Dysfunction in Washington: 60 House Bills to Name Post Offices, Zero To Fix Mail Service...

By Amy Bingham
ABC News
Aug 1, 2012

In the 18 months the 112th Congress has been sworn in, the House has introduced 60 bills to rename post offices. Thirty-eight have passed the House and 26 have become law. During those 18 months, the House has produced 151 laws, 17 percent of which have been to rename post offices, according to Congressional Democrats.

Not a single bill has come to the House floor aimed at reforming a Postal Service, which is bleeding billions of dollars because of Congressional mandates.

Today the United States Postal Service will default on a Congressional mandate to pay $5.5 billion to “prefund” health benefits for future retirees. On Friday, the House of Representatives will leave town for a five-week summer vacation. There is no plan to take up postal reform before that summer recess.

The Postal Service has attempted to enact an array of cost-cutting measures to pull itself out of a $22.5 billion budget shortfall. Over the past five years USPS has cut more than 110,000 employees. The mail service, which takes no taxpayer money but is regulated by Congress, has announced plans to close or consolidate 230 mail processing centers, cutting 13,000 jobs and saving an estimated $1.2 billion annually.

The service attempted to close 3,700 post offices under a plan announced last year, but after public outcry decided to cut operating hours to between two and six hours per day at 13,000 locations. USPS claims that move will save $500 million per year.

One of the largest cost-saving measures would be ending Saturday mail delivery, a move the Postal Service says will save $3.1 billion a year. But USPS can’t cut delivery without Congressional approval, and partisan disagreements over whether Congress should take control of USPS’s operations until it is solvent again or if it should leave the decision making to the postmaster general have halted any action on Capitol Hill.

USPS claims that if Congress does not act, the mail service will default not only on the $5.5 billion payment due today, but also on another $5.6 billion payment for future retiree’s benefit due September 30.

The Postal Service has pleaded with Congress for years to end the requirement that it pre-fund its retiree’s health benefits. But many lawmakers claim that because USPS has such a massive workforce – there are 614,000 Postal Service employees—if it does not pre-fund retirement benefits, it will not be able to pay them in the future.

And as long as these disagreements persist, it looks like naming post offices is the closest Congress will get to passing postal reform.

China Top Source Of Counterfeit U.S. Military Electronics (Bloomberg)

Editor`s note: Should it really be a surprise to anyone, that we are a society where we want everything on the cheap nowadays - goods and labor chiefly and China being the top world exported of cheap manufactured goods would supply counterfeit or 'aftermarket' parts for the U.S. military war machines and supply chains. Its the U.S. government and the lobbyist-controlled Congress who basically sent all the jobs and factories to the East while leaving the once mighty U.S. impotent in industrial manufacturing. So should we be so quick to blame China for our worries, where the government hands them billions of dollars worth of oil and gas concessions, approves the increased global Chinese state-media influence by allowing recent take over of AMC Theaters and giving them direct access to our Treasury to buy our debt? And the list goes on and on but these are just the recent developments in the past week and more will come surely as while our U.S. government touts and vilifies the Chinese government in every shape and form. - RA (Rubaiat`s Blog)


Bloomberg News
By Tony Capaccio
May 21, 2012

China’s government has failed to curb manufacturing of counterfeit military electronic parts by Chinese companies that are the “dominant source” of fakes in the U.S. defense supply chain, a Senate investigation found.

The U.S. Air Force suspended in January a Shenzhen, China- based company from supplying parts to U.S. contractors after it sold about 84,000 suspect components, many of them installed on U.S. aircraft, according to an example cited in the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee report released yesterday.

The panel’s report outlines the results of a 14-month investigation disclosing dozens of examples of suspected counterfeit electronic parts. Saying U.S. companies and the military services didn’t crack down on abuses, the committee said the defense industry “routinely failed to report cases of suspect counterfeit parts, putting the integrity of the supply chain at risk.”

The report didn’t cite any examples of counterfeit parts causing damage such as lives lost or planes that crashed.

The committee said it found “overwhelming and undeniable evidence to support” the conclusion that China hasn’t taken steps to stop operations “that are carried out openly in that country...”

(click here to read the full article)