Josh Marshall:
The short and sweet of it is that Time Warner has proposed and postal regulators have accepted a proposal which is actually reducing postage costs for mega-mags like Time and Newsweek while dramatically raising them for small independent publishers. From small mags on the right and left I've been deluged in recent weeks by letters saying the new rates are tipping them into financial crisis.
[snip]
For two hundred years US postal rate has been geared to support independent media and political discourse. It's something small magazine publishes and press theory types understand very well but it's not that widely understood in the general public. If that comes to an end it will be a very big deal. Here's a link to where you can find out more.
7 comments:
Comes from running the postal service like a business, I guess. Which would be the plan for the internet as well under AT&T's reforming monopoly if some kind of network neutrality isn't instituted soon.
We need to start recognizing more things as public resources.
Public resources: common good: NOT for private businesses.
Thank you.
Private = secret. Do we want secret government or do we want public government?
Public. Transparency, checks and balances. Open government.
And for those who (like Jack Nicholson as the general) yell that we can't handle the truth, try us.
Amen.
The Post Office is one of the very few federal agencies that are constitutionally mandated... i.e., we can't not have one. The privatized Post Office isn't really privatized: its risks are socialized, because it cannot be allowed to fail. What an "opportunity": a sprawling for-profit business, with a 100 percent government guarantee of "success."
So how come we have letter carriers going postal....?
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