Democratic Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) appears to have devised a strategy to reanimate the bloated corpse of the U.S. Postal Service by encouraging her followers to start a “pen pal” program.
The “progressive pen pal program” was proposed during an Instagram chat on Sunday by the congresswoman with a knack for using much more recent forms of technology to communicate and build a political following.
In a bid to revitalize the USPS, @aoc proposes a “national progressive penpal program” to boost stamp sales. pic.twitter.com/UzTNdz2Moq
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) August 17, 2020
“I have been thinking about ways to help you help the post office,” Ocasio-Cortez told fans during the Instagram chat.
“So one of the best ways to support the post office is to buy stamps,” she said. “What do you all think — would you guys be down and excited if I set up a national progressive pen pal program. Do all the work of connecting you to somebody else. We would offer some maybe conversation prompts or postcard prompts and maybe even a printable postcard format?”
“You just send it out,” she added from her smartphone. “Would you guys be down? Do you like that idea?”
Some reactions on Twitter have been less than favorable, with one user asking, “Someone has to explain this to me. Yes, I know it’s all cynical and they don’t actually care, but who is dumb enough to fall for this (rhetorical, I know Dems are)? We have Fedex and UPS. The last time I was in a USPS branch it felt like travelling back to the 60s.”
“What did socialists use before candles? Electricity,” another user quipped.
Fox News host Sean Hannity tweeted, “PROBLEM SOLVED! AOC Suggests National ‘Pen Pal Program’ to Save Postal Service with $0.55 Cent Stamps.”
Ocasio-Cortez then said she is going back to D.C. to have a talk with Louis DeJoy, the Postmaster General, referring to the Oversight Committee meeting on August 24. The coauthor of the infamous “the Green New Deal” flop will join other committee members to question DeJoy about the USPS’s recent troubles.
Progressives and sympathizers in the media have accused DeJoy, who has only held the position for around three months, of scheming to slow down the mailing process to interfere with mail-in balloting for the 2020 general election in November. The conspiracy theory has been dubbed “Mailgate” or “POAnon” by critics.
DeJoy was appointed by President Trump and has been a key Republican donor in the past. Democrats have demanded throughout the summer that appear for a grilling regarding his plans to “implement an organizational realignment” at the USPS.
“The American people want their mail, medicines, and mail-in ballots delivered in a timely way, and they certainly do not want drastic changes and delays in the midst of a global pandemic just months before the election,” House Oversight Chair Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) said in response to DeJoy agreeing to appear before the committee next week.
NPR reported that the USPS “has long been in financial trouble, having lost $9 billion last year.”
According to the USPS, their service has collected $24.4 billion from first-class mail in 2019, which is short by about $510 million from the 2018 reports.
Ocasio-Cortez’s proposal would require every American to send 49 pen-pal letters every year to close the $9 billion gap and would require infrastructure to handle a further 16.3 billion new pieces of mail each year.