Mail delays hit Philadelphia residents, short staffed USPS struggles to keep up

I don't like to leave political comments here, but this gets my goad:

> it shows the culpability of most of the elected officials, from both parties.

The "both parties" remark drives me crazy, as if they are equally culpable in how we got to today, or equally culpable in their current leadership of America, so let's just back up for a moment.

No Democratic president has won a majority of the white vote since 1964. The Republican Southern Strategy cynically used racism to dismantle the New Deal. Mondale was the last New Deal democrat. His crushing defeat by Reagan is what led to the the current Democratic party. See the Democratic Leadership Council. The Democrats had lost the white vote to racists and they had to do something to start winning elections. So they adopted the so-called Third Way.

Simultaneously, Republicans and "right-to-work" (hah) laws dismantled unions, the primary source of Democratic fund raising. The Democrats had to go somewhere for money and that somewhere was corporate donors.

So we end up with both parties beholden to corporate influence and neither party truly representing working class voters. But let us not forget that the Democrats didn't have a whole lot of options. Republicans also loosened campaign finance restrictions making it even more expensive to win elections. Heads we win, tails you lose.

So the Republicans hold on to white working class voters through racism, not because they represent their economic interests. The Democrats become the "everyone else" party but are too much in the pocket of corporations and wall street. (One of Obama's biggest mistakes was not locking up the crooks responsible for the sub-prime crisis.)

Still, the Democrats are much more the party of the working class voter than Republicans. You don't see any Republican candidate arguing for sectoral collective bargaining for example. Republicans, not Democrats, are trying to kill the USPS, the largest provider of decent working-class jobs in the country.

I hope that Trump is the end of the Southern Strategy and that we end up with a not-racist Republican party. The Democrats need an opposition party that's based on serious policy differences instead of a party based on racism and cynicism.

For example, I don't think there's a free-market answer solution to health insurance, but if the Republicans believe that, let them at least make a serious proposal.

Here's an example of where the Republican party might go:

Five years ago, Oren Cass sat at the center of the Republican Party. Cass is a former management consultant who served as the domestic policy director for the Mitt Romney campaign and then as a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute. But then he launched an insurgency.

Today, Cass is the founder and executive director of American Compass, a new think tank created to challenge the right-wing economic orthodoxy. Cass thinks conservatism has lost its way, becoming obsessed with low tax rates and a quasi-religious veneration of markets. What conservatives need, he thinks, are clear social goals that can structure a radically new economic agenda: a vision that puts families first, eschews economic growth as the be-all-end-all of policymaking, and recognizes the inescapability of government intervention in the economy. Trump is likely — though not certain — to lose in 2020. And then, Cass thinks, Republicans will face a choice: to return to a “pre-Trump” consensus, or to build a “post-Trump future” — one that, he hopes, will prevent more Trump-like politicians from rising.

In this conversation, Cass and I discuss how current economic indicators fail, the relationship between economics and culture, why Cass believes production — not consumption — should be the central focus of public policy, the problems with how our society assigns status to different professions, the role that power plays in determining market outcomes, the conservative case against market fundamentalism, why Cass supports labor unions and industrial policy but not a job guarantee or publicly funded childcare, what the future of the Republican Party after Donald Trump looks like, whether Cass’s policies are big enough to solve the problems he identifies, and more.

https://overcast.fm/+QLhWcHCkY

Now that's a serious policy difference we can discuss instead of the clown show that is the current Republican party.

I have a lot of beefs with the Democratic party but it's not "both parties" by any stretch of the imagination.

Mail in voting could potentially expose a person’s vote. I don’t think we can trust the postal service to play fair, nor their carriers.

Or stolen or discarded. To vote by mail is to trust the letter carriers, a union that has typically heavily favored one party over the other. The solution is to open more voting locations - which is a state responsibility, not to trust it to some third party.

Every administration does this, to advance their own agenda. Are you surprised?

par·si·mo·ni·ous /ˌpärsəˈmōnēəs/ Learn to pronounce adjective unwilling to spend money or use resources; stingy or frugal.

With respect, I don’t think that means what you think it means. We should work to remove ambiguity and threats to voting, not adding, and entrusting your ballot which is your most sacred right as an American citizen, to the Postal Service considering it’s history over the past 30 years, is far too dangerous for my taste.