April 14 - Politics and History Chat

Postal History
QUOTE: In the more than two centuries since Benjamin Franklin was appointed our first Postmaster General in 1775, the Postal Service™ has grown and changed with America, boldly embracing new technologies to better serve a growing population. We hope you enjoy exploring our rich history. 

Congressional Franking Privilege: An Overview
The congressional franking privilege, which allows Members of Congress to send official mail to their constituents at government expense, dates from 1775, when it was approved by the First Continental Congress.  

The Debate Over a Post Office Bailout, Explained
QUOTE: The Postal Service has been organized in several different ways across American history, but its modern paradigm, dating from the 1970s, dictates that the USPS is supposed to be a self-funded, independently operating public sector entity. And at the core of that entity is a two-sided bargain. On the one hand, the Postal Service gets a monopoly on the provision of daily mail services. On the other hand, the Postal Service undertakes a series of public service obligations that a private company would not provide — most notably, daily mail delivery and flat postage rates regardless of where you live. But the volume of first-class mail — the source of the lion’s share of USPS revenue and the cornerstone of both its monopoly and its universal service obligations — peaked in 2001 at 104 billion pieces of mail. Decline has been fairly steady since then, falling to just 55 billion pieces in 2019. The cost of meeting USPS’s basic service obligations, by contrast, has essentially remained steady, creating an obvious financial problem. 

Congress Has a Constitutional Duty to Preserve and Promote the Post Office
QUOTE: No member of Congress who takes seriously their oath sworn to uphold the Constitution can neglect the duty to preserve the United States Postal Service. The founding document is clear. Article I, Section 8, Clause 7 gives Congress the power and the responsibility: “To establish Post Offices and post Roads.” 

Postal Reorganization Act
 QUOTE: U.S. Congress approved the Postal Reorganization Act of 1970, signed into law August 12, 1970. The act transformed the Post Office Department into a government-owned corporation, called the United States Postal Service. Congress no longer retains power to fix postal tariffs (although changes may be vetoed) or to control employees’ salaries, and political patronage has been virtually eliminated. Government subsidies continued on a declining basis until 1982, after which the U.S. Postal Service itself no longer received a direct subsidy from Congress 

"Going postal"
QUOTE: Going postal is an American English slang term, used as a verb meaning to suddenly become extremely and uncontrollably angry, often to the point of violence and in a workplace environment. The term derives from a series of incidents from 1983 onward in which United States Postal Service (USPS) workers shot and killed managers, fellow workers, and members of the police or general public. Between 1986 and 1997, more than 40 people were killed in at least 20 incidents of workplace rage. Following this series of events, the idiom entered common parlance and has been applied to murders committed by employees in acts of workplace rage, irrespective of the employer

How George Bush broke the Post Office
QUOTE: Passed by a Republican-led Congress and signed into law by President George W. Bush, the PAEA gave the Postal Service new accounting and funding rules for its retiree pension and health benefits. Up until 2006, the USPS funded those obligations on a pay-as-you-go-basis, pulling out of its pension fund and adding to it as retirees' costs came in. But the PAEA required the Postal Service to calculate all of its likely pension costs over the next 75 years, and then sock away enough money between 2007 and 2016 to cover most of them. 

US Postal Service says it needs federal assistance to continue amid pandemic
This is a mashup from a few different news sources 

Trump’s grudge against the US Postal Service is a threat to the US election
QUOTE: Lawmakers say that without serious help, USPS only has enough money to last through about September. Although USPS couriers are famously committed to completing their rounds despite snow, rain, heat, gloom of night—or the coronavirus crisis—they might have finally met their match in US president Donald Trump. 

Third Party Voting and the 1844 Election
QUOTE: In 1844, as the United States shook off the effects of the worst depression in its history, the presidential election season began with the two major political parties riven by internal divisions. It saw a campaign filled with vicious personal attacks that often overshadowed the issues at stake. And it ended with popular vote totals so close that supporters of an ideologically purist third party effectively handed the presidency to a man whose policies were at explicit and direct cross-purposes with their goals. They voted their consciences, and the nation received neither the perfect nor the good. 

The Populist Movement: Primary Sources
QUOTE: In late-nineteenth-century United States, agrarian reformers in southern and midwestern states collaboratively organized for government action against business monopolies, exorbitant railroad rates, secret ballots and political corruption, and the gold standard for currency. Because the Republican and Democratic parties were not meeting their needs, these “common men” farmers and small business owners joined the “people’s party” or Populist party as a third- party alternative. Emerging from earlier political efforts of farmers, such as the Granger movement and the Farmer’s Alliance, the Populists attracted not only rural white male farmers, but also African American farmers and women reformers. This primary source set highlights prominent Populists, propaganda from political campaigns, and political arguments of the movement. After reading and viewing these documents, assess how central the “common people” are to the movement. 

Populism and Political Realignment
During the 1870s and 1880s the American agricultural community suffered from innumerable problems as the United States became increasingly urban and industrial. Farmers first sought to solve their own problems through the economic cooperatives founded by the Grange. When these self-help programs proved a failure, farmers began to demand that government respond to their plight. They increasingly turned to the Farmers Alliance, a new agrarian group which sought to pressure the major political parties and the Congress into adopting their demands. When, because of the nature of the Gilded Age party system, the Republicans and Democrats as well as Congress refused to respond or responded superficially, the Farmers Alliance evolved into a third political party known as the Populists. They were intent on wresting power from the Republicans and Democrats at both the state and federal level. While they failed to take over the national government through the electoral process, they would end the Gilded Age party system and prepare America for fundamental changes in government accomplished by others after the turn of the century. 

Historians Have Long Thought Populism Was a Good Thing. Are They Wrong?
This article from a couple of years ago in Politico Magazine draws parallels between the populism of the 1890's to that which is occurring now. 

How third-party votes sunk Clinton, what they mean for Trump
QUOTE: An astounding 7.8 million voters cast their presidential ballots for someone other than Trump or Hillary Clinton. The two biggest third-party vote-getters were Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson (almost 4.5 million votes) and the Green Party’s Jill Stein (1.5 million voters). But others received almost another 1.9 million votes as well. 

Can the Federal Government Override State Government Rules on Social Distancing to Promote the Economy?
QUOTE: A wary president is eyeing the economic fallout from movement restrictions intended to flatten the COVID-19 curve and is calling for a “return to business” sooner rather than later. But those restrictions flow primarily from rules promulgated by state governors, county commissioners and mayors—not from the federal government. Does the president have the power to force changes if state and local officials won’t follow his lead?

As feds play ‘backup,’ states take unorthodox steps to compete in cutthroat global market for coronavirus supplies
QUOTE: Officials in one state are so worried about this possibility that they are considering dispatching local police or even the National Guard to greet two chartered FedEx planes scheduled to arrive in the next week with millions of masks from China, according to people familiar with the planning. These people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, asked that their state not be identified to avoid flagging federal officials to their shipment. 

HOW HERBERT HOOVER SAVED BELGIUM
QUOTE: Herbert Hoover is a name that lives in infamy in America, forever tied to a stubborn, detached leader unable to combat the worst economic calamity in the nation’s history. In Belgium, however, Hoover is synonymous with hero, a stubborn, detached leader who kept millions of Belgians from starving during their country’s darkest hour. 

How FDR Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Keynesian Economics
QUOTE: “FDR began his 1932 campaign for the presidency espousing orthodox fiscal beliefs” and “believed that a balanced budget was important to instill confidence in consumers, business, and the markets, which would thus encourage investment and economic expansion.” But as the severity of the Great Depression became clear, he recognized that emergency relief programs were a necessity no matter the cost. Speaking at a campaign rally in 1936, he declared that “to balance our budget in 1933 or 1934 or 1935 would have been a crime against the American people… When Americans suffered, we refused to pass by on the other side. Humanity came first.” As the economy began to improve, he eventually gave in to conventional wisdom and tried to cut back on spending, triggering the so-called Roosevelt Recession of 1937. 

The United States of Inequality
QUOTE: The Great Compression ended in the 1970s. Wages stagnated, inflation raged, and by the decade's end, income inequality had started to rise. Income inequality grew through the 1980s, slackened briefly at the end of the 1990s, and then resumed with a vengeance in the aughts. In his 2007 book The Conscience of a Liberal, the Nobel laureate, Princeton economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman labeled the post-1979 epoch the "Great Divergence."  It's generally understood that we live in a time of growing income inequality, but "the ordinary person is not really aware of how big it is," Krugman told me. During the late 1980s and the late 1990s, the United States experienced two unprecedentedly long periods of sustained economic growth—the "seven fat years" and the " long boom." Yet from 1980 to 2005, more than 80 percentof total increase in Americans' income went to the top 1 percent. 

Don’t Let Leaders Use the Coronavirus as an Excuse to Violate Civil Liberties
QUOTE: As a pandemic sweeps the globe, it is carrying with it a related and equally dangerous threat to free speech and open discourse. The firing of Navy Capt. Brett Crozier for the crime of raising alarm bells over the spreading viral risk to the sailors under his command on the USS Theodore Roosevelt is among the most vivid examples of a metastasizing trend of silencing and punishing speech, ostensibly  to protect public health and order./