On Saturday, August 22nd, the NAACP New Bedford Branch joined rallies all over the country in support of saving the U.S. Postal Service. Unionists, activists, and others met on the steps of the downtown New Bedford post office to condemn Trump’s politically-motivated sabotage of postal service — 75 days before a national presidential election taking place during a global pandemic in which absentee ballots will be critical to both democracy and safety.
Last June Donald Trump appointed Louis DeJoy to the position of Postmaster General. It soon became clear that Trump had appointed a fox to guard the chickens, as DeJoy — who is a millionaire with investments in competitors of the U.S. Postal Service — began driving the USPS into the ground.
DeJoy banned overtime, “disappeared” more than 600 high-volume sorting machines, and decommissioned familiar blue mailboxes in neighborhoods across the country. The hiring of postal managers was frozen.
Having already hobbled USPS capacity to handle an anticipated deluge of absentee ballots in November, the President freely admitted that he also wasn’t going to do anything to help the USPS handle them. “If we don’t make a deal, that means they don’t get the money,” Trump told Fox Business News host Maria Bartiromo. “That means they can’t have universal mail-in voting; they just can’t have it.”
On Saturday, NAACP New Bedford Branch Vice President Renee Ledbetter delivered the following statement on the steps of the Post Office:
Good morning. My name is Renee Ledbetter and I serve as Vice President of the New Bedford Branch of the NAACP. First of all, I’d like to thank the organizers of this event for inviting me to speak today. And thank you everyone for coming.
When I read about the dismantling of mail sorting machines and saw the photos of public mailboxes removed — exactly at the time that we need them — I was angry, but I shouldn’t have been surprised. The President and his cronies know that they can’t win an election fairly and have consistently taken steps to deny the right to vote to many Americans. This isn’t new. We’ve seen Republican administrations not just on the federal but also on the local level interfere with our right to vote as we choose in recent history, let alone the past. We have seen gerrymandering over the years, which is intended to ensure that one party stays in power, we’ve seen elimination and reduction of early voting, and we’ve seen the most shameful acts of voter suppression. And of course nothing was more destructive than the dismantling of the Voting Rights Act by the Supreme Court in 2013. It was that decision that allowed for the closing of hundreds of polling places accessible to African-Americans and people of color. That unfortunate decision made voting by mail even more important for a historically disenfranchised people.
In addition to the right to vote, another basic right in our democracy, is the right to communicate freely. The U.S. Postal Service has historically played a crucial role in guaranteeing that right, even during this era of the internet. We shouldn’t think that this latest attack is the first one the President and his cronies have made on the post office. He has been trying to defund the postal service for some time now. He is an enemy of the post office even besides the election. That’s why he appointed Louis Dejoy as Postmaster General in the first place, a man who has investments in companies that directly compete with the U.S. Postal Service. He was put there precisely to undermine it. So, the fight isn’t just to keep the mail moving during this election and to make sure every vote is counted — as important as that is. Our fight must then continue to provide sufficient funding and personnel and effective leadership to preserve this precious public institution and give it the tools to continue to provide the vital services that it does and always has done, well into the future.
So, I’m here today to stand up for our right to vote and to demand that the Trump administration stop messing with our post office, and with our right to communicate freely. We have fought for these rights too long and hard to give them up now. I pledge on behalf of the NAACP, that the fight to preserve an effective postal service is our fight too, and while we stand with you here today during this moment of crisis, we will continue to stand with postal workers and all those that work so hard, day in, day out, to ensure the proper functioning of our democracy.
