Thread by @kristoncapps

Writers for @jacobinmag and @thenation argue for nationalizing Amazon and folding it into USPS. The @WhiteHouse wants to privatize USPS and sell it for its parts.

So how did we get here? I look at the route to radicalism for America's most beloved agency: bit.ly/34FMF73

People like @AOC make the point that the GOP forced USPS to prepay pension funds decades out. That’s right but it’s also normal.

Under Bush, the GOP required USPS to prepay *retiree health benefits* decades out. Now that’s radical. bit.ly/34FMF73

https://twitter.com/aoc/status/1126627555497447424?s=21

https://t.co/hzsP3OcSFb

Very few large businesses have retirement health bennies at all (only 18% in 2018). If companies were forced to prepay retiree health benefits, they would just cut them. But USPS can't do that without an act of Congress.

The fight for the Postal Service is connected to #M4A.

The squeeze that the GOP under Bush put on the Postal Service gets worse. bit.ly/34FMF73

The GOP's pinch for the Postal Service was sandwiched by the Great Recession and now Covid-19: bit.ly/34FMF73

As @nhannahjones observes, there's a racial component to conservative antipathy toward the Postal Service. bit.ly/34FMF73

https://twitter.com/nhannahjones/status/1249382181719375878

Costs of the GOP plan to privatize the Postal Service would fall squarely on the black middle class. bit.ly/34FMF73

"USPS is caught between a mandate to operate like a business but with the expenses and political oversight of a public agency" — the understatement of the decade, from the @WhiteHouse's 2018 outline for an IPO for the Postal Service. bit.ly/34FMF73

In the process of writing this story I may have ordered an apocalypse's worth of Ellsworth Kelly stamps 😬 bit.ly/34FMF73

https://twitter.com/kristoncapps/status/1135899785054085120

While writing I may have also searched for items from the sold-out Forever 21 X Postal Service collab bit.ly/34FMF73 thesource.com/2019/03/20/for…