To the editor:

The USPS is proposing to the Postal Regulatory Commission to raise letter and postcard rates.

Particularly given that the USPS has already lost a court case and holding its one-ounce First-Class rate too high, and an appeal, its proposal for another rate increase is cynical, unjustifiable, and cruelly abusive.

Many people already have a hard time affording the current postal rates. Amongst those who are suffering because of the already ridiculously elevated rates are mail artists and fine artists of all kinds. Mail art, which had been enjoying a renaissance in pandemic times, is beginning to be overwhelmed and pushed backwards by this exorbitantly extortionate approach; some of our most wonderful mail artists have become so discouraged that they have given up. Painters and draughtsmen in the fields of visual and invisible art, already abused by a society practically engineered against them in every way and at every step, are often hardly scraping by. Unlike some other professions, they may depend heavily on mail even if not shipping fumages and oils, including mailing postcards to promote solo exhibitions in galleries. Some of them teeter above a canyon of starvation and bankruptcy, and it will not bother the Postal Service, with its endless indifference if not bad faith, to see them fall into death. Like many other people, the poohbahs at the post office do not understand why it is not optional for artists to be able to eat food. The Commission must stop this rate increase, and if it does not, another court case must roll it back.