Commentary: A curious letter arrived in Desert Sage's mailbox this week. It was in a red and green envelope addressed in tiny calligraphic script. The postmark read, "North Pole."
"Dear Sage," the letter reads, "This is written in great haste during a very busy time of year. You wrote to ask whether the elves have a labor union. I don't delve into politics much but will put it this way: Santa's workshop is not an enterprise, I am not a boss, and the elves are not employees.
"Folks love to picture the workshop as being similar to your industries down there, as if we were the original Amazon warehouse or something. It isn't like that at all. The elves wouldn't work one hour for Amazon. Let's just say that we may seem to be in the same line of work, but our values are entirely different and this is reflected in how our workplace is organized. You folks could do the same but you seem to like the way you are doing things, strange as it seems to us.
"Since you are so interested in how we get gifts to everybody on Christmas, may I make a request? Our reindeer can't get everywhere and to everybody, so we rely on your courier services - outsourcing, I think you call it. We keep Federal Express and UPS busy, but we really couldn't do this year after year without your postal service - and as you are aware, that institution is being strangled to an unnecessary death, so perhaps you would speak up for them?"
Santa is no doubt referring to the manufactured budget crisis that has many people believing the United States Postal Service is unprofitable and insolvent. The USPS is an independent agency that must fund itself through its own revenue, and we are often told that the postal model is unfeasible. The claim is used to justify frequent hikes in postage rates and fees, the recurring threats to eliminate Saturday delivery, and the closure of processing centers and layoffs which reduce the quality and speed of service.
The age of the internet is not primarily to blame. Nearly all of the postal service's budget shortfalls since 2006 have been due to a single law: the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act, a law requiring the USPS to pre-fund 75 years' worth of retiree health benefits by billions of dollars over a period of ten years. For a personal sense of the impact, imagine having to pay off a 30-year mortgage on a typical home in 2 or 3 years, or most of your paycheck going into Social Security. The legislation was promoted by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a group which writes laws for legislators to submit and pushes privatization. The aim is clearly to "liberate" the postal service for private enterprise and to break postal unions.
The postal service is valued in the Constitution as a public infrastructure. That infrastructure could support additional public services extending beyond mail delivery. Instead we are moving towards selling it off, and as we have seen in other countries, this leads to universal service being curtailed and prices inflated by the need for profit.
That is worth letters from all of us, letting Congress know we value the postal service and don't want it killed. While you're at it, write a letter to a friend. It will make their day.
Santa concluded his letter with a P.S.: "Give our love to Billy." That's our postman here in Deming. Of course Santa would know.
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Algernon D'Ammassa is "Desert Sage." Email him atDesertSageMail@gmail.com.