City should fight Postal Service

My mind has really been reeling about something that's irritated me for a year or so.

What can my town to do remedy the loss of several public mailboxes - a loss that has forced me and many others to travel close to a mile every time we need to mail something?

We shouldn't even have to use a public box, but apparently there's no home pick-up of mail here. (Well-to-do neighborhoods still have home pick-up; we apparently don't.)

With the United States Postal Service gaining its annual stamp rate increase this month - which is now automatic due to Republican legislation - now is the right time to ponder what can be done about this. Stamp increases used to require at least some effort to show the Postal Service needed it (as weak as these efforts were). Now they can just increase it without any accountability at all.

I don't doubt that it needs an increase in postage rates. But this increase should be against junk mail, not normal-sized letters and bill payments that we all send. For years, we've been forced to subsidize mountains and mountains of slick ads and deceptive credit card offers. It costs much less for junk mailers to mail this cheap firewood than it does for us to mail a letter that's a fraction of the size.

Public mailboxes don't even accept some of the items they used to accept, which forces us to travel even further to the post office.

So let's get the city on the Postal Service's case about the disappearing public mailboxes. I also believe there should be a city ordinance requiring public boxes to accept the same items that they used to. "We, the people" are supposed to be the boss. Not "we, the corporations." When it comes to standing up for the people, local autonomy has dibs over federal fiats that only harm us.