Editor’s Note: This is the conclusion of a three part series that became a four part series because the writer just can’t get enough.
A recent New York Times editorial by U.S. Postal Regulatory Commissioner Ruth Y. Goldway suggested converting the entire fleet of gas-powered USPS vehicles to all-electric as a way to obviate her responsibility for aiding and abetting in driving the USPS into the economic ditch. Her 11th hour panacea is to plunder taxpayers’ pockets and squander tax dollars from President Zero’s Porkzilla Act of 2009 to cover this conversion.
Her suggestion entails the installation of solar panels on the rooftops of all USPS facilities nationwide as a cost containment measure from disbursements on fossil fuel expenditures that will then allegedly create green jobs while simultaneously making us feel fuzzy about ourselves and thus lend a thin justification for Ms. Goldway’s continued employment as a well-paid government shill.
Golly, don’t break a nail, honey. If Ms. Goldway really wants to go “green” then a more “shovel ready” and simpler solution would be installing stationary bikes linked to capacitors while desk bound USPS bureaucrats pedaled our way to energy self-sufficiency.
Think Ed Begley, Jr. This solution would also flatten some of those fat-inflated tires parked around privileged executive waistlines. (The postmaster general could stand to lose a few.) No solution yet for the cholesterol illegally parked in the handicapped space above their sclerotic necklines.
While I’m sure Ms. Goldway’s suggestion was well meant despite her paucity of lucid logistics, I have a simple question: How does one justify spending taxpayer billions on multi-facility retrofits and the purchase of new EV golf carts for the largest US vehicle fleet to reap the specious savings of a few several millions? Obviously mathematical adroitness is not a job requirement over at the US Po$tal Regulatory Commi$$ion considering the budget crevasse into which they have cratered as of late.
Meanwhile, postal unions are “workin’ it” like some under paid, non-union, over-marinated pole dancer on the Sunday dawn patrol at a Las Vegas hootchie palace during a National Association of Letter Carriers convention. Unions are hooting over four presidential executive orders that only benefit unions who comprise a mere 8 percent of the US work force. Sorry, you other non-union 92 percent rabble can eat cake. Only presidential campaign payers can play if one has rendered the necessary tribute to Caesar’s Palace of Change.
If labor unions want to claim any credibility considering the skeezy nature of the company they are keeping within the Obama administration, then they might consider resurrecting Jimmy Hoffa as their consigliere.
“Pro-union” nostrums and quackery don’t necessarily dispense a “pro-labor” cure.
The National Association of Letter Carriers [NALC] publishes a magazine that informs the Smurf Army of the “who, what, when, where, how and why” of political apple-polishing that is performed on their behalf by the union hierarchy.
There are cookie-cutter, self-congratulatory odes from the NALC president all the way to the janitor on the night shift that extol what a damn fine job that union suits are doing down at HQ.
When you read further in the magazine, however, there are about a dozen pages of Hannibal Lecter-ish horror carnivals compiled from across the country by union stewards who’re fending off serious problems of supervisor abuse, retaliation and work hazards. While the union generals are assiduously proclaiming that they’re single-handedly winning the public relations war, the Smurf Army is emulating the Persians at Thermopylae!
In the branch of applied mathematics known as Game Theory, a person’s success in making the correct choices in strategic situations depends on the choices of others. It is a mathematically derived analysis over how well any given entity will perform to the detriment of the other.
In a nutshell, “Who benefits?”
Between cerebrally challenged USPS autocrats and piously preening NALC potentates dining like bloated seagulls over political morsels from the rancid “hope and change” economic dumpster, who then truly benefits?
As corporate/union responsibility is not a mathematical coefficient in this zero-sum Parker Brothers Monopoly equation, then the gambit in question shifts to “Who’s the Monkey-in-the-Middle?”
Union and management seneschals should heed that the “monkeys-in-the middle” who schlep a mailbag all over creation are the sole reason for their existence.
Without monkeys there is nothing to manage nor to unionize. Remember, though, that the monkeys can become a 500-pound gorilla at any simian moment. And 500-pound gorillas are known to sit wherever they collectively choose.
As my co-worker and dancing street philosopher pal Dave Levin observed, “They always get rid of the coach before they get rid of the team.” If I were the postmaster general or the president of NALC, I’d certainly knock off the nonsense or the USPS will most certainly be the next entrant of past profitable enterprises like buggy whips and the pony express.
Steve Breen has withdrawn his nomination as postmaster general of the USPS as he has to wash his hair tonight and is still “the best looking mailman in the US Post Office.” He can be reached at dulcamarax@yahoo.com.
