Tuesday, February 11, 2014

Pen

DDay. There are unfilled vacancies on the Postal Service's Board of Governors:
There are five vacancies on the nine-member board. (Obama) has not successfully placed a single appointee on it during his entire tenure in office. The four existing members were all appointed by George W. Bush.
Currently, the board consists of chairman Mickey Barnett, a former Republican state senator from New Mexico and onetime aide to Senator Pete Domenici; vice chair James Bilbray, an-ex Democratic congressman from Nevada; Louis Giuliano, former CEO of ITT Corporation and a senior advisor to the Carlyle Group; and Ellen Williams, a lobbyist and former chairwoman of the Republican Party of Kentucky. So the decision-making entity for the Postal Service remains in partisan Republican hands, five years into the Obama presidency. It’s not surprising, then, that they’ve used a relatively artificial retirement funding crisis to shrink the agency and privatize services.
The Board's authority is broad, and substantial elements of a postal banking system could be established under its authority.