USPS: The Republicans want it destroyed!!!! Nothing less.

I lived in a village in remote Alaska for 1 year.  The mail service was the  link to the outside world.  If the US Mail were privatized, little communities in Alaska and the lower 48 as well, will suffer enormously.  In the villages, handicrafts are made and the USPS is how they get the orders in and out.

John Tierney thinks the problem is Congressional interference in downsizing because no Congresscritter wants their districts little podunk PO to be abolished. But saving those little outposts is the only good thing Congress has done. It provides employment in areas where there are few jobs and a local gathering point for rural communities. 

Which is not to say the GOP in Congress isn't the reason the USPS is in trouble:

In 2006, the GOP Congress passed a bill that required the Postal Service to fully fund future retiree health benefits for the next 75 years and to accomplish this within a 10-year period. Republicans are always insisting that the USPS be run like a good capitalist enterprise, but few, if any, private businesses could bear the burden of funding three-quarters of a century of retired employees’ medical costs over just one decade.

In truth, the Republicans who crafted the bill were not interested in turning the Postal Service into a better business; they were seeking to run the post office out of business. With all those unionized employees working for a quasi-governmental operation that competes with private sector enterprises, the Postal Service is an affront to those who hate government, hate unions and hate to think that there is anything that government can do better than the private sector. The post office may be mandated by the United States Constitution, as clearly as freedom of religion or the right to bear arms, but it does not fit with modern Republican dogma and, therefore, has been targeted for extinction. 

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