Deliberate Sabotage! The Post Office and the Trucking Industry

                   DELIBERATE SABOTAGE!

 THE POSTAL SERVICE AND THE TRUCKING INDUSTRY                                 
Miss American
   
By Miss American

 The first time I heard that the Post Office was considering cutting out Saturday deliveries, my antenna went up.  “Oh no!  They want to wreck that too”!  But I wrote it off as a normal cost cutting measure given our dismal financial state of affairs.  The next warning then came as an announcement that they were 8 something billion in the red on their pension commitments, and were talking about closing hundreds of regional centers, rural post offices, and lay workers off.  My anger, when I hear about the neglect and demise of something that is so basic to our country, such as our Postal Service, goes over the top.  You could say I go postal.  There’s always plenty of millions/billions for the bankers bonuses, trillions for wars and killing, and the latest weapons and technology to be used against Americans, but not a penny in sight to shore up the basic foundations of our society.  When it comes to anything for us, the taxpaying consumers as we are known, “we’re broke” they tell us.  What Americans need in the way of help from our loving, caring government is a drop in the bucket compared to what they decide to spend to “keep us safe”!!  I’ll take the odds and keep myself safe!!  Just let me keep my freedom, please!!!  Anyway, I don’t appreciate how many innocent people they have to kill, and how many other countries they have to obliterate to keep me safe. Hey!  Anyone want to invest in a new airline?  It’s called ‘Fly At Your Own Risk Dream Trips’.

I found out that back in 2007, the government passed laws that require the Post Office to pay the U.S. Treasury money towards their pension plan for future workers, people who have not even been hired yet!! How many companies do you know that have to do that?  It is these payments that have drained their current cash flow, not the union which was never a problem before.  Of course in today’s America, union workers must be getting filthy rich!! (Can’t have that!)  Now the House and Senate are scrambling around trying to fix their obvious screw up.  But once again, partisan politics and penny pinching are holding up solutions to the immediate and future Postal Service problems presented by their own past actions of national sabotage.  And once again, similar to the demonization of ‘entitlements’, they want to call it a Post Office bailout.  Like I said, if it’s for the citizens, it’s vilified and a big problem.  All these acts of pimping America out are coming home to roost, such as a recovery that will never come because our jobs were sold out to the lowest bidder so politicians, corporations, and the government could generously enrich themselves.

Now, my antenna is up for another infrastructure target.  The trucking industry.  I certainly don’t profess to know the intricate details or inner workings of this business, but my son just so happens to drive what he calls an 18 wheel revenue generator, and it’s not revenue for him or the company!   These poor guys are like fish in a barrel.  The highway patrol just salivate when they pull one of these trucks over.  How many trucks do you think could be pulled over and inspected with a magnifying glass, where there isn’t some little thing wrong they could fine them for??  It would be easy to write a whole article on the squeeze that is put on the drivers, between the companies that push them to violate to make the delivery, the log book limitations, the federal regulations, filthy crowded truck stops, horrendous diet choices that cost too much, severely restricted parking opportunities, on and on.  

Along with all the very tight NTSB rules and regulations, a couple years ago the Feds decided to add another layer to the pile.  Mind you, most of the rules are made up by bureaucrats who never sat their butt in a big rig truck, and virtually ignore feedback from the men who do!  The new plan was called CSA 2010.  What part of it entails is testing drivers to analyze whether or not they have the type of personality that would predict if they were prone to having an accident!  Then, based on the findings of the collective driver profile, the company would get a particular insurance rating.  This was along with a bunch of new requirements and rules.  It is almost to the point that the drivers and companies can’t decipher whether by complying with one law, they are breaking another!  Then, add in the actual human element of weather issues, traffic jams, road construction, rush hours, searching for a place to park, all when your legal driving hours for the day are up.  Whatever you think may be a fair ticket for any small violation, such as driving in the left lane when cars won’t let a truck back in the right lane, quadruple it.  There are no small fines for truckers! And they, not the company, have to pay them.

Not only are the mountain of rules creating a situation where a driver can barely make a living, they have created a huge driver shortage which grows monthly. You can pretty much forget getting hired if you’ve had any kind of accident, citations, or you got caught with pot when you were 12 years old.  Now, my son tells me that they are going to tinker with the regulations again.  Just like with air travel, the people who are taking the country down piece by piece, want to wreck our country’s lifeblood of food and goods delivery.  No need to wonder what all those piled up and stored plastic caskets around the country are for. How many people died during the last depression?

It’s so despicable how “special interest” groups write all the new laws, then they pay one of our ‘elected’ traitors to introduce it. Nobody bothers reading or analyzing it, yet they pass it with little, if any partisan bickering, except for a short show for the cameras now and then. Speaking of acting, do they give Hollywood awards for dog and pony shows?   No matter how grave the offenses or crimes against Americans that are presented to law makers, while we sit and watch the C-span productions, NOTHING EVER CHANGES!! Especially the laws that allowed the crimes to take place to begin with. Taps on the wrist are the stock and trade of the so-called overseers.  Some of the most egregious crimes against children, families, and the elderly by our legal and court systems go absolutely unaddressed, even after ‘congressional hearings’ alert our so-called leaders to these devastating human events brought about by corrupt judges and government agencies.   Oh, how they hate us.  It is my conclusion that voting fraud is as old as our country’s history.  Some of the most hated ‘representatives’ who have stabbed us in the back and front, just breeze back into office as if they knew they would.  Can you say Harry and Nancy? John Boehner? Dick Durbin? John McCain?  There’s not enough room to name all 535 of them!  They obviously don’t give a damn if we vote for them or not.  Now, why is that?

Orig. published Feb. 18, 2013                                          {jcomments on}