Fed-Ex helps fund Brookings Instit think tank & they're attacking our US Postal Service

[RiverLover]

Warning: Another Attack On Our Postal Service
by Dave Johnson
Campaign for America's Future
September 30, 2015

Should we run our country for the benefit of We the People, or so that a few people can profit off of We the People? This is a question that is rising to the surface in a battle between those who want the United States Postal Service (USPS) maintained and expanded, and those who want it privatized.

There are some conservative ideologues who just can’t stand that the USPS demonstrates government doing its job of helping make our lives better. As with Social Security, they attack it relentlessly and endlessly.

The latest push to privatize the USPS came from the Elaine Kamarck at Brookings, in “Delaying the Inevitable: Political Stalemate and the U.S. Postal Service.” Kamarck writes:

The USPS exists right now in never-never land. It is not fully public and it is not fully private. It is supposed to compete and innovate but it is stifled by law and saddled with a governance structure that impedes innovation. It is time to decide its future.

Using the old “buggy-whip” analogy, Kamarck claims that much of what the USPS does is obsolete. Paper mail is “fading away” because of the Internet (“only” 23 billion pieces of first-class mail were sent last year).

UPS and FedEx compete in parcel delivery.

Kamarck’s defines USPS’ dilemma as a “stalemate” in Congress that prevents lawmakers from passing legislation that would address the postal service’s challenges. (This stalemate is really between anti-government privatizers who want FedEx and UPS to take over all mail and package delivery, and the public who rely on the USPS and want it maintained and even expanded into new services like public banking.)

The “solution” Kamarck recommends is splitting the USPS in two. One part would be a public institution that delivers mail, and only mail, to everyone nationally. (This part is a reluctant nod to the pesky fact that a Post Office is mandated in our Constitution and popular with the public.)

The other would be a privatized organization for parcel delivery, a business that would compete with (or, more likely, immediately dismantled and sold to) FedEx and UPS....

http://ourfuture.org/20150930/warnng-another-attack-on-our-postal-service

FYI, Elaine Kamarck is a member of the Democratic Party and Third Way.

PBS: Think Tank transcript~

.....WATTENBERG: -- How did you come to become fascinated and entranced with government? It can be a pretty dry thing.
KAMARCK: Well, there was the -- there was the political genesis of it and the intellectual genesis. So, the political genesis was when I was working with the Democratic Leadership Council in the 19 -- late 1980’s, early 1990’s and the Democratic Party had a problem. The problem was that it was the party of government and everybody hated the government.
WATTENBERG: And the party of pessimism, they had turned into --
KAMARCK: Right.
WATTENBERG: They used to be so optimistic --
KAMARCK: That’s right
WATTENBERG: -- and they turned into - -
KAMARCK: And the two were -- and look the two were kind of related, ok, because they were the party of government when the government was pulling the country out of depression and the country was winning the second world war, et cetera.
And then government started to not be able to do what it had done for people. People lost faith in government. Democrats got pessimistic and at the -- the group I was working with at the time -- we wanted to breathe some new life --
WATTENBERG: The Democratic Leadership Council.
KAMARCK: Right.
WATTENBERG: Which was and is one of the motive forces of keeping the Democratic Party from going too far to the left.
KAMARCK: Yes, that’s exactly --
WATTENBERG: And among your Chairmen was -- were Bill Clinton.
KAMARCK: Bill Clinton.
WATTENBERG: Joe Lieberman.
KAMARCK: Sam Nunn.
WATTENBERG: Sam Nunn.
KAMARCK: Chuck Robb.
WATTENBERG: Chuck Robb.
KAMARCK: And, today, Harold Ford.
WATTENBERG: My heroes. [Laughter]
Now, you were recruited to serve in the Clinton Administration. And your title was?
KAMARCK: I was senior policy adviser to the Vice President......
http://www.pbs.org/thinktank/transcript1266.html

Also see~

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Way_%28think_tank%29

[RiverLover]

1. FYI - "Hillary Clinton Goes to Militaristic, Hawkish Think Tank, Gives Militaristic, Hawkish Speech"

Leading Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton this morning delivered a foreign policy speech at the Brookings Institution in Washington. By itself, the choice of the venue was revealing.

Brookings served as Ground Zero for centrist think tank advocacy of the Iraq War, which Clinton (along with potential rival Joe Biden) notoriously and vehemently advocated....

full story~
https://theintercept.com/2015/09/09/hillary-clinton-goes-militaristic-hawkish-think-tank-gives-militaristic-hawkish-speech/

Republicans invading the Democratic Party, that's the Third Way Brookings Institute.

[kelliekat44]

2. Corporations are people, you know. (Wish we could put them in jail like other felons.) nt

[RiverLover]

3. The world would be a better place if we could at least shutter the doors on corrupt corporations

whose "personhoods" cross the line. They can have a going out of business sale, call it a "yard sale", you know, since they are people with rights.