According to
Wayne Madsen Report,
Attacks by Trump on the USPS are aimed at undermining U.S. national sovereignty.
Washington
Donald Trump's assault on the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) to negatively impact the processing of vote-by-mail ballots in the upcoming election is not his first attempt to strangle an institution whose existence is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution and was the impetus of Benjamin Franklin. As one of the framers of the Constitution, Franklin, the thirteen American colonies' first Postmaster-General, believed that a postal system was a necessary infrastructure that would [serve] to unite not only the thirteen colonies during the rebellion against King George III of England but also the newly-formed United States. Franklin understood that a postal system and the issuance of postage stamps help to mark a nation's sovereignty.
Today, the current Trump crony, Louis DeJoy, a Brooklyn-born business shyster who became a North Carolina billionaire owner of a freight transporter in competition with the USPS, is the Postmaster-General. DeJoy is determined to help eradicate with a single shot the USPS and Americans' faith in the sanctity of the popular ballot. DeJoy has ordered USPS mail sorting machines removed and scrapped along with postal boxes in majority Democratic states and cities. This was in response to Trump's stated desire to defund the USPS in order to impede mail service and prevent voters from casting their ballots by mail during a catastrophic pandemic and public health emergency.
The collateral damage from DeJoy's actions includes veterans, retirees, and cancer patients not receiving their life-sustaining prescriptions in the mail and those dependent on checks and money orders being placed in financial distress. In Maine, poultry farms are receiving thousands of dead chicks in the mail that were sent from hatcheries in Pennsylvania, even though the boxes were stamped LIVE ANIMALS. Twitter, which is owned by Jack Dorsey -- an irreponsible billionaire libertarian cut from the same cloth as Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Charles Koch -- temprarily banned for the first time this editor's Twitter account. The ban was brought about by the editor's tweeting back to Trump that he was literally killing veterans, retirees, and others by interfering with U.S. mail service.
In 2017, DeJoy served as one of three deputy national finance committee chairman for the Republican National Committee. DeJoy's two fellow deputy chairmen were Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, who is serving a prison sentence for perjury, and Elliott Broidy, who was convicted for defrauding the New York State Common Pension Fund. In 2019, Broidy also threatened to sue this editor, using the absurd claim that I was a paid agent for the government of Qatar.
Trump's assault on the USPS got underway in 2018, when Trump and his bellicose trade adviser, Peter Navarro, threatened to withdraw the United States from the Universal Postal Union (UPU), which was established the Treaty of Bern in 1874 and is one of the world's oldest international organizations. The bees that were buzzing in Trump's and Navarro's bonnets were UPU standardized international postal rates that permit the unfettered international exchange of letters and packages. Navarro, an extreme right-winger with an obvious racist anti-Chinese disposition, claimed the UPU gave a preferential rate treatment to China and that somehow this was injurious to the United States. By withdrawing from the UPU, the organization would be prevented from sharing special codes with the USPS that are necessary to send and receive international mail. While the move would have been a financial boost to UPS, FedEx, and DeJoy's XPO Logistics, poor and rural Americans would find it too costly to send mail and packages abroad.
By withdrawing from the UPU, none of the other 192 nations' postal services would have recognized USPS stamps or metered mail.
As any stamp collector appreciates, a postage stamp puts a nation, self-governing territory, principality, or other political entity on the map. For Trump and DeJoy -- and behind the scenes, Navarro -- to threaten to kill off the USPS is not only a constitutional crime against the republic, but an assault on the sovereignty of the United States in the eyes of the rest of the world. Shipping labels of FedEx or UPS are not what helps give the United States a sovereign identity, but postage stamps emblazoned with "USA."
History has shown that the revocation of separate postal systems was a step to eliminate national sovereignty or territorial autonomy. Philatelists' stamp albums are testaments to separate sovereign entities disappearing from maps along with their postage stamps and postal authorities: Danzig in 1939, Gaza in 1967, Fiume in 1924, Tangier in 1942, Hyderabad in 1948, West Irian in 1970, Biafra in 1969, Tuva in 1936, Bahawalpur in 1949, Trieste in 1954, Katanga in 1963, and Kathiri State of Seiyun in 1967. In 2012, concerned that digital communications could end the issuance of Israeli postage stamps, the director of the Israeli Philatelic Service said what is on the mind of every postal employee around the world, "A stamp has the same status as a currency bill, the flag or the national anthem. It is an indicator of national sovereignty that must be protected."