If you pay an employee a fat salary, give him a prestigious title, and then pump up his package with perks like free mailing privileges, well, you feel like he owes you some work. Maybe you need to give him an occasional assignment.
That’s why I wrote my Representative in Congress, Mr. “Bud” Cramer, to help me solve a bureaucratic conundrum. I waited nervously for the response, since it was my first assignment to him. I was anxious to evaluate his performance, as well as solve the mystery.
My assignment was a simple one for this Servant of the People. I asked him, where in the library of law books that frame our civic lives, I could locate the words that gave the United States Postal Service monopolistic powers. Their singular status was common knowledge - they had a choke hold on “first class mail” - or so it was said. It’s not simple, you know, like “Thou shalt not kill”. What about Fed Ex and UPS and courier services? Puzzling. THEY delivered letters and stayed out of jail. What sequence of legal words, from what source, and interpreted by whom cast a curse on private ownership of delivery services? Why could an enterprising businessman deliver me a large order of General Kao Pow’s ginger-kissed chicken wings, but not an 8 by 11-1/2 square of bond with typed or handwritten words stuffed in an envelope? As Don Quixote weakly whispers on his deathbed. The words. . . Tell me the words, please, the words. That was my question to Congressman Cramer. An impossible dream, though I never suspected it at the time. Yes, where were the words defining our Postal prerequisites. Where are they carved in the legislative stone that frames the unique status of our USPS? That’s the task I assigned my Congressional employee. Consequently, I’m proud to say that Representative Cramer, respecting my quest for knowledge reacted promptly. He forwarded my letter to the pseudo-monopolists who were the subject of my inquiry, the USPS.
To their credit, they replied promptly back to the senator, who using their services relayed the letter to my home - not to my neighborhood, not to my block - but directly to my mailbox. They’re good at that, I must admit.
The USPS letter has two themes of interest to the communications truth seeker: 1) It informed me that “a group of federal civil and criminal laws known as the Private Express Statutes (PES) state that only the Postal Service may carry letters”. (How could it be?) 2) These statutes enable the USPS to be the most efficient postal system in the world. (I believe that - I’ve lived overseas and seen businessmen routinely mail back-up letters because they know the first letter will cycle eternally in Postospace.) There was much talk of the constitution origin of Federal Mail Service and the tradition “of a 228 year policy that mail delivery in our democracy is a basic and fundamental service by the government of the U.S.”.
This concept goes back to the Constitution, says the USPS letter. This statement is as indigestible in the human mind as a brick in the human stomach. Why would our letter-writing, freedom-loving founders in a world not yet blemished by Karl Marx - in a political environment fostering a weak union - arrogate a function like mail delivery to the Federal Government. Again, show me the proofs.
The point of the USPS essay was that remote locations could not be serviced by profit-making corporations or individuals. Sure, some greedy profit seeker would gobble up the New York market. but Keokuk, Iowa would have to rely on smoke signals or ex-Opera stars who would bellow information to Sioux City. As stated by the USPS, “without the protection of the PES, mail volume from low-cost, high-profit areas would be targeted for carriage by Postal Service competitors, leaving the Postal Service the more expensive and difficult-to-serve areas”. Hmm, maybe, but why not give the marketplace a chance?
But wait. There’s hope for understanding the unjailed status of UPS/FED EX employees. Because in 1979, says my government letter, the post office suspended some PES provisions for “extremely urgent” letters. Thus allowing SOME competition. (Can I charge my wife fifty cents to carry her invitation to my daughter’s wedding across town to cousin Susan? She says “it’s extremely urgent”. I have no idea.) The point is carefully underlined, that though exceptions were made in 1989 when the post office, due to a fat and prosperous year was in a good mood, some letters do NOT qualify for “any exception or suspensions to the PES“.
So, the mystery as deep and dark as those black holes in galactic space, and the imperialistic drive of the honeysuckle vine to take over your fence, and dark tendency of open-face jam and peanut butter sandwiches to fall on the kitchen floor, jam side down.
But still there’s hope because my two-page brochure about PES’s tells me that the exact, literal words that compose the prohibitions “are codified in title 18, US Code, 1693 through 1699 and title 39, US Code, 601 through 505.
Guess what my next request to my responsive and prompt Congressman will be?
