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Republicans in Congress behind post office change

I write in reference to the July 29 front-page article concerning the local downsizing of the post office. How like the Marietta Times to leave out the most important part of the story.

Was the author of this article unaware of the reason why the post office is having such a hard time financially, or was this a deliberate act to mislead the public? I do not know, but either way it’s not a good thing.

More than one letter to the editor in the recent past has explained that the post office has been put in an impossible situation by Republicans in Congress. A 2006 “poison-pill” piece of legislation mandates that the post office fund 75 years of pensions within a 10-year period, forcing this self-supporting institution to divert 5.5 billion to the U.S. Treasury every year.

This outrageous law was expressly designed to take from us a public service that has always been very much a part of our lives, in order to hand it over to private corporations, where we can be sure that costs will go up and service will go down. Way down.

And it’s also Republicans in Congress who refuse to allow the U.S. Postal Service to modernize in order to bring in new business. An example would be public service banking which would help people get away from payday lenders.

Can you see what’s happening here? Once again Republicans are serving private corporate interests, forgetting that they were elected to serve the people.

So many of us are going through hard times these days precisely because of Republican treachery in D.C. and in statehouses across the country. That’s why it’s so important that we have a newspaper that alerts us to this sad state of affairs, not one that helps to cover it up.

Regina Carpenter

Belpre

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