Forum Post: Stealing Commons
Posted 4 years ago on Aug. 10, 2020, 9:32 a.m. EST by agkaiser
(2552)
from Fredericksburg, TX
This content is user submitted and not an official statement
The Trump administration continues the privatization frenzy started during Milton Friedman's sojourn with Nixon and put on steroids by Reagan. The Republican pre-election strategy is to further weaken the post office, which was strong until "The United States Postal Service and Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act" of 2006. That was during the reign of George II. Today they're making more costly demands of postal services, while denying the funds to support them. This is also a point of penetration of voter suppression. The cons know if voter turnout is high, they will lose. They can't depend on an electoral college inversion again. They must suppress the vote, inspire more corruption like the hacking of Ohio voting machines or hanging chads in Florida or they will lose. Republicans can't win a fair fight. And of course, while discouragement of mail in votes, which might encourage intelligent voters by offering some protection from the virus, is their immediate objective. privatization resulting in increased investor profits, at our expense, is always the final goal.
The loss of our common heritage to private individuals, cliques, classes and corporations has been going on for a long time now. Hear Ye this 17th century English folk poem:
The Goose and the Common Authors unknown
The law locks up the man or woman Who steals the goose from off the common But leaves the greater villain loose Who steals the common from off the goose
The law demands that we atone When we take things we do not own But leaves the lords and ladies fine Who take things that are yours and mine
The poor and wretched don't escape If they conspire the law to break This must be so but they endure Those who conspire to make the law
The law locks up the man or woman Who steals the goose from off the common And geese will still a common lack Till they go and steal it back [Seventeenth century protest against English enclosures] https://unionsong.com/u765.html
I would change the final line: "Till we go and steal it back!"
The "hanging chads" were no doubt a problem, but we must not forget that 100,000 voted for Ralph Nader in Florida, far more than the "hanging chads" it shouldn't have been that close, elections matter, voting matters...2000 was by far the most important election of my lifetime, we could have had a real chance to do something about climate change, now we just danced on the Titanic.
"1 in 3 college students faces food insecurity"! by James Burch:
"A surprising number of young Americans are suffering serious health consequences because they don’t have the money to eat properly." Maybe this stealing of youth and young people's future, is actually the ultimate Commons being Stolen?
respice; adspice; prospice ...
"As White House Floats Skimpier Relief Bill in Bid for GOP Support ... Progressives Warn Going Small Would Be 'Catastrophic'" by Jake Johnson:
"Congress should err on side of offering generous relief to a larger pool of people, rather than too little."
fiat justitia ...
While I was in college, I worked multiple jobs, on and off campus. My way of coping with late-night food insecurity was to mooch off of my parents ( yeah, it's a kind of frequent "visit" to keep in touch ! There's no place quite like home ) and carry back to campus fried foods which tended to spoil slower than the other foods during the week.
I used "Soviet-era under-the-window" Berliningrad cold storage for keeping the foods relatively unspoiled for a few days ( in those days, the colder seasons were fairly consistently cold--I worked during the hot summers and studied during the colder seasons; I modulated the consumption of the perishable foods by knowing about the activation energy needed for spoiling and its dependency on ambient temperatures--every 10C/18°F roughly doubles the reaction rate of the spoiling process; the essence of successful policy for longer-term food storage by avoiding the wet dilute-electrolyte bodily temperature zone { recall "Life is electric fire burning slowly in water" } is to "keep dry foods dry, salty foods salty, hot foods hot, and cold foods cold," in line with the Bible's "each unto its kind" principle observed by God during Genesis.) I was glad that I had previously made the decision to hang around somewhat close to home ( like the International Space Station being located somewhat close to Earth before a human expeditionary voyage to Mars ) for college studies before embarking on a distant voyage.
Being largely illiterate ( Mom's being so was due to the patriarchal societal culture and the large sibling cohort, which together waste potential human talent--as half of the people were destined to become "breeders" for "other families' males"; Dad's being so was due to his own childish choice influenced by his fear of his school's barbaric bodily punishment of inflicting pain upon his classmate's palm with a heavy stick for the pupil's inability to recite-from-memory, and his lenient "let it be" very wealthy mother who [ erroneously ! { Dad was sent away with "advantages" from a war zone but no matter where he had escaped to, war chased him down; wealth really didn't matter--life mattered } ] believed that his inheritance would take care of him and his descendants for generations upon generations,) my parents couldn't and wouldn't help out with my over-their-heads college education ( I jettisoned their { almost exclusively Mom's } academic help in early grade school; I knew that furthering my education would require independence from my parents' help because Dad assumed that I had become literate in English after I had learnt all of English's 26 Roman alphabets; he even told me that Mathematics was just the ten decimal digits and the four operations: plus, minus, multiply, and divide--it did inflate my benighted sense of accomplishment and pride until the next school grade { with fractions having crept onto my celadon plate; glazes' cations' ionic radii affect colors approximately as Rydberg's Forumla "In the Beginning, God signed His Name "Alpha" to the Rydberg constant of this formula" and Planck-Einstein relation; scientists who contemplated light made epoch-making discoveries } and it p o p p e d like a balloon ) but they { mostly Mom } cooked and I could use a boost.
Forum Post: Commitment to Literacy and Survival of Diverse Ideas made Christian European Culture dominate
Backlash Over Postal Service Sabotage:
Because The USPS is about The Commons!
U grapes however .. are mostly - All About U!
temet nosce!
DeJoy must go.
From truthout: "But Trump has taken USPS sabotage to new heights, including by appointing businessman Louis DeJoy as postmaster general of the USPS. DeJoy is a major Trump donor, giving nearly $450 million dollars to Trump’s inauguration, Victory Fund, and the Republican National Committee (RNC). He’s also in frequent contact with top Republican Party officials and met with Trump the first week of August prior to his meeting with Democratic leadership.
DeJoy has enacted and overseen multiple policies that will put both the viability of the Post Office and the integrity of the November election at risk. On August 7, DeJoy displaced two top executives at the USPS and reassigned 23 others, in a move critics called a “Friday night massacre” that centralizes power around DeJoy. He has also attempted to increase the rates states pay to send mail-in ballots. And most recently, during his tenure, the USPS removed post office boxes in Portland and Eugene, Oregon, and across the state of Montana, prompting Senator Jon Tester (D-Montana) to demand answers from DeJoy. The USPS is still unable to confirm to CNN if the removal of mailboxes will stop."
When these RWNJ governments go too far, it backfires on them. While the people can be pretty stupid, they're not THAT stupid.
"But Trump has taken USPS sabotage to new heights, including by appointing businessman Louis DeJoy as postmaster general of the USPS. DeJoy is a major Trump donor, giving nearly $450 million dollars to Trump’s inauguration, Victory Fund, and the Republican National Committee (RNC). He’s also in frequent contact with top Republican Party officials and met with Trump the first week of August prior to his meeting with Democratic leadership.
"DeJoy has enacted and overseen multiple policies that will put both the viability of the Post Office and the integrity of the November election at risk. On August 7, DeJoy displaced two top executives at the USPS and reassigned 23 others, in a move critics called a “Friday night massacre” that centralizes power around DeJoy."
Repeating your excerpt from:
https://truthout.org/articles/trump-is-facing-a-nationwide-wave-of-backlash-over-his-postal-service-sabotage/ by Alexis Goldstein (ex OWS & Occupy The SEC) & also try to consider:
https://truthout.org/articles/usps-sorting-machines-are-still-being-dismantled-despite-dejoys-promise-to-stop/ by Chris Walker
fiat lux et fiat justitia ...
DeJoy needs to go to de jail.
http://bluenc.com/content/along-trump-louis-dejoy-needs-go-jail
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/06/us/politics/dejoy-political-donations.html
"DeJoy Pressured Workers to Donate to G.O.P. Candidates, Former Employees Say"
OMG! Can this be true?! "Controversial postal chief poised to remain in Biden administration"!
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/controversial-postal-chief-poised-remain-biden-administration/story?id=74469137
"The USPS governing board, all Trump-appointed, has heaped praise on Louis DeJoy" but so what?!
caveat emptor!
That is sick! We've been had!
They gave us the fascist so we'd accept the neoliberal con. I'm disgusted.
https://thecorbynproject.com/ in the UK may need an equivalent in USA. Also fyi NB:
https://jacobinmag.com/2020/12/jeremy-corbyn-project-for-peace-and-justice-launch
per aspera ad astra ...
"Oh my God, it's full of stars !!!"
A glass was broken indicating the direction of time "everything is reversible in principle according to quantum theory's linearity but nearly nothing is reversible in practice according to the second law of thermodynamics; a small number can seemingly defy a statistical law to perceive a miracle but a large number can never do so to escape the heat death" and then the Star Child was born after aiming at reaching for the Moon. We got Landsat for land whales instead of getting to Clavius and TMA-1.
A round-the-world voyage started in Hong Kong with flying on Pan Am Clipper Gem of the Seas to visit a long-lost little sister in Japan and on to Columbia to "sound, sound the trump of fame." The stars were so bright. Bye, bye, Hong Kong. Motherland was gunning at the escaped "kidnapper" and beckoning to you to return ( when the 99-year-lease expired on July 1st, 1997 and China's "Century of Humiliation" ostensibly ended although Shittism lives on--it is being abated by 2.8-billion lungs which can breathe and filter ) so kiss me goodbye as I was leaving on a jet plane, with Mom, Dad, and I being the only passengers { but the Boeing-707 flight out of Tokyo to New York was jam-packed } aboard a Boeing-747¿SP?, perhaps testing how fuel efficiently or quickly { about 2.5 hours on that day } the Hong Kong to Tokyo route could be flown ( I've never flown higher than this flight's 39,000 ft. altitude--my novice { the water dripped drop by drop into a white porcelain bowl making ripples under the full moon, the KGV gold coin, and Liberty Eagle silver half dollar ritual apparently worked ! } ears hurt while the plane was swooping to land--opening mouth and swallowing air could've helped relieve the pressure difference; the plane's wing's mechanism was rather elaborate as there were multiple slats being extended at different times, flaps being moved, as well as reverse thrusting. Thanks for making our new lives in America possible, Pan Am !!! )
Yeah, we left behind my Hong-Kong young childhood's mandatory "Russian root soup" food culture learnt from the Russian food vendors in the global-refugee-central Old Shanghai ( the Russian aristocrats deposed by the Russian Revolution and the Jews fleeing from Nazi German persecution all found their new homes as refugees harbored and/or fed and hidden from "the Reds" and "the Japs" in Old Shanghai; a number of the Jews founded with a hope for a home truly of their own { here's the origin of the apartheid-like nationalistic policies which conflict with the indigents' need for Lebensraum, too; Israel cannot admit all the world's Jews to Zion in a desert/quasi-desert environment without infringing upon the indigents' Lebensraum } " i.e. stop being global pinballs with every place to go but no place to be " and settled in the state of Israel.)
I ate chicken at every meal as Dad had promised until I got sick of eating it. I would still eat gourmet chicken butts, fried pork rinds and residues left over after Mom had rendered the fat for lard, lard on salted rice, preserved spring-leaf shoots, potato/tomato/kidney-bean/preserved-mustard-green soup, etc. but voluntarily. If one loves and chooses the "mandatory," it's indistinguishable from the "voluntary." My Mom asked me at the time whether I would like to try eating the fried pork fat residues. I agreed, smelled, ate, and decided that I liked them. I only thought of them as being "mandatory" only in the light of all of the other specialties being eaten about the same time. What I ate as "gourmet" chicken butts was likely butchers' discard originally but the second batch of four pounds was probably due to their extra effort to give my Mom far more so I saw the eternal light of "the fairy crew out boating" cast upon the water ripples.
Exercising moderation in eating was the key not to get nauseated from merely thinking of these near-starvation diet specialties.
For Hong Kongers seeking to flee the [Prussian-militaristic]German-Fascist-Bolshevik authoritarian ideology, the Jews may still remember what Shanghainese and Hong Kongers once did to shelter the "wretched refuse of your teeming shore" and offer help. Hong Kongers' ancestors had stored up goodwill in multiple peoples during the others' times of need. I remember Hong Kong ( or its ¿traditional Chinese? culture similar to what Fake Communism had flushed out from Old Shanghai as manifested in : my teacher's after-schoolhours' helping me with the ×2 multiplication table { the Swiss used the Trachtenberg system for overcoming the same common problem in their young children, } principal's sharing her umbrella with me when it suddenly began to rain while I was walking to school, etc.) Others may, too.
When the squirrel-tail-maned rooster goes into the baby shower with woman friends early in the morning, as decreed -- a liberated highflow showerhead shall henceforth sing "cock-ad-oodle-doo."
Due to cracking ( the ones who are most adept at spying and stealing trade secrets are the ones most concerned about developing uncrackable quantum codes lest others crack their business to discover what unsavory practices they are actually doing,) all communications cease immediately in order to revert to Type-0 Earth civilization by dampening vicious-cycle feedback-loop instabilities; regression over progression as authoritarian regimes desire to get stability for retaining eternal power. Prussia-animated Germany knew how to do it one better through conquests including the bulk of the Soviet Union in the last century. My Big Brother bought me a light-assault carbine to play with, too ( you may well correctly guess what he had aspired to become, ) but my Mom bought me guppies to raise shortly after we had moved into a much denser populated neighborhood. She was probably trying to cheer me up after I'd been dis-/re-located.
Protestant Christianity fits modern mobile lives better because one is less answerable to the crimes committed by relatives when everyone is answerable directly to God or the Law in a Christianity-informed state. It makes no sense why I should be held accountable for the crimes of anyone I had absolutely nothing to do with. It's not my "crime" that my ancestors bought [farm]land hundreds of years ago after their unfortunate neighbors had been drowned by a deluge ( foretold in a dream and fulfilled/"triggered" by a mischievous village butcher ) and their survivors needed sustenance.