Warren’s Post Office Proposal: Palast Aims at the Wrong Target
By Ellen Brown
Remembering the Pony Express by stampofapproval.com
Investigative reporter Greg Palast is usually pretty good at peering behind the rhetoric and seeing what is really going on. But in tearing into Senator Elizabeth Warren’s support of postal financial services, he has done a serious disservice to the underdogs — both the underbanked and the US Postal Service itself.
In his February 27 article “Liz Warren Goes Postal,” Palast attacked her support of the USPS Inspector General’s proposal to add “non-bank” financial services to the US Postal Service, calling it “cruel, stupid and frightening” and equating it with the unethical payday lending practices it seeks to eliminate.
After “several thousand tweets by enraged liberals,” he wrote a follow-up article called “Brains Lost in Mail–Postal Bank Bunkum,” in which he contends, “the Postal Governors are running a slick, slick campaign” to “use federal property to run illegal loan-sharking shops.” He says they would “team up with commercial banks to cash in on payday predation,” exempting themselves from Warren’s own consumer protection regulations.