Sorry Manny, I think I understand what you're trying to say and genuinely sympathize

with the sentiment, but the fact is that assholes have become the overwhelming majority in this nation (maybe that they always were and I just failed to notice) and they are very well represented on this site. I've no doubt that I am counted among them, perhaps by you, certainly by those for whom being a DU "cool kid" is the pinnacle of, and reason for, their existence.

We're not on the same, or any team. This is not a community, it's not a club (literally anybody can join), and nobody that matters pays any attention to what goes on here. It has had no effect on the issues that it pretends to address. It's just a means to an income for three people. Thom Hartmann seems to occasionally use this place to find topics on slow news days or when his show gets stale, but like Thom's show, the unfortunate fact is that you could stuff the entirety of it into the eye of any major players and it wouldn't even feel the need to blink.

I don't know if you are younger, more tolerant, or perhaps you just haven't experienced the consequences of their ministrations to the same degree that so many of their victims have, but it should be clear to you by now that many of the most prolific posters here are here for no other purpose than to exorcise and validate their own selfish agendas.

Anyone that is outraged and pissed off by this oh-so-very-unacceptable reply, before you hit the alert button, do yourself a favor; spend the next two weeks tracking how much time you waste here and promise yourself that you will spend that much time actually working to help alleviate the real human suffering that Manny and xchrom are talking about.

That's the problem with conflating a political party with philosophy. The republican party was the

liberal party that actually instituted real progress for almost half a century before Big Money authoritarians took it over. For the overwhelming majority of its history the Democratic party has been the party that unflinchingly defended the status quo. Both of our Roosevelt Presidents were traitors to their parties and both enjoyed great popularity from those betrayals.

Political parties have no allegiance or purpose beyond gaining political power. The Democratic Party is no more liberal than the republican party is conservative, they are merely facades hiding the real powers behind each of them. Gore Vidal, IMO, put it best when he stated that,

"There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party ... and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt — until recently ... and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties"

K&R. Too little, too late. You've certainly nailed that head, but make no mistake, it is still

going on just has it has for centuries. The only thing that has changed is that they are much more efficient and can move more quickly than was previously possible.

Those of us that have no power or control are always either ignorant of what is being done or marginalized until it it is too late to do anything about it.

On this thread there is mention of climate change, green energy, and media control. All of these are perceived as being among the current issues, but the reality is that it's too late to do anything about them now.

The cycle of global warming passed the tipping point five minutes after anyone outside the field cared anything about it. We had some of those people telling us what was going on 40 years ago, but they were ignored and marginalized because stopping it would hurt the energy interests. By the time Al Gore was writing his book and road show the cycle was irreversible and the best that could be done was immediate action on a global scale to slow it and alleviate some of the worst consequences. A decade later we're still talking about what might be done 20 years from now.

Green energy is part and parcel to the warming of our planet and the resulting changes in weather patterns, but again, the best we can do is to try to catch up with what we should and could have been doing for at least 30 years. This is not to say we shouldn't do anything, but I use it to point out the real flaw is our own submission to the "pragmatic" voices that dominate every conversation and the underlying instruction to comply with authority.

If we're going to change what is being done to us we have to look at what is coming, instead of focusing entirely on what has passed. If we are to make any difference. The major part of that is going to be to take back our power from those that hold it. Nationality or political party affiliation are irrelevant. Those in power don't care about them, they only care about gaining or holding power and will change their line or location in any way that helps them achieve those goals.

For those of us that knew what was going on in 2001 - 2002, don't waste the energy re-fighting a battle that has been over for a decade, look at what is happening now, at the preparations those with real power are making, and focus your energy there. For those of you that didn't get it then, perhaps you might want to give some credit to the people who were right and listen to what they're saying now, instead of ridiculing and marginalizing them because what they're telling you is uncomfortable or inconvenient to you.

Some interesting facts about the USPS.

And some reading comprehension might allow you to reach rational conclusions.

I said quite clearly that it is my relative that works for them, today, right now. I also said very clearly that I did not doubt that you were an employee, that the service is absolutely rife with with short-sighted, Libertarian idiots that are too stupid to realize that they are enthusiastically supporting their own executions as well as the destruction of the best mail system on earth, although not quite that clearly. I have no way of knowing if this description fits you exactly, but the posts you have written on this topic indicate that you certainly lean that way.

I did write, quite clearly, that there are many places where improvements can be made, none of which involve degrading service or laying off the employees that actually do the work. Being an RCA is the worst job and that's where you start if you want to be a rural carrier. My relative did it for about 5 years before getting a route, and while it is not as good as it used to be, it is still better than what the contractors have and the service provided in those place where contractors are used is perfectly indicative of that.

You also paint a very misleading picture of the rural service. The post office is a Constitutionally mandated, formerly governmental, service and as such, is not meant to be a profitable enterprise. Yes, there are tiny offices with practically no customers scattered throughout the nation that get no service from FedEx or UPS and operate at what is, from a business standpoint, a loss. There are also places throughout the nation where it is not profitable to provide electricity and sanitary water, but that's one of the major reasons for government. A nation can't be a nation if the unprofitable citizens are left to their own devices. Would you have us abandon huge swaths of America because there are not enough people living there to make it profitable?

Beyond that however, there are major cities that are serviced by the rural system (about 70% of Scottsdale, AZ., for example). This is because the city/rural divisions were drawn up almost a century ago. Hardly any rural carriers use their own vehicles any longer. The Potter administration ended it when they noticed that carriers were able to pay for their personal vehicles under the old system and therefore deprive political contributors from some welfare. Carriers cannot schedule their days off, each route that has a day off (not all of them do except for Sunday), has it scheduled by the station or district supervisor. If the carrier wants to take Monday off, they have to spend a vacation day or take LWOP (leave without pay). Perhaps it is the idea of regular working people having paid vacation time that so upsets you?

USPS is the nation's largest employer of veterans, and the largest source of living wage jobs for those without connections and college degrees. But those are probably bad things in your book. Unless you're a political appointee, you're not going to get rich working for the post office, but you can raise a family, buy a house, and maybe send your kids to college in exchange for working your ass off for 40 years before you retire your broken-down body. OTOH, if you are politically connected, you can be paid in the top 2% of wage earners, destroy the organization that paid you and then get rich going to work for the corporate parasites that couldn't even exist if not for the USPS.

The current Postmaster General, Patrick Donahoe, is better than the last one, but is still grossly overpaid and apparently dedicated to protecting the executive class at the expense of productive employees. The one shrub put in, John E. Potter, spent 9 years utterly devastating the service and retiring with a package worth about $6M. The program of eliminating the best mail system in the world began under reagan (Big surprise there) and even after a quarter century of consistent attack, it remained self-sustaining. Even before reagan, the U.S. Congress has been using the USPS as it's personal slush fund to finance it's blatant graft for generations, yet I read nothing from you about addressing that.

The USPS has done an admirable job of adapting to the changing reality, remaining self sustaining with the rise of the world wide web and the constant attacks from Congressional lapdogs in the employ of private carriers and being forced to both subsidize them while being prohibited from competing with them. For 1/6 the price of a cup of coffee you can drop a letter to your mom in a box in LA and be assured that she will get it at her door in NY 2 or 3 days later. That level of service would cost you $8 with UPS today, and should people like you be successful in killing this modern marvel of efficiency, you can expect that to double.

Why this is really nothing much to celebrate.

Prior to the gutting of ERISA and flogging the alphanumeric soup of "individual retirement plans" on the public, the DJIA was really irrelevant to the average worker. It was a piece of trivia published in the WSJ and fretted over by executives and those with the means to invest, IOW people with knowledge, means, and interest in the topic.

Legalizing and rewarding the theft of the average person's earned equity (pre-seventies pensions as the primary example) and thereby forcing all of us into a market we have no control over and little if any knowledge of has captured and required us to root against their own interests. The worse things are for the average citizen, the better Wall Street likes it, so the higher the averages go.

One piece of evidence of this is the numerous "I've finally recovered my retirement account" statements here on this and the other threads.

You haven't, your equity was still stolen, you will never get that back. You've lost the interest you should have made over the intervening years, you will never get that back. You've lost the time and all the myriad effects that has had on your life, you will never get that back. You've lost the unimaginable amounts of money that you, as American taxpayers, are on the hook for in fueling this so-called recovery you will never get that back and your grandchildren will still be paying for that long after you're dead.

It is the illusion, the cynical manipulation of our collective perception that causes us to cheer our own losses to the exclusive benefit of those that stole what was ours that is so insidious. By making you feel better, you are motivated to participate in your own demise. All those losses listed above, and many more that would take hours to write, came from you and went to them and they don't even have the decency to thank you for it, nor do you have the understanding(?) to demand their gratitude and remuneration.

You're cheering your torturer for backing the thumbscrews off a quarter turn.

A million bankruptcies a year from medical costs, we are just one.

I thought I was retired in 2003. I had made a very good living for a couple of decades, almost any reasonable person would count me among the rich, and had socked away enough money to meet my rather modest needs for the rest of my life even if were to live to 100, or so I thought.

Even with the so-called great insurance I had, one major illness wiped me out. We lost our home, cars, savings, our future. On top of all this, I was one of the lucky ones. I had the means to find and get the good treatment that is available to those that can. Almost a decade earlier my mother was not one of those and she paid for her lack of wealth with her life.

She had insurance as well. She had the kind of insurance almost all of you that are lucky enough to have any, have. We didn't know that she had fallen into a system that is concerned with nothing except draining as much money as possible from sick people as they can before their victims die. We were all told, and we believed, that she was getting the care she needed. It wasn't until after her death that we learned the truth, the truth that she was dumped into the system that exists for the little people, that had we known and paid enough, she would probably be alive today.

So I am alive today. I am in my 50s, unhirable, over educated and overqualified, destined to live out whatever time remains doing the same menial jobs I did 30 years ago for less money than I made then. I have no insurance. I haven't had a checkup for six years, I haven't seen a dentist for nine. I very likely am sick again and for sure need to have my teeth looked after but we just can't afford it.

This is the great system that our President and our party has dumped all the rest of us into for the foreseeable future. This is the system that none of them will ever be victimized by. They will all get the very best treatment possible, the treatment that all of us are entitled to, for the rest of their lives. We get to pay for their futures with our lives.

Only from the short-sighted, doomed to fail perspective that dominates America today and

for the last 30 - 40 years or so.

Here's the thing. Just like every other non-botanical creature on earth, we are animals. We like to pretend that we are better than the other animals, but all the evidence is clear, we are just like them. We are ruled by uncontrollable and often unperceived impulses that regularly drive us to to take the worst actions, make the worst decisions, and behave in utterly irrational ways. We have several characteristics that seem to make us different or special, but in the end, we act no better (and often much worse) than any other animal.

One example; We have the capacity to understand that uncontrolled breeding will absolutely without fail lead to the devastation of our environment and ultimately our own demise, yet we breed like rabbits and then weep at the sight of starving children.

Smokers are addicts, I don't think there is any rational debate that this is so, but we like to pretend that it is a choice and therefore assign the blame to those that partake. The Obese eat too much and move too little, yet we claim that this too is beyond our control. Has anyone ever seen an obese person that lives in a famine stricken area? The very idea is ridiculous, but here in America obesity is due to genetics, a virus, a bad childhood, whatever we can make up to lay the cause on somebody/thing else. In fact, we have an entire industry devoted to nothing other than excusing our own lack of will that takes in more than enough money to end all hunger on earth.

And by this same lack of honest, objective consideration, we have a significant faction that fervently believes that denying help to those that need it will somehow, despite all evidence to the contrary, make those people give up the cigarette and put down the fork and just get better.