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

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

#141

Post by evan_ »

refurb wrote: post #83
ethanbond wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Republicans. It is Republicans who think more people voting means they will lose. Now is a time to be absolutely frank and direct with our words and our actions. Our democracy is not invincible. It is not inevitable. It is teetering on the brink and if it falls, there is absolutely no guarantee that it will recover. There is exactly one party who is trying to undermine the most basic principle of our democracy, and t…

Hate to break it to you, but it’s more complicated than that. You may want to do some reading from the other side, you sound like you’re parroting Democratic talking points. NYTimes disagrees with you that higher turnout always helps the Democrats. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/15/upshot/2020-election-turn... Typically increased turnout helps the Democrats, but that’s not necessarily true now.

Then why are republicans fighting so hard to keep people who should legally be allowed to vote from voting? They can’t be doing it because they think it will hurt their chances.

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

#142

Post by zanny »

ethanbond wrote: post #42
xzlzx wrote: post #25

Among other reasons, this is in big part happening due to a large push toward mail-in voting come the next Presidential election. It seems that certain political entities think they will suffer at the poles due to the fact that it’ll be easier to vote. easier voting -> more votes -> undesirable outcomes

Republicans. It is Republicans who think more people voting means they will lose. Now is a time to be absolutely frank and direct with our words and our actions. Our democracy is not invincible. It is not inevitable. It is teetering on the brink and if it falls, there is absolutely no guarantee that it will recover. There is exactly one party who is trying to undermine the most basic principle of our democracy, and t…

Note that just because Republicans are wrong (and boy are they) does not make Democrats right. Democratic administrations, even with majorities to pass legislation, have done nothing to correct much of the anti-democratic processes in the US including elections being on a non-holiday Tuesday, absentee ballots being limited / restricted and operating state-by-state, the persistence of first past the post voting being the least representative form of election, the continued existence of the electoral college and senate, nothing to correct the loss of voting rights for felons, and more.

The Republicans are the wrong answer, but by and large and consistently for the last 80+ years the Democrats have not been the right answer. The US has a void (many voids, but this one in particular is most problematic) of a labor / workers party. Democrats are liberals and republicans are conservatives, both of which represent capital interests. This lack of representation is structurally foundational to US government and has been intentional since the founding over 2 centuries ago, and its also intentional that the only path to correcting it without violent revolution is a supermajority of states to compel an amendment to fix it. Which is in and of itself a nondemocratic process because a supermajority of states have a minority of the population.

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

#143

Post by isoskeles »

callmeal wrote: post #88
nemothekid wrote: post #10

Incredibly frustrating to get mail by USPS over the past couple months and even more frustrating to know this is an intentional kneecapping of the USPS by the administration in order "prove" government services are inefficient to privatize the USPS

[flagged]

If we're disregarding "congress" and "administration", I'm not sure how you propose this is a "Republican" problem at all. Republicans where? Republican... citizens? Republican postal workers? Which Republicans have caused USPS to has a history of financial issues?

Just from this graph, it looks like since 1960, the only time they ran a surplus was 1994 - 2004: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/49/USPS_Sur...

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

#144

Post by sixstringtheory »

missedthecue wrote: post #94
callmeal wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

The simplest argument against government run services is that eventually, the people you don't like will be in charge of them

The simplest counterpoint to this is that government allows accountability.

You will have those same people you don’t like running private enterprise, but CEOs have much longer terms than postmasters general.

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

#146

Post by ethanbond »

zanny wrote: post #142
ethanbond wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Republicans. It is Republicans who think more people voting means they will lose. Now is a time to be absolutely frank and direct with our words and our actions. Our democracy is not invincible. It is not inevitable. It is teetering on the brink and if it falls, there is absolutely no guarantee that it will recover. There is exactly one party who is trying to undermine the most basic principle of our democracy, and t…

Note that just because Republicans are wrong (and boy are they) does not make Democrats right. Democratic administrations, even with majorities to pass legislation, have done nothing to correct much of the anti-democratic processes in the US including elections being on a non-holiday Tuesday, absentee ballots being limited / restricted and operating state-by-state, the persistence of first past the post voting being…

I am no fan of the Democratic Party and strongly feel we need to overhaul our systems in a big, big way. Part of that overhaul cannot be, however, a period without democracy. It is much easier to maintain, modify, or destroy a democracy than it is to create one.

Here you have the Republican establishment, not insurgents, actively trying to disrupt Americans’ right to vote for their leadership.

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

#147

Post by evan_ »

jypepin wrote: post #57
floatingatoll wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can return your mail-in ballot to a drop slot / drop box at your local election office, which saves them postage fees and gives you more certainty it arrived. If you can’t spare the time then the mail still works, but for those that are worried, it’s allowed.

I can't vote, but i can drive. Is it legal to drop someone else's ballot to the local election office? I'll drop it for people who can't go.

That’s derisively known as ballot harvesting and the legality varies. Republicans generally say it’s cheating and try to pass laws to ban it, except when they do it themselves. https://twitter.com/libsinamerica/status/1261069338427211782...

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

#148

Post by claudeganon »

alextheparrot wrote: post #111
claudeganon wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Moreover, it shows the culpability of most of the elected officials, from both parties. It shows that after the labor movement was destroyed, the only material base for the Democratic Party was to go looking for money from the same people who give it to Republicans. Saying we don’t need a labor movement is equivalent to saying “we don’t need a political party that relies on support from workers.”

If I may, I'll add a correction to your quoted statement to give my intended meaning: “we don’t need a political party that relies only on support from workers.” The subdivision and segregation of American political movements has been an incredibly useful tool in defusing them. The labor, civil rights, suffrage, identity movements, were powerful, but the lack of intersectionality made it so that once policy victories…

I won’t say that you’re naive, but only that that is kind of diffuse liberalism has no history of effecting real political change while the labor movement has a long, international history of doing so.

While it’s good to acknowledge the failings of prior forms of the labor movement in addressing issues of race and gender, this doesn’t reflect their current state or reality. Unions for groups like the teachers, nurses, or service workers across the country are already wildly diverse across every axis.

The primary failing of solidarity in the US is among white collar professionals, who see the struggle of these workers as separate from their own concerns, even though these unions been fighting for the racial and economic justice for many years prior to the current unrest. To my mind, this is the result of an ingrained classism, where said white collar workers see themselves above unionization (and thus the working class union members), preferring acts of temporary, performative symbolism over durable structures that would unite them with others across class lines. The first step in fighting this would of course be to form their own unions in explicit solidarity with those of the working class.

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

#149

Post by lopmotr »

nxc18 wrote: post #51

It’s frustrating that we have to discuss the current administration as if we assume they are acting in good faith. It is frustrating to have to have a ‘but both sides...’ and ‘actually they just care about market efficiency’ arguments when the current administration, acting against all expert advice, has taken action to create the worst outcomes we’ve seen in decades, at least as long as I’ve been alive: unmanaged gl…

> create the worst outcomes we’ve seen in decades

Do you really believe all that is worse than the Iraq and Afghanistan wars which caused millions of people to be killed? It sounds like you're just a nationalist who thinks their lives don't matter because they're not Americans. If millions of Americans were killed in a decade-long internal war, you would probably rank it worse than the mail being slow, fear for your American lifestyle, and the president's policies being stopped by the courts.

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

#150

Post by adrianmonk »

missedthecue wrote: post #107
riffic wrote: post #80

Buy stamps, as if they were toilet paper or war bonds. If the American public buys stamps they can have a collective action of helping to save one of its finest institutions.

Asking people to perform charity in order to save socialised letter delivery is going to be a hard sell.

You could plan to use the stamps later and think of it as a loan to help the USPS through a pandemic and a hostile administration. Of course this means limiting yourself to a quantity you can actually use.

Forever stamps roughly match inflation, so you're not even losing money in real terms, so it's not a horrible return.

I don't use a lot of stamps myself, but I know someone who sells stuff on Amazon, eBay, etc., so if I bought $100 of stamps now, I could probably get them to buy them at full face value from me later. (It also looks like you can sell unused stamps online but only at around 70% of face value.)

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