#postal banking

[aunti-christ-ine]

We NEED Postal Banking back ... but first, DeJoy needs to be fired.  Send him to DeJail ASAP. 

[theleftycanadianradical]

O'Toole says he'll make life more affordable, but when Conservatives were given the opportunity to restore postal banking and help rural communities, they voted NAY, with the Liberals.

[berniesrevolution]

The miracle of the United States Postal Service

If all of America worked as well as the Post Office, this would be a much better country

When I was a boy, I lived in a tiny Utah town called Torrey (population: 171), and my parents worked as river guides in Grand Canyon. They rowed wooden dories — fragile boats that require considerable skill to navigate through the big rapids down there, but also provide a near-magical river experience.

On a lark, one of their friends from another state once tried to send a letter to my mother with only three words in the address field: "Dory," plus her first name, plus "Torrey." No surname, no house number, no street, and no zip code.

It was delivered just like any ordinary letter.

I thought of that while watching The View co-host Meghan McCain splutter that democratic socialism would instantly turn the U.S. into Venezuela. "If you think the government is so good at running things — the Post Office is [such a] great run business?"

We should be so lucky. Postal service has been absolutely central to the history and development of the United States, and the USPS continues to provide fast and efficient service despite being beset by enormous problems. If everything worked as well as the Post Office — and there's certainly room for improvement — this country would be a much better place.

The Post Office is by far the oldest federal agency in America, and the only one explicitly authorized in the Constitution. As Winifred Gallagher writes in her delightful history How the Post Office Created America, its main architect was none other than Benjamin Franklin, who had been heavily involved in the earlier colonial postal service. On the orders of the Continental Congress, he built up its first iteration as part of the Revolutionary War effort.

It was an expensive business, because in those days paper was not cheap, transport was accomplished with animal power, and roads were generally terrible. But the need for it was barely discussed, because a nation at war simply must have reliable communications.

After the war, a similar need was recognized for the fledgling American republic: thus the Constitution granted Congress the power "To establish Post Offices and Post Roads." This rather vague language was finessed into the Postal Service Act of 1792, which was signed into law by President Washington.

Under the arguments of Washington and his ally Benjamin Rush, Congress conceived of a Post Office conforming to democratic values. Unlike European postal services, which were generally expensive provinces of the elite (plus state surveillance and espionage), the U.S. Post Office would ideally be available to just about anybody who needed it. Tampering of any kind, state or private, was outlawed.

So instead of making a profit for the government, the Post Office was set up to be self-sufficient. Profitable short routes between big cities would subsidize longer deliveries — which were naturally somewhat more expensive. A democratic Post Office should serve the dock worker writing to his sweetheart just as it should carry important state correspondence. Meanwhile, newspapers were cross-subsidized even more — a democratic citizenry, it was thought, depended on regular, accurate news of political developments.

It's easy to forget today, but up until the development of the telegraph in the 1850s, mail was the cutting edge of both communication and state modernization. On the Postal Service Act, Gallagher quotes historian Richard R. John that it inaugurated "a communications revolution that was as profound in its consequences for American public life as the subsequent revolutions that have come to be associated with the telegraph, the telephone, and the computer."

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[tnelms]

This is excellent. Thx @rapuvdayear. (Also, what I wouldn’t give for his sweatshirt. Sweatshirt fashion is real.)

[berniesrevolution]

The Michael Brooks Show | Postal Banking and Jobs Guarantee NOW (TMBS 42 ft. Mehrsa Baradaran)

[berniesrevolution]

IN THESE TIMES

When Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) introduced legislation last week to establish simple banking services in every U.S. post office, she continued a trend of aspiring Democratic presidential candidates using their perch in Congress to propose big, progressive ideas.

In this case, Gillibrand was aiming to solve a major problem in America of financial inclusion: Over one in four households have little or no access to banking services, causing them to use high-cost alternatives like check-cashing stores or payday lenders, which gouge them with exorbitant fees and create cyclical debt. If the post office, with over 31,000 locations across America and significant trust from citizens, were to offer simple banking services as it did from 1911 to 1967, it could potentially solve the inclusion problem, save billions of dollars for vulnerable populations, and help modernize and stabilize the postal system in an era of electronic communication.

But there’s one thing missing from most of the largely positive coverage of the Gillibrand bill—we already have the building blocks for a postal banking system in the United States ready to go, without the need for authorization from Congress. Or at least we would have it, if the U.S. Postal Service stuck to the promise it made to one of its biggest unions two years ago.

In 2016, the American Postal Workers Union (APWU), representing nearly 200,000 clerks, maintenance workers and other postal employees, engaged in a quiet campaign to make postal banking a reality. They took the concept to the bargaining table in their most recent contract negotiations. “We made the argument that you’re asking for cuts, but you haven’t looked into new ways we can bring in revenue,” says Katherine Isaac of the Campaign for Postal Banking, the APWU’s public coalition for the effort.

In July 2016, the APWU and the Postal Service reached agreement on a contract, and tucked inside was a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on “Enhanced and Expanded Services.” The MOU established a joint labor/management task force, required to meet monthly and consider pilot programs for “opportunities to increase revenue that also provide a positive financial contribution.” These included two specific ideas: “modernization of money orders” and “expansion of international money transfers.”

In 2015, the Postal Service sold $21 billion worth of money orders, a secure certified check. In recent years, however, postal office money order usage has fallen off. Modernizing the service, as proposed by the USPS Office of Inspector General, could include selling money orders digitally, enabling person-to-person money transfers online or through mobile phones, or creating prepaid, reloadable credit cards.

A pilot program could also expand the post office’s “Dinero Seguro” money transfer service to 60 locations around the world, through the Universal Postal Union (UPU), a UN agency that coordinates international postal services. In 2016, immigrants and those with relatives abroad wired more than $138 billion in remittances from the United States. But Dinero Seguro currently only reaches four of the top ten remittance markets in the world, and services a tiny 0.01 percent of all transactions. The infrastructure for expanding international money transfers is already built through the UPU, the USPS need only plug in.

Advocates see both money orders and remittances as a launching pad for advancing postal banking in the United States, under USPS’ authority to expand existing products. Such pilot programs would help work out the kinks of postal banking, and create demand to bring it to more parts of the country. It also doesn’t require anyone in Congress to give the go-ahead. The Postal Service can’t authorize everything on its own—short-term loans, for example, would be a new product that would probably require legislative sign-off. But pilots could create the environment to get Congress interested in pursuing a national postal banking program.

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[berniesrevolution]

VICE NEWS | Bernie Sanders Has A Plan To Save The Postal Service (HBO)

[berniesrevolution]

JACOBIN MAGAZINE

Bluff, New Zealand is the southernmost inhabited city in the Eastern Hemisphere. The post office there looks over the Foveaux Strait — if you were to sail south from the harbor, the next landmass you’d encounter would be Antarctica. Fewer than two thousand people live in Bluff, but any one of them can walk into the post office and cash a check or apply for a loan. Residents may be at the edge of the world, but thanks to the state-owned postal banking entity, Kiwibank, they still have access to basic financial services.

Meanwhile, the United States is riddled with what are called banking deserts — inhabited areas, many of them urban, where residents have no access to a bank. The problem got worse in the aftermath of the recession, when traditional banks started closing branches in low-income neighborhoods around the country. Many cash-strapped Americans were forced to turn to “alternative financial services” — that is, predatory payday lending and check-cashing operations, which offer small-dollar loans in a pinch. Known for hidden fees and exorbitant interest rates, these businesses don’t provide basic services like checking and savings accounts. They’re not banks, they’re shark tanks.

One in four US households is unbanked or underbanked, meaning they’re fully or partially boxed out of traditional financial services. Those 68 million people represent a growing market for payday loan sharks, and spend an average of 10 percent of their yearly income on the high interest and fees that go with alternative financial services — roughly the same proportion they spend on food.

Traditional banks show no signs of returning to the areas they abandoned during the recession. But there’s a collective solution to the banking desert: we could set up a public postal banking system like New Zealand’s. After all, we’ve done it before.

Poor Man’s Banks

A primary impetus for postal banking systems around the world has always been providing services to the poor. Great Britain’s post offices began offering savings accounts in 1861, at a time when poor people had to physically keep their savings under lock and key. But ordinary citizens weren’t the only beneficiaries. In Britain it quickly became clear that postal banking successfully provided the government with a valuable resource of its own, helping it securely finance the public sector — a win-win.

American postmasters general advocated tirelessly for postal banking starting in the 1870s, but the American Bankers Association fought it viciously from the outset. Most banks were concentrated in the northeast and the banks weren’t in a hurry to serve neglected areas — yet the industry was terrified by the prospect of competition from the federal government. Private bankers successfully lobbied against every postal banking bill for forty years.

After the Panic of 1907, when millions of Americans lost their savings, postal banking moved to the forefront of the national political agenda. “I am convinced that the people desire such banks,” President William Taft declared in 1909, since they would benefit “a great many people of small means who do not now have banking facilities.” A public banking proposal was passed in 1910 and the program was implemented starting in 1911.

Due to lobbying from the banks, however, the resulting system was relatively limited: the savings accounts had low ceilings, the interest rates were capped well below the private sector’s (leading to the colloquial denomination “poor man’s banks”), and the deposits were re-lent to local commercial banks rather than financing the public purse.

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