Toshiba, USPS Woes a Call to Arms...So Answer
I don't want to get into partisan politics here, but this U.S. president and Congress seem to be in no rush to solve the dilemma facing the U.S. Postal Service. As they sashayed out of Washington, with swim trunks and Montrachet in tow, the senate and house stooges called back, "Let us know when you're completely out of money." Nice. And par for Congress' course.
I am a huge Patrick Donahoe fan. This man has been blunt and forthcoming about the Postal Service’s financial position. Huge changes are needed. How we go about it needs to be hashed out. Nothing is happening and, quite frankly, it's looking as if we're going to exit 2012 without true postal reform.
Donahoe, the postmaster general, is just one man. He's not being heard by the general public, despite his countless warnings of armageddon. And now that USPS has crashed, we're all going to be guilty of letting it burn.
We don't need press releases. Save the Webinars. No white papers on the benefits of keeping the mailing industry healthy. What the printing, paper, mailing and associated concerns need is a united, national voice.
The citizens of this great land need to know the vital importance of printing, paper and mailing to the jobs of hundreds of thousands of fellow Americans, not to mention the economy. Now is the perfect time to launch a full-fledged media blitz. And, we need to throw money at it; we're talking big bucks for network advertising. We, collectively, have the resources to unleash a powerful, fact-laden campaign that can cast printing, paper and postal in a positive light.
The country is going to be weary of what is shaping up to be the ugliest, mud-slingingest presidential election/street fight in our lifetime. So now is the perfect time to illustrate, on television, just how great a role these industries play in our daily lives and what would be the consequences of losing them. We need a strong, positive message delivered by a voice Americans trust (think James Earl Jones, Morgan Freeman) that dispels some of the misgivings we, as a country, have about paper usage, so-called junk mail and the post office.
