016 than any postal voting scam will ever deliver to Uncle Joe in 2020. And in any case, it wouldn't come close to the 176,000 names (and counting) of Covid19 victims who are now very conveniently unable to vote on account of their deceasedness. Then again, dead people have been voting in elections since the Dawn of Time. What a shitshow.

And of course, there is nothing more to say about that dead-set opportunist snake and former Master of the Dark Arts, Steve Bannon, being yanked off a luxury yacht owned by some billionaire Chinaperson bobbing somewhere around the coast of Connecticut mid-week, and being cuffed for wire fraud by the U.S. Postal Inspection Service. Fraud? Nice irony. For the love of Sweet Weepin' Jesus Upon The Cross it couldn't have happened to a nicer fraud.

It doesn't need to be this hard, but "it is what it is" - for every person, man, woman...