The latest in a long series of Trump millionaire goons
Their incompetence is matched only be their malevolence
This is an abridged version of the most recent paid-subscriber edition of Hell World which you can find in full here. It includes an essay by our regular Hell World postal worker correspondent on the attempted destruction of the agency by Trump and his toady Louis DeJoy. Second is a piece of reporting on the New Orleans sanitation worker strike by contributor Brittanie Shey.
For convenience or maybe to make things much more confusing you can jump to the two separate pieces — here is the one on the USPS, here is the one on the sanitation workers — on their own pages on the Hell World site.
To unlock both full pieces you’ll need to purchase a subscription. If not thanks for reading anyway and see you in a few days! In the meantime I will be very simply thinking about our “beautiful bikers.”
If you missed this free Hell World from the other day it’s about the attempt to criminalize and transform everyone to the left of Nancy Pelosi into violent terrorists in order to further constrain our civil liberties and ability to protest which seems to be going about as well as you might expect.
I’ve never been more convinced that someone must have shown Trump this Raandy tweet from 2016 and he 100% believed it was real.
How else can we explain the blatant and very obvious attempt to hamstring the USPS from the inside by the latest in a long series of Trump millionaire goons whose incompetence is matched only be their malevolence? Besides everything else we know about Trump and his malevolent millionaire goons I guess.
Back in April I wrote this about the USPS. Since then things have only gotten worse.
The situation with the Postal Service is complicated but if I could sum it up for you in a few words it amounts to this: They’re basically fucked. Like almost everything else in Hell World that is not an accident or a fuck up that has randomly occurred it is a punishment that has been purposefully levied upon them by the worst people in the world.
The main reason the USPS has been in such financial turmoil for the past fifteen years or so is because George Bush and his outgoing Republican Congress in 2006 inserted what amounts to a self destruct button in the form of the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act. The bill required the USPS to prefund the pensions for all of their hundreds of thousands of workers for the next seventy five years all at once which is something no other federal agency is required to do. Understandably that hamstrung them significantly. Imagine you had to pay for everything you will ever have to pay for for the rest of your life right now today. You’d go under too.
On top of that there’s also the right’s predictable privatization boner. Essentially the Republicans would like to see the USPS privatized and to hand over the spoils to their rich donor friends. Same song as it always is. They look at the infrastructure of the USPS in much the same way that the dastardly real estate developer in the kids movie looks at the local community center he wants to turn into condos or whatever. In the movie the kids go on to win a breakdancing contest and save the day and the old bastard has to go suck his own dick but this current situation doesn’t appear to be a problem breakdancing can solve which is something I find myself thinking far too often.
Although it’s been in dire financial straits for a long time the USPS has been hit particularly hard by the fall out of the pandemic and leadership is warning they could run out of money by this fall if relief doesn’t arrive soon. Unsurprisingly Donald Trump who holds a grudge against the USPS because he thinks they’re too lenient on Jeff Bezos who is of course very nasty to him or some stupid shit declined to offer any funds for the agency or their 600,000+ workers in the recent bailout bill. In fact Trump threatened to veto the entire $2 trillion CARES Act if it contained any money for the USPS according to the Washington Post. Ultimately a $10 billion loan they would have to pay back was allowed through although it has yet to be approved by the Treasury.
Another reason Trump seems to be content to let the USPS wither away into nothing is that he is anticipating the reality that many of us may be required to vote by mail come November. A further hobbled Postal Service will obviously make this endeavor much more difficult and if there’s one thing Republicans love more than privatizing anything that isn’t firmly nailed down it’s engaging in voter suppression.
In that same Hell World I checked in with our postal carrier about the increasingly grim conditions he and his fellow workers have been subjected to during the pandemic. You can read the first of our interviews here.
Man who gives a shit the USPS is not supposed to “make money” it’s a public service!
Here’s an excerpt from the piece on the USPS
After a couple hundred years it just stopped
It’s tough getting people to give a shit about the Postal Service. I know firsthand as someone who’s collected somewhere north of half a million bucks in my career to give a shit, and even I still find it hard on a day to day basis. There’s nothing “woe is me” about that though. You sort of want your job to be forgotten when the only time you’re memorable to people is if you fuck something up. The problem is, between Covid-19 and the election in front of us, USPS might be as relevant as it’ll ever be right now, and we’re reaching the point where we can’t afford to ignore the corruption and sabotage plaguing the agency.
I know. It sounds like another hashtag-resistance outcry. Another agency in despair because of America’s First Bad President, and only you can save us, and all you’ve gotta do is buy some stamps, like we’re hosting a bake sale and we’re two rice krispie squares away from paying for Blair’s first round of chemo. But with the Postal Service losing a few billion bucks a year this isn’t a crisis we can buy our way out of. And the way it directly threatens our democracy makes it a hell of a task to vote our way out of too. Especially now that the entire infrastructure of our country’s vote-by-mail system is in the hands of another stooge in a long line of partisan stooges.
A few months ago our Postmaster General Megan Brennan retired. She was a postal lifer, and got a lot of respect for that, but she was also a pretty ineffectual bureaucrat whose primary accomplishment as PMG seemed to be ignoring Donald Trump’s temper tantrums. It seemed to really bother the guy that he had no official authority over USPS, so pretty much every time The Washington Post ran a mean story about Donald, he’d publicly scream at Brennan to jack up Amazon package prices to get back at Jeff Bezos. To the bitter end of her career she just...ignored him. She was the Pelé of that shit.
That’s where Louis DeJoy enters as our new Postmaster General. It’s pretty useless to throw around the word “swamp” anymore in politics, but sometimes the word just fits. DeJoy is a lifelong Republican, a Trump mega-donor/fundraiser, and a high ranking RNC official who also once owned and operated a regional logistics company, which is about all the room a weasel needs these days to pretend they’re qualified to run the largest logistics operation on the planet. It’s not that it’s unheard of for USPS to hire outside its ranks, it’s just that I also don’t expect to become manager of the St. Louis Cardinals anytime soon just because I bought a few tickets and once coached my brother’s little league team. Oh, and did I mention DeJoy owns more than $40 million worth of stock in companies that compete with USPS? Of course he does. Nothing matters, see.
All of the potential angles for corruption make DeJoy’s aims pretty tough to figure out. He’s a small market conservative from the private sector running a massive government agency. He’s a Trump ally running the agency responsible for ballots during an election year. He also has a direct financial interest in seeing us fail. Take your pick. You’re probably right no matter what. And judging by the chaos he’s unleashed into USPS in just his first two months, “all of the above” might be your best bet.
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Read the rest here and find more about the USPS situation as it develops from Letter Carriers for Antifa Chapter President @DingusJMcGee on Twitter.
Here’s an excerpt from Brittanie Shey’s report on the New Orleans sanitation worker strike
It’s a call to acknowledge that all labor deserves dignity
On February 1, 1968, two Memphis sanitation workers were crushed to death when they took refuge from the rain inside the back of a trash truck, which then malfunctioned. Their deaths, and the hazardous working conditions of sanitation workers in Memphis at the time, most of whom were Black, set off a 63-day protest that many consider a turning point in the Civil Rights Movement.
Half a century later, a similar strike is playing out in New Orleans. There, like many cities, the work of sanitation employees is largely invisible, yet it’s still a critical part of society. These are the people who pick up household trash and clean up the streets after Mardi Gras. And since May, the City Waste Union has been striking against a city contractor called Metro Service Group for increased wages, better PPE, hazard pay and other necessities.
The workers, nicknamed hoppers, currently make $10.25 a hour picking up more than 250,000 lbs of waste per person per week, often without adequate protective gear. They’ve been asking for better working conditions for months, but the coronavirus pandemic gave those demands new urgency. On May 5, 14 hoppers walked off the job, demanding that their pay be increased to $15 an hour, $150 a week hazard pay, full PPE for every worker for every shift, and other conditions necessary to do their jobs safely and effectively.
Like the Memphis Sanitation Strike was, the New Orleans strike is closely intertwined with other social issues — the Black Lives Matter Movement; a looming eviction crisis in New Orleans, a city overrun with short-term vacation rentals; the prison-industrial complex in a state with one of the highest incarceration rates in the world; plus discontent with the way politicians have handled one of the most unprecedented moments of our time, a global pandemic. Many residents of New Orleans are specifically upset that Mayor LaToya Cantrell, who ran on a pro-immigrant, pro-minority, pro-LGBTQ platform, has been anything but progressive since taking office.
The 2020 protest is just now entering its third month. New Orleans residents have largely been supportive of the movement. But outside the city, few people know about the striking workers or their cause. One reason that might be is because jobs like sanitation work — jobs that are frequently dangerous and physically demanding — are often looked down upon, said City Waste Union representative Daytrian Wilken. (Wilken’s uncle is one of the striking hoppers.)
“The people who are sanitation workers, janitorial services people, maintenance people, they’re doing the jobs that nobody else wants to do,” she said.
In addition, she said, many of the people who work those jobs are exploited.
“If they're Black and brown, some of the brown people are undocumented. Some of the Black people may have to check the box, which means that they may have been a convicted felon. So at that point you have no choice but to take the work. The job requires a lot of work so that makes the work valued and the worker undervalued. And you have no choice but to say, ‘Okay, I'm gonna do it,’ because you don't have other choices.”
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Read the rest here.
Brittanie Shey writes a newsletter about art, culture and social justice on the Third Coast called Eat Your Makeup. She's the associate editor of Eater Houston and Eater Dallas. Her work has also appeared in Rolling Stone, Curbed, Modern Luxury and elsewhere.
Yesterday it was a year since we lost David Berman which I wrote about in this Hell World at the time. His book Actual Air is available again if you never got it which you should directly.
Here’s a lovely song from the new Fontaines D.C. album.
Ok that’s all for now. Thanks for reading.