PostalReporter.com Blog

Sherry Fisher has been employed with the U.S. Postal Service for twenty-three years; sixteen of those years as Postmaster. Fisher lives in Forrest City, Arkansas with her husband and two children; one son and one daughter — Amanda, about whom this story was written. She makes sure her daughter, Amanda, who was born with intellectual disabilities, participates in Special Olympics, and through this work, hopes to make other parents and children aware of how much good the program can do. This is her first book, but is currently working on a sequel “Amanda, All Grown Up.”

According to the press release:

Sherry Fisher uses an easy-to-read picture-book format to acquaint children with people, especially other children, who have physical or mental handicaps that make them appear different. She wants to make children’s early experiences with the handicapped good ones, so that throughout life, they will accept everyone “just as they are.”

“Amanda, Just the Way I Am” is based on the late James Hamilton and Sherry George Fisher’s daughter, Amanda, who was born with intellectual disabilities. She wants other children to know that Amanda and others like her like to run and play and compete in sports, which also, she hopes will promote Special Olympics. Any disability, or difference, affects not only the person with the disability, but their whole family, and everyone who comes into contact with them. Sometimes, not understanding that people with physical or mental differences have feelings and emotions just like everyone else allows children to make fun of them, or even laugh at them. The wording used throughout this story keeps the reader focused on the fact that children who appear different are still “children just like them.”

The child’s voice, “Hi! My name is Amanda. I am a little girl just like you…. sometimes, it’s hard to understand what I say, but my family loves me just the way I am.” And “Sometimes it seems like nobody wants to play with a special kid … but at Special Olympics, everyone cheers for me and gives me a chance to do my best,” are words spoken not only to children without handicaps to help them understand, but also to others who have any kind of disability.

For more information, or to request a review copy, please contact the author at sherryf @ team-national.com or visit Book Surge

Related link:

EEOC: Questions & Answers About Persons with Intellectual Disabilities in the Workplace and the Americans with Disabilities Act
 

Updated: 5/17/06-  $45 million net gain after escrow allocation -USPS revenues of $6.59 billion for March were 3% or $189 million over plan and $424 million or 6.9% more than March 2005. Expenses were virtually on plan, producing a net income of $295 million before the escrow allocation.

Contributing to the March performance was the new postage rate structure implemented Jan. 8, which provided a 5.4% revenue increase needed to fulfill the requirement of Public Law 108-18, The Postal Civil Service Retirement System (CSRS) Funding Act, enacted in 2003. This law requires the Postal Service to place $3 billion in an escrow account by Sept. 30, 2006, to cover the difference between the CSRS retirement costs before and after the law’s implementation. We are allocating $250 million per month for purposes of assessing our financial position. After the escrow allocation, our financial position for March shifts to a net gain of $45 million.

Total mail volume in March was 1.5% more than last year, with volumes in all major categories except Express Mail and International Mail above their March 2005 levels.

Year-to-date, net income before escrow allocation is $1.57 billion or $147 million over plan. Year-to-date, the net gain after escrow allocation is $74 million.

Year-to-date revenue is 2.9% higher than the same period last year and $288 million above the year-to-date plan. Year-to-date expenses are 4.2% above March 2005 postings. Revenues, year-to-date, are $288 million or 0.8% over plan. Expenses year-to-date are 4.2% higher than the same period last year, and $141 million above the year-to-date plan.

Year-to-date, total mail volume is 256 million pieces more than the same period last year. Year-to-date, First-Class Mail volume is 1.3% below the same period last year. Standard Mail volume is 1.5% above last year, and Priority Mail is 7.0% above last year.

source: USPS

Notes from The Postal Service Financial Statement are below:

The full report is available at the USPS Financials web page http://www.usps.com/financials/fos/welcome.htm (more…)

Washington, D.C., May 11, 2006 - The Securities and Exchange Commission today filed securities fraud charges against a New Jersey letter carrier who illegally leaked secret grand jury information to members of one of the most pervasive insider trading rings ever prosecuted. The new charges bring to 14 the number of people charged in the international scheme that netted at least $6.7 million in illicit gains through tactics that also included stealing information from Merrill Lynch and advance copies of BusinessWeek Magazine.

CNBC showed postal worker Jason Smith, the latest member of the insider trading club that snared the still jailed Eugene Plotkin and out-on-bail Stanislav Shpigelman (source Wall St Folly)

The new charges allege that, while serving on a federal grand jury investigating Bristol-Myers Squibb Co., Jason Smith leaked information about the proceedings to the ringleaders of the insider trading scheme, co-defendants Eugene Plotkin and David Pajcin, who traded in Bristol-Myers securities based on the information. By leaking the information, Smith, age 29, a resident of Jersey City, N.J., and a letter carrier with the U.S. Postal Service, violated grand jury secrecy rules and his oath as a grand juror.

The grand jury scheme is the third insider trading scheme orchestrated by Plotkin and Pajcin. In previous complaints, the SEC charged Plotkin and Pajcin with orchestrating a scheme to obtain advance knowledge of mergers and acquisitions transactions being handled by Merrill Lynch, and a scheme to obtain advance copies of a market moving column in BusinessWeek. The complaint also alleges that Smith provided money to Plotkin and Pajcin to use in all of the insider trading schemes in return for a share of the profits. Today’s charges were made in a Third Amended Complaint that is subject to Court approval.

Linda Thomsen, the Director of the Commission’s Division of Enforcement, said, “Today’s charges reveal how far and wide this insider trading scheme had spread. The defendants seized every possible opportunity to profit from the theft of information.”

Mark K. Schonfeld, Director of the Commission’s Northeast Regional Office, said, “The defendants’ misuse of grand jury information for their own advantage is particularly insidious. The defendants flouted a duty of confidentiality to the people of the United States.”

As alleged in the complaint, beginning in early 2005, Smith was serving on a federal grand jury in the District of New Jersey convened to investigate potential accounting fraud involving Bristol-Myers and certain officers of that company. Plotkin and Pajcin set up a scheme with Smith in which Smith leaked information about the grand jury proceedings to Pajcin and Plotkin in order to enable them to trade on this non-public information. Among other things, Smith communicated to Plotkin and Pajcin that it appeared as if a high-ranking Bristol-Myers officer would be indicted, and based on that information, Plotkin and Pajcin traded in an attempt to profit on the negative information, initially in an account in Pajcin’s name, and later, in a foreign account in the name of his aunt, defendant Sonja Anticevic. Plotkin and Pajcin also tipped Plotkin’s father, defendant Mikhail Plotkin, and defendant Henry Siegel, in return for a share of their trading profits. Later, a day before the announcement of a deferred prosecution agreement with Bristol-Myers that did not include an indictment of the high-ranking officer, Smith tipped Plotkin and Pajcin that the grand jury had decided not to return an indictment against the high-ranking officer. Based on this tip, Plotkin and Pajcin caused various accounts to liquidate or cover their positions in an attempt to avoid losses. Smith also provided Pajcin with some funding for Pajcin’s and Plotkin’s other insider trading schemes, and Plotkin and Pajcin agreed to provide Smith with a percentage of Pajcin’s trading profits based upon information derived from this scheme, as well as other insider trading schemes.

more SEC Announces New Charges Against Insider Trading Ring

Mailman accused of grand jury leaks for insider trading (New Jersey Star Ledger)

Postmaster Marilyn Musser applied for a disability retirement annuity asserting that a “major depressive disorder, family and marital stress, extreme anxiety and difficulty with concentration, retention, and recall” prevented her from performing her duties as a Postmaster with the Postal Service.The Postmaster also testified that anxiety and stress caused by her increased workload and alleged under-staffing by the Postal Service caused her to become absent from work.

In its final decision, OPM denied Musser’s application, finding that her statement, supervisor’s statement, and medical evidence “did not constitute objective evidence that her conditions had worsened significantly and caused disablement.   OPM also found that the evidence submitted did not demonstrate that her conditions caused any documented service deficiencies.”

 The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) petitioned for review of the initial decision issued on December 15, 2004, that reversed OPM’s denial of the appellant’s application for disability retirement benefits under the Civil Service Retirement System (CSRS).  Upon re-hearing MSPB reversed its initial decision, and sustained OPM’s denial of the appellant’s application for disability retirement benefits. The MSPB ruled the evidence presented by  Musser  ”does not unambiguously and without contradiction indicate that the appellant’s medical condition prevents her from performing her specific work requirements.”

Marilyn Joyce Musser v. Office of Personnel Management

According to the New York Sun:  With little fanfare, the postmark (note: see picture below) Americans have been accustomed to for more than a century is quickly going the way of the telegram and the rotary dial telephone.

Last month, the postal service finished deploying new equipment nationwide that replaces the traditional circle-and-bars postage cancellation with a computer-generated city, state, and date, slapped onto mail by a high-speed ink-jet printer.

The post office began phasing in the new cancellations at regional mail processing centers last August and completed installation on all 1,083 of its state-of-the-art canceling machines a few weeks ago, she said.

With the demise of the traditional postmark, America is losing an icon ubiquitous in travel books, pop art, and historical memorabilia. This summer, for the first time, vacationers who send postcards home from trips across America will find their missives emblazoned not with the familiar circle indicating the geographic origin of the mail, but with two sterile lines of computer type.

more from The New York Sun 

A Basic and Fundamental Service ‘Provided To and Supported By the People’ by APWU President William Burrus in the May/June 2006 of American Postal Worker Magazine

The glaring absence of any representatives of “the people” is evidence of the transformation of the U.S. Postal Service from the constitutionally required service to the people into a service catering to commercial entities. Postal management has aided the transition to a service that is simply a delivery arm of major mailers, and in so doing has rejected any semblance of balance between services to individual citizens and to the business community.

USPS headquarters at L’Enfant Plaza in Washington, DC, has become a cesspool of industry officials under contract or in a lobbying capacity who influence the decisions of a service constitutionally intended to serve the people

As the founding fathers deliberated over the precise wording of the constitution of the new nation, they fully appreciated the importance of communication to a developing country, and determined that the establishment of the post office and postal roads were of paramount importance.

Management has shifted the focus, replacing service “to the people” with service “to the business community.” (more…)