A few words on the American Postal Office and medical care
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by 2503830
It was recently announced that the post office would stop delivery of mail on Saturday. We as a nation cannot afford mail service as we used to anymore, as we cannot afford a lot of things anymore.
The GOP (Republican Party) is doing its best to destroy a national institution that provides hundreds of thousands of unionized jobs. (The Democratic Party is doing nothing, perhaps waiting for a signal from its corporate benefactors.)
Merely reading “unionized” in front of “jobs” leads to the conclusion that ideology is behind this latest attack on working people, and surely a Right-wing desire to eliminate large unions and drive down wages further is a significant motivation. And we all know that there is a long standing 'theme' of attacking the unions in this country.
Privatization is a polite word for corporate interest. When you hear someone talk about "it needs to be privatized", then someone big sees profits there, or has interests there and doesn't care what happens in the process.
But "unionized jobs" is not the sole motivation, however. Privatizing the Postal Service would mean big new business for delivery services and companies that supply postal products.( Hello ! )
Advocates of privatization recently sought to inject more wind into their sails with the release of a study by a “think tank” with the bland-sounding name of National Academy of Public Administration. The “study” has yet to published in full, but its four authors, described as “postal industry thought leaders,” have published their conclusion — a call for a near total privatization.
Is anyone reminded of the "global warming" *studies* i spoke about? You should.
But who are the people behind this "think-tank" anyway? Well, most of them except one are vastly interested in privatization for personal gain ( no surprise there , it's America ):
Ed Gleiman, a former member of the Postal Rate Commission, has since become a lobbyist for the Direct Marketing Association, a group representing large mailers.
John Nolan, a deputy postmaster general during the Bush II/Cheney administration, is currently a board member for Streamlite, a business-to-consumer lightweight package delivery service. He is also a senior advisor to The Western Union Co., another corporation that stands to benefit from dismantling the Postal Service.
Edward Hudgins is a director of the Atlas Society (“Atlas” as in Ayn Rand) and previously worked for the Cato Institute and Heritage Foundation. The latter two organizations are manically dedicated to destroying all protections for employees, while the phantasmagorical absurdity of Ayn Rand’s novels bear as much relation to reality as an elephant that flies.
George Gould, a former political director for the National Association of Letter Carriers union, doesn’t appear to have an ideological axe to grind as do the other three “leaders” and perhaps is guilty of nothing more than absorbing neoliberal ideology. Critics of the NALC say that the union has failed to fight for its membership, and Mr. Gould’s participation in this “study” might provide those critics additional fuel.
To end the farce the company who funds the "study" ( notice i said COMPANY, not INSTITUTION ) is Pitney Bowes Inc.
For those of you who do not know who they are, i'll use the quote from Greg Bell, executive director of American Postal Workers Union which says:
"Pitney Bowes, the company that is funding the review, stands to be a major beneficiary. The company is widely known as a provider of mailing equipment, but it is also a major mail ‘pre-sorter.’ The company takes advantage of generous pre-sort discounts offered by the Postal Service to provide outsourced services to high-volume mailers. In 2011, Pitney Bowes operated 41 mail processing facilities and generated $5.3 billion in revenue. Pitney Bowes would certainly snatch up a major portion of USPS revenue if it were given the chance.”
Getting the big picture now? Gooood.
Backlash has been timid, and nowhere near the size it should have been. By comparisson France a country with only 50 mil. population has had almost 12 million in the streets to protest such measures meant to make the rich richer and you all, poorer.
The US has had nothing. Nothing...
Yes there was Occupy but let's be frank several thousands having their say over the hundreds of millions watching Oprah or Kardashian's ass or whatever - that ain't gonna change much.
There were a lot of political and financial analysts on TV lately and there was this insanity that "we are recovering" "America is recovering" and the worse of all "It's good that the we as a nation have cut down on medical spending!".
Stop. STOP !
There's a very simple explanation why the expenditures for medical care have gone down.
WE'RE IN A RECESSION ! We're spending LESS on everything !
People avoid going to the doctor they CAN'T AFFORD IT ! They 'll go into debt, they'll have financial problems, etc
And this is considered a good thing. Is it ?
Think a bit with me here: If you don't go to a doctor to get treated, the problem gets ...WORSE. And you are going to save now but spend 100 times later ( or simply die depending on your condition ).
We shouldn't be celebrating this. This is a disaster. Health and education impact society for DECADES.
But as i said, in a country that wants to believe that "we're in a recovery! Hurray !" it is very hard to show reality and not be called a pessimist.
Material use😛
NYT.com
WashingtonPost
Wikipedia.org
naturalnews.com
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Comments
So, nice article BUT... generally RL stuff is used as fodder for the game. This seems to have nothing to do with the game. You CAN be reported for that depending on the content. So as interesting as this is, you may need to contextualize for the game in the future.
Back in my former eCountry people welcomed a critic of RL and called this a "real article".
Hopefully i'll get the same treatment here. If i get my first FP i may stop but it would be sad as there is so much to be said, and i am just getting warmed up.
FP's don't mean anything but that someone with a MOD friend didn't like your opinion. I got 7 in one day once.
Some players were told at a meeting to create multies and it would be fine, yet some players are banned for doing just that.
It depends who is pressing the "report" button.
Had a huge comment typed, and lost it.
Basically, I worked for one of those "companies" pushing privatization, a few years back.
Our facility helped implement a new, easier document processing system one year. We worked 10-12 hour days of "mandatory" overtime, lost holidays, etc, but we did it gladly as we were working. During this time we helped train an overseas crew, which was touted to us as coming on to assist us with providing 24 hour coverage to our clients.
Once the implementation was done, our company starting laying off people, 5-8 at a time. In the first group was a 6 month pregnant woman, who was an office "star" up until then, who would have had 3 months of paid maternity leave coming, along with a few elderly workers who'd been there for years but had some scheduled medical time off issues coming up. They through a couple of young people in to each group. Each layoff was "the last" according to the company and people were terrified. This was at the beginning of the huge layoffs a few years back. People were told they were being laid off for "economic" reasons. They planned and grouped the layoffs perfectly so that it would be nearly impossible to prove anyone was laid off wrongly. In a year, every person at the facility was laid off, but upper management and it was closed down. Every job was now overseas.
If the mail is privatized, companies like this will immediately send every available job overseas to increase their bottom line, with absolutely NO thought to the state of our citizens or country. Billions of dollars in revenue are not enough for them. This isn't speculation, it's what they have already done and will continue to do. They have their global operations streamlined by this point so that they don't have to have positions in the US anymore.
We have to do what we can to keep jobs in our country.
I'll address outsourcing too in a future article, with all the effects.
I look forward to reading it.
That's because companies feel better when they are "thinner", with people that work harder and get less money. After all this is the lesson we are thought in economics at school: Economy is about increasing production and reducing costs.
It's a major problem for the developped countries population that demand higher wages. The problem is not the population in poor countries, they deserve a better life, but those who are too greedy and try to control everything, at the cost of turning people against people and without consideration for the rest of the world's population.
On the subject of "medical care", a friend of mine works full time in a corporate position and makes so little that he qualifies for state covered medical insurance for his children. He could not find an orthodontist to put braces on this son because none would take the state insurance.
Our country is broken.
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Medical spending is down because we can't afford to go to the doctor. You are correct.
The broken melting pot turned into a salad bowl long ago here in the rl US; best evidence of that was 2004 when lifelong Republican John Mclaughlin of PBS publicly endorsed John Kerry over Bush.
Tldr; had Kerry been elected in 04 we would not be burdened with the millstone Obama who dares wave a bogus birth certificate after his grandnother attested that Barack's birthplace was Kenya... too bad she was prematurely "silenced" days before the 2008 election...
Instead we have our esteemed leader owing his re-election due to the weather channels doom-mongering coverage of "superstorm" Sandy which in truth was little more than an Atlantic Ocean Fart.
Such foolishness; doubly so when rl politics seem to mimic an absurd MMO's in-game politics...
security vs freedom .. the more security you get the less freedom you have and vice versa .. USA pride itself for being free , survival of the fittest , break or make kind of thing , thats why we love you ... guns guts and glory plus a country song, barbecue and a dodge ram truck , the american way lol
Interesting article
About US mail:
http://www.pbfcomics.sciesnet.net/archive_b/PBF052-Kitty_Heaven.gif
...they always find a valid destination for your packages 😃DDD
lmfao!
Rofl
Neither rain nor snow... xD
I just stopped reading after you said how the GOP is destroying jobs because they hate unions, after that point I knew I would just get in a huge fight that wasn't worth anyone's time if I read any further.
I'll just leave this article with "agree to disagree." Unions have served their purpose in the USA's industrial revolutions and now they're just hurting small business employers which indirectly destroys jobs (seen this firsthand).
voted though because I can see you put effort into this
true that brotha
I cannot change your mind(s), i am just stating facts. You can choose if you wish to accept them or not.
I will talk about unions and their relevance too in a future article.
I don't think I've ever seen a RL article in eRep but I loved this one. I'll sub you and hopefully the next one will be just as good/better.
Privatize ftw
Wow! You are truly retarded, aren't you?
Please keep comments free of insults. Thank you.
This is another cloaked version of proletarian internationalism. I saw it in my day with the red scares and I see it now. Use the system to collapse it and usher in world communism. Use the American Constitution to abolish it. Use peace and prosperity to rape and pillage. Welcome to the New World Order. Пролетарии всех стран, соединяйтесь!
lol... I laughed XD