♪ ♪ >> hello, i'm llewellyn king, the host of "white house chronicle" is coming right up. i have some thoughts that have

some bearing on what we are talking about later. i may child of the post office. i grew up in the time when post offices were very excite in places because we got our mail and that changed our lives. because i grew up in a british colony, it was also the place that controlled cables and telegrams. i was a junior, junior, 4 -- correspond when i was 16 and my assignment came by cable which i got in a box at the post office or went sometimes five times per day to see if there was some excitement from london or new york, something to be doing. this was in africa. i kept in that sense of magic and excitement and life changing. i was not somebody who's only telegram was to announce a death. in the united states, the telegraph and telegrams, cables

etc were run by western union, not the post office but still the post office was what anchored a small town and was a source of lovely things like magazines, like changing letters, correspondence, wondrous things -- a very special place for the post office and for the unfailingly nice people who carried the mail. the letter carriers. there were always cheerful even if you had a truly nasty dog. my dog never bit them. we will talk today about the decline of the u.s. postal service, the loss of an enormous number of jobs as the internet has taken away the mail. first-class mail has fallen

tremendously. even junk mail has fallen and the post office, that very core of the small town or a village may go away, it may be closed. the actual retail outlet may be close. the postal service itself, an incredible distributive system may be a shadow of its former self. as is western union, a very slight shadow of its former self. these are the times we live in. these are the days of destructive technologies. we will be right back to talk about the post office and you and the post office. ♪ >> many have spoken out on the need to transition to a clean energy future. at exelon, we are acting. by 2020, we are committed to

displacing metric tons of greenhouse gases annually, helping our customers and communities reduce their emissions and offering low carbon electricity and the marketplace. we are taking action and we are seeing results. ♪ >> "white house chronicle" is produced in collaboration inwhut, howard university television. nationally syndicated columnist -- llewellyn king and coastal linda gasparello. ♪ >> hello again and thank you for coming along. before we get going on the misery of the post office and possibly the joy of the post office, i want to do a shout out to two of our smaller but wonderful stations that have just joined our network of more than 200 stations.

they are wktv chapel 25 and channel 26 in wyoming, michigan and to kiss-tv in union city, indiana and thank you for joining our family of yours. -- of all viewers. i would like to introduce bob sacra, who worked in the world of mail were huge corporations have used his services to look at the mail, to deal with the memo, magazine publishers. tell us more about your career. >> first of all, i am pleased to be with you today. i have been involved with the postal service for more than 30 years. i have done for newspapers, magazines, books, now for big transactional mailers. i have watched -- >> what do you mean by big

transactional mailers? >> all those folks who do statements and bills and so forth. i have watched this incredible arc of the postal service from close at hand. the postal service was born from dysfunction and near collapse in the late 1960's when it was reorganized and to the postal service from the post office department. and then it went on to an unprecedented range of success with this volume going almost straight up from the early 1970's through 2006, peaking at well over 200 billion pieces and then promptly deflated like a balloon. it just went straight through. >> you are so right, when i was involved in the postal service, i was a newsletter publisher. we used first class. i started this business in 1973

and we have problems with the mail. we put traces on things. then it got better and better. today you get delivery often the next day and certainly in two days which is totally amazing. except that the male is falling off. none of the newsletters that i read are published on paper anymore. they are all electronic. >> it is a huge part of the problem. there has been a cultural shift. the application of disruptive technology on the internet and the communication range outside of paper keeps growing and growing whether you're talking about twitter, facebook, the internet itself, email, the choices are astounding. there is virtually none of the traditional letter writing that is still smell.

a lot of the commercial mail -- you probably do some of your bill paying online. that is gone. magazines remain largely in the mail -- >> there are fewer magazines. >> many of them have been driven out of business because of postal price increases. >> it is interesting historically to see the role of the mail in publishing. it is always subsidized publishing. it has always been -- in every country -- a government effort with fourth class mail, a bulk rate, second class, for various periodicals. we have a newspaper in washington called a "the washington post." it has not been delivered by mail for a long time. also "the saturday evening post" which is no longer with us. >> today still you have

thousands of small newspapers, for example, that still depend completely on the mail. for them, if you lose saturday delivery which is something that is being talked about with great seriousness, that really hurts them in turn, that hurts their communities. they depend on delivery on saturday. >> we hear that the fix for the post of the switches about half -- of the post office which is about half -- >> it is about half of its peak. it has lost so much money that that is precisely right. the combination of a loss of that income and payments that have been imposed upon it by congress has resulted in an absolute flood of red ink. >> so this is a political issue, the future of the post office. >> it certainly is. >> the white house will be involved, congress will be involved, but there are many

constituencies. i live in the plains, virginia and we love our little post office. we don't need it but we love it. just by chance, i found five other post offices within easy driving distance. the furthest one is 9 miles which is not very far away. >> there are way too many post offices. when you are talking about rural areas, the dependency on the post office and the affinity for the structure, the people work there in the community, it is a pillar of the community. i know that from growing up. it was the same thing of my small home town in upstate new york. >> it gives exactly the same service at the end of a long unpaved road in ohio or iowa or north dakota or alaska as it

does in manhattan or washington, d.c. it is the same delivery times and that is a phenomenon. how did it come to be -- the post office when through a period of being criticized for a bit politician said he would not want the post office running a medical system or you would not want the post office -- the post office -- the ceo of a very large electric utility said to me that you know the post office works surprisingly well. we send out 1 million bills and never is one loss. he said is one of the great untold stories. this was some years ago. it was how they depended on the post of us and how efficient and reliable the postal service was. this was even while politicians, even anything they didn't like they linked to the post of us and the failure of government- run or government-and entities.

>> the post of us got a bad rap. the postal service is efficient. the reason for that is that they have been able to successfully integrate a huge amount of automation into their system while still obtaining great service from their employees. everybody knows who their letter carrier is. everybody knows in rural areas when the letter carrier will show up. what people don't know is that all of the other folks behind the scenes, the people who actually move the mail from here to there are just as diligent and are working just as hard. >> we will take a little break. we will identify this program, a white house chronicle" for the people listening on channel 124 on xm-sirius radio.

we're very glad to be affiliated and i am glad to say that on fridays and noon, i have a half hour in which i talk about the week's news on those programs. you can also see this program around the world on the english language services of voice of america. i am talking today with art scara, a man with an encyclopedic knowledge of the postal service and knowledgeable services around the world who knows the romance of the post office and the problems it is facing in this age of electronic communications. welcome back. , art. >> office has a bad

reputation as an employer because we've got this or that has gone into language --"going postal" because some postal workers have gone berserk. >> relatively few. >> why is that? >> it has been highly publicized. >> it takes away from the notion of that at the public service. >> that is true. i am not sure if there is any cause that runs for all these different incidents or whether they were specific to the individuals who actually did them. there may have been something to the way the system was organized and the supervision. the postal service has done extensive work to improve conditions and give their employees more of the say in how they are treated on the work floor and so forth.

i think you have not heard of any recent incidents involving postal employees. i think it has improved. >> it is quite sad to hear that the post office improved its service and improve its work environment and got to a point where it can be hugely effective and suddenly it's customers are going away. >> that is correct them and it has to retrench in a dramatic fashion. >> what will those retrenchment likely be? we will talk about the political difficulties of bringing any of them about >> the postal service wants to do two things and both of them are necessary. one is to be able to downsize, to fit the system to the amount of business it has. that is the most important thing. the second things to do something about these payments that congress has mandated that

pushes them beneath the surface, each and every year. >> what are these payments? >>one is to pre-fund retiree health benefits. they are being required to pay $5.5 billion per year. nearly no other public or private sector entity is required to pre0-0fund health care. if you took away those payments over the last four years, the postal service might be slightly in the black instead of having experienced all that red ink. >> who handles the postal service in congress and how political is it? is it something that divides politically between left and right or is it more complex? >> it is in homeland security and government affairs committee in the senate and the oversight

reform committee and the house. there are significant differences between the parties and how they want to approach saving the postal service. there are differences between the two houses on how they want to approach saving the postal service. now they are both at least aware of the urgency of this and the depth of knowledge and the realization of how important it is to help the postal service is broader and deeper than i have ever seen it before it is probably a mark of how serious the situation is. >> the congress is not going to look favorably on anything that cost it money at a time when we have declared ourselves impecunious. >> that is true but there is certain realities that are involved and there is an emerging consensus that some of the financial piece of this can

be fixed, that the payment for pre-funding can be restructured or re-amortized and the overpayment that has occurred by the postal service to one of its retiree funds, to one of its pension funds, can be repatriated so that money could be used to provide incentives for early retirement. a lot of the postal workers are very senior and the system and have been around for decades. they are eligible for retirement and this would be an incentive for an early out and enough of that can happen, there won't have to be laos and other people losing their jobs. >> we have dealt with two or three allegations against the post office. one is that now gets lost and postal workers are unhappy and they bring guns to the office and the third one is that they work a very short working life and get huge pensions and live

in great style in florida. >> i think that one is a canard. they don't. i'm sure on occasion there are abuses just as there are with any other institution but in general, postal workers love their jobs. they stay for decades. they do get good pensions. they get good pay so i assume they have savings and so forth than a $80,000 per year with overtime? >> if you count the cost of their benefits. >> which is pretty good particularly if you live in a low-income area. , in a cheap housing area. it is different if you are in manhattan theme that's right, there are no real location differences. being don't get more for in downtown chicago or boston there is obviously the rural

area where they are economically quite well off. >> relatively, yes. >> i saw on television one of these energized commentators frothing at the mouth, outraged over the fact that 140 postal workers were showing up and there was no longer any work for them. is that the fourth possible allegation that may not be true? >> there sure our employees who no longer have anything to do and they are sort of stockpiled. the post of us is not permitted by contract to lay anybody off who has been in the postal service for at least six years. >> there is no reduction in force possible? which is really needed. >> yes, it is all about retirement and early retirements. >> early retirement costs money. you have to persuade people to retire early. >> that's right, and the post of this does not have any money which is why this repatriation

of overpayments to its pension fund is so critical. >> i understand that will not happen. >> there are two different pension fund. there is a huge dispute over whether an overpayment to actually exists at all for one of a. for the other one, there is no argument there has been an overpayment in the neighborhood of 6-$7 billion. >> which would help. >> the postal service thinks it needs to reduce its workforce by another couple hundred thousand employees. >> at a time of unemployment, you're talking about reducing work force by 200,000 people? >> that's correct. >> one of the largest employers in the country will almost cut its work force by half? it will not make its numbers on new benefits. >> what is this compared to?

seriously, not just you personally, but anybody was looking at this, there's an industry worth over $1 trillion that employs 8 million private- sector workers which is 7% of gdp that depends on the postal service. if the postal service is not fixed, the impact on that industry which already has been hit very hard collectively experiences hundreds of thousands of layoffs and business closings and you name and of the postal service does not get fixed, doesn't get restructured to be able to have a system that is the right size for the business it has for the disabled future, it is, in fact, in serious risk of collapse. the postal service shut down

even for days or a week or two, the impact would be calamitous. >> i'll always waited for scented letter but it won't come. >> we can be sentimental about about the about those businesses depending on checks coming in. >> we talked about the allegations and the failure of the post office but there are also suggestions and some of them are wild about how to save it one of which is that the post office starts selling candy and cards and pincushions and candles and macrame. one is that you take all the bands and paint advertisements on them. these are not practical? >>well, in terms of selling other things in the post offices, there are two problems.

private-sector businesses are already in those businesses and they will object. in terms of the vehicles, you could turn them into nascar vehicles and have these advertisements on them. they are all over the streets. , everywhere every day. >> there is no nascar racing machine in the postal service. >> you've got me there but and there is some value to folks seeing that. >> how well the billboard people who pay taxes, what will they say? it is the same argument. other ideas have been that they find entirely new things to do with the labor force may be

with commercial mailers like ups and fedex. or that united parcel service and fedex just take over the post office. somehow they would all make money ben. >> no chance of that happening. right now, ups and fedex use the post of us for last resort delivery. >> last-mile deliver remains between their terminal and a >> the brain to a processing point and the post office to exit from their. >> as i watched the collapse -- the slow and sad collapse of western union -- it is basically a company that seemed to own the world and have people in every city and had a monopoly on the technology that looked as though it would last for all time and they never could understand that they were making silent movies when the talk these had been

invented. maybe big organizations cannot change. can the post office change enough that >>well, that remains to be seen. at the highest levels, they get it. they understand it. they are very aware. they are trying themselves to dow. -- downsized. if they don't get interference from local communities and the hill they should be able to save quite a few billion dollars by reducing their size. and still be able to deliver pretty decent service. but the question is whether that can filter down through the entire organization and can they deliver? >> i have not heard where if you were running this or if you were personally a large miller or rather than a consultant, what cuts would you accept? i would accept saturday as an

individual. what would you accept? >> i like what they're proposing about cutting back on the mail processing facilities. that means it will cut its network by more than half and streamline and be able to more efficiently, hopefully at the end of the day, deliver mail around the country. that is a big savings. i would also close a lot of postal retail outlets. that does not mean just post offices in the rural areas. it means stations and branches in the city and suburbs. >> because this is television, i have to close you down and your performance check will be in the mail >>. i will be waiting. >> thank you for a fascinating discussion on the post office, so critical to our national well-being. that is our show for today and we will be back in one week with an important discussion so have a great time and enjoy the romance of the mail.

there may be something good in it for you while the male is still coming six days per week percheers ! ♪ ♪ >> many have spoken out on the need to transition to a clean energy future at exelon, we are acting. by 2020 we are committed to offsetting are displacing 15 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions annually through our operations and helping our customers reduce their emissions and offering more low carbon electricity in the marketplace. we are taking action and we are seeing results. ♪ >> "white house"chronicle is produced in collaboration with whut, howard university

television. from washington, d.c., this has been "white house chronicle" featuring llewellyn king, linda gasparello and guests. this program may be seen on pbs stations and cable access channels. to view the program online, visit us at white house. to view the program online, visit us at white house.