"The Post Office Is Us"

It's ours. It's been the key to America since before the Revolution. And the privatization motherfuckers are trying to kill us, our democracy, by killing it.

Charles Pierce:

They really did it quite well, the privatizers and the deregulators and the people who simply believe that there is nothing we own in common, that every bit of what we own through our government is ultimately fungible. One of the most successful of their long cons seems to be coming to fruition in the next 24 hours, and they've got enough of the rubes in line to pretend that it's all for the good.

SNIP

Yes, technology has taken a whack at the Postal Service. People go out of their way not to mention it, but the USPS is in trouble because Congress saddled it with a preposterous regulation in 2006 regarding how it would pay out its pension and medical benefits. This was done deliberately, so as to cause the kind of default that we are seeing today, so that the public-sector competition would one day be eliminated. Let them succeed and watch entire swaths of the country lose mail service entirely.
Alas, we continue the death spiral....

Peter Nesvold, a financial analyst with Jefferies and Co., says the post office's financial future will depend on how Congress resolves its conflict over the mail agency's core mission. While the Postal Service is a business expected to stay afloat, it also has a legal obligation to provide uniform first-class mail service even to sparsely populated, far-flung areas of the U.S., all for the same price of a 45-cent postage stamp. UPS and FedEx don't deliver to those areas that are less profitable, contracting with the Postal Service to get the job done.

More to the point, and as I have said before, the Postal Service is something that is ours. It belongs to us as a people. Outside of the police, it's usually the most intimate connection we have to what is still, in theory, our government. That this does not matter a damn to those people who forced the current fiscal crisis is clearly spelled out in what has ironically become a pro-privatization argument presented by ostensible Democrat Peter Orszag, who essentially says that privatization is the right path forward because Congress — which is also part of what is still, in theory, our government — is dead-set against arriving at any other solution to the problems it went out of its way to create....

Read the whole furious thing.