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Unsanitized: The COVID-19 Report for Aug. 14, 2020

Doing the Math on the Postal Service Hustle
Plus, don't pass the RESTAURANTS Act

 

The USPS handles much more mail every day than there are ballots to
deliver to voters. (John Nacion/STAR MAX/IPx 2020)

First Response

At least two states have now been told that mail-in ballots may not be
able to be sent in time for voters to have them counted in the November
election. We've reported on the Washington state letter
,
which strongly recommends that the state pay nearly three times as much
for first-class postage or risk late delivery. Now another letter has
surfaced

in the important battleground state of Pennsylvania. They're pretty
much the exact same letter with the same date (July 29), so we can
assume that every state has received one. The Pennsylvania letter,
though, is the subject of a lawsuit
,
where activists and elections officials are both asking for emergency
changes to state law to extend ballot deadlines, explicitly to avoid
disenfranchisement of voters during the pandemic.

It's worth questioning the entire premise of these letters. The idea
is that a ballot sent by states and counties as marketing mail, a
lower-class designation, would not arrive on time to voters, amid a
surge in postal delivery around the election. First of all, the entire
point of the postal service crisis generally, to hear it from the
privatizers, is that mail traffic has been slumping as people pay bills
online and use electronic communication. Second, we're not talking
about a lot of ballots in the grand scheme of things.

As I mentioned on Tuesday
,
as of 2018 there were 153 million registered voters

in the United States. Not every one of them is going to request a
mail-in ballot (in fact a diminishing number of Trump supporters will,
though Trump himself did
for the Florida
primary). Let's go on the extreme high side and say that 80 million
ballots have to be distributed. The U.S. Postal Service distributes 182
million pieces of mail every day. Adding in 80 million over the space of
a week or two, and some number less than that returning to election
centers, will barely be felt. This isn't Christmas week, it's just
another slightly busy week in the life of the postal service.

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The same math tells you that this isn't about postal revenue; adding
35 cents to 80 million ballots does nothing for the USPS' overall
finances. It's also not about safeguarding voter fraud; even a
Trump-appointed judge has given the Trump campaign one day

to find evidence of mail-in voter fraud "or admit that it doesn't
exist." It's just about voter suppression, as former number 2 at the
Postal Service Ronald Stroman indicated

this week.

As one postal worker told me, ballots have one of the shortest supply
chains of any piece of mail: it goes from the county election office
directly to a local mail processing plant and to the carrier. There are
no planes, no movement outside of the county level. It's just never
been a difficult problem to get ballots to the public. And it wouldn't
be a problem now, without deliberate sabotage of the mail system.

Ruining essential infrastructure
in the
process of this scheme is just collateral damage. The Postal Service is
a critical part of daily life and commerce in rural America, the places
UPS and FedEx won't go because it'd cost too much. As Americans
increasingly get their medications through mail-in pharmacies, the
Postal Service has become a critical node of the health care system.
Degrading it is not that different from shutting down hospitals.

These assaults hit areas represented by Republicans the hardest, which
is why traditionally Republicans would scream the loudest about cutbacks
to mail delivery. Because Trump means to steal an election, they have
zipped up, while their constituents suffer. It's probably really bad
for their re-elections to have the most consumer-facing manifestation of
the government suddenly give bad service. It's bad for Trump's too,
on the face of it. But when you're trying to prohibit ballots from
reaching people, it's just collateral damage.

If you do get a ballot by mail, use a drop box

or turn it in at the election office, or local polling site.

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Save Our Restaurants But Not Our Waitstaff?

A double-dip recession
,
which is where we're headed given the lack of support from Washington,
is going to hit smaller business hard. The imbalance

between the Fed rescue and smaller businesses is worse than what's
described here, because businesses that are too big for PPP but too
small to issue corporate bonds have also been screwed by a Main Street
Lending Program (designed to fill in the gaps) that isn't functioning.
One of the biggest sufferers will be non-chain restaurants
,
which really can't open in a normal way until there's a vaccine, and
which define communities and make them distinctive. Losing them would be
disastrous.

So in that context, the bipartisan RESTAURANTS Act

(that is an actual acronym but I'm not dignifying it here) should be a
no-brainer. It creates a $120 billion bailout fund for grants to
non-chain restaurants, with smaller restaurants getting first crack at
them for two weeks after the bill is enacted. Sounds great, right? They
even got Morgan Freeman to cut an ad
for it. What
could go wrong?

Well, there are no worker protections in it whatsoever, for one thing.
There's no requirement to maintain payroll, no hazard pay, no mandate
for PPE, and even a provision that holds restaurant businesses harmless
if they claim the inability to keep workers on the job. This bailout
holds for restaurant owners and not the people who make or serve the
food. The two-week set-aside for businesses with under $1.5 million in
revenue only suggests "priority" for women- or minority-owned
businesses, and after that it's a cash grab.

I'm told there's an extremely intense campaign to get members of
Congress, particularly progressives, on board for this bill. The Senate
Republican bill had a 100 percent expensing option for business meals,
so clearly helping restaurants is on the radar. This lobbyist-approved

bipartisan bailout for owners, without protections for workers, could
see the light of day, if Congress actually gets around to a deal. You
could envision it getting stuck into the agreement at the last minute.
That would be a mistake.

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**Housekeeping Note**

Like Congress, I'm heading home for the weekend. And during the two
political conventions,

**Unsanitized** will be preempted for

**Unconventional**, coverage of the Democratic and Republican virtual
gatherings written by our own

**Harold Meyerson**. So Tuesday through Friday next week and the week
after is reserved for that. We are a politics magazine, after all!

Days Without a Bailout Oversight Chair

141
.
Speaking of sabotage.

We Can't Do This Without You

Today I Learned

* A startling CDC survey
finds that
one-quarter of people aged 18-24 considered suicide in the past 30 days.
(CDC)

* As in 2010, evictions will wreak havoc with elections
,
because your district and registration is based on where you live.
(HuffPost)

* There's no White House plan

to end the payroll tax, it was all a bluff. (Bloomberg)

* What would Keynes do

with the post-COVID economy? Ezra Klein talks to Zach Carter. (Vox)

* Newsrooms going virtual

in the pandemic, as corporate parents sell the real estate out from
under the business. (Axios)

* Georgia appears to be the new Florida

on coronavirus outbreaks. (Atlanta Journal Constitution)

* Online learning leaves behind poor students
.
(Los Angeles Times)

* This link is old

but the private planes flying over my house every damn day makes it seem
like a WWI dogfight in my neighborhood. (Barron's)

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