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A senator should help to represent the needs of the people in that state. But Susan Collins doesn’t seem to care about the Maine farmers she represents from her seat in the Senate.
According to the Press Herald, farmers in Maine are ordering newborn chicks to be shipped to their post offices, only to find all of them dead on arrival. One farmer said that while in previous times only one or two would be dead, now thousands are dying because the post office is mishandling the birds. Rep. Chellie Pingree wrote a letter to Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue complaining about the losses Maine farms have suffered.
Pingree said, “Can you imagine, you have young kids and they are getting all excited about having a backyard flock and you go to the post office and that’s what you find?”
Washington Monthly pointed out that Susan Collins engineered the USPS disaster as far back as 2005. She sponsored and introduced the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act, that required the post office to prepay the next fifty years of benefits. So every year, the post office had to pay $5 billion or so into a pension fund, making it impossible for the department to have a profit at all.
The institution is now billions of dollars in debt.
“Maine farmers have blamed recent changes at the U.S. Postal Service after receiving thousands of dead baby chicks due to shipping delays. The state’s postal workers blamed the slowdown on a bill championed by Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, that “weakened the Postal Service”@Salon
— 🐝ҍմҽղօ ҍҽɑղ, íղϲ.™ (@_myownprivateid) August 21, 2020
Meanwhile, the post office is the only service to ship livestock and animals to farmers and breeders. Maine has no state hatcheries, requiring farmers to order their chicks from other states. The farms that provide America with food depend on the post office to make it through the year. And now, that seems to have come to an end.
The Senate majority is currently blocking a bill that would give the post office $25 billion in relief funds.
