30 thoughts on ““Today it’s the US Postal Service closing down 3700 additional offices. Tomorrow it will be Social Security, Medicare and so on and so forth.””
Bruce
Spend more fuel to go to the nearest post office = makes you more in debt and subject to more control.
It’s enough to make you go postal.
*boom, tish*
Kwai Chang
the geithners and bernankes are going to need more body guards…
(and a pope-mobile)
…I wonder if that old former Hitler-Youth Ratzinger will loan out the keys
Billy
We, (society) are so fucked! It saddens me to see that humanity can not manage to balance itself. We need to have a calamity event for us to “let the pieces where they fall” and rebuild. As if we do not see what past societies tore themselves up for. wealth and greed. I am not against striving to achieve more in life and financial well being, but not by transfering my obligations to my fellow citizen of this planet.
In the end it is all in vain as there “sour apples” always manage fuck up our well being.
I would very much like to see these “apples,” “chopped” before they rot away on their own and contaminate more “apples.”
Chervonets
We are in the end game
03052011
It’s about time the USPS took a hit. Hopefully more federal agencies will receive the same treatment.
If you know people who work for the State, you are well aware of the downsizing, furloughs and other income adjustments that the state workers have had to endure.
States agencies dont have a blank check like our federal agencies.
The federal agencies need to start functioning like they have a budget!
YoLithos
Why not postal video bingo parlors? The usual signs and bulletins : “We cash checks”, “We accept food stamps”, “Cash for gold (teeth) – no questions asked”, “Talk to Louie, say Sam sent you”.
OTOH, local small-scale “delivery” services ought to see more demand. Anyone with means to set up an electric bike (or tuktuk, other vehicle) relay might have something of an opportunity – for a while. The same goes for “lankiosks”. Etc.
The real increase will be in goons and gangsters, the usual product of social decay (not just lack of money). Lack of money is a more serious issie in the US, than in many other places, due to the literally mindless veneration of it. And, the dependency on having it, due to the rather rather dispersed and isolated (“individualistic”) social structure. Or lack thereof. Which is being continually abraded.
Why do I worry? “No man is an island”. The same goes for countries, cultures, communities, and so on.
So there is austerity ahead. So times may be tough. I lived through austerity and an undeclared war called a confrontation and came out of the end of it into the swinging 60′s.
My stock of silver is slowly growing…
Tom
Cuts for social services (USPS, FAA) and increases in transfers to the wealthy (bank and corporate bailouts). Just another step towards third world America.
Jean Desjardins
Austerity worldwide while they laugh at us.
1- Use bitcoins (cuts money supply to International Mother F-ckers)
2- Buy More Silver (will eventuall crash JPM)
3- Don’t vote (will cut oxigen supply to lobbying and hence fascism)
4- Give yourself a raise: stop paying taxes to prop up *your* economy.
JailBanksters
If it gets real bad, I’m sure the International Mafia Fund will step in and save the Day.
Kevin Eshbach
Time to crank up Megadeth’s “How The Story Ends”.
F. Beard
Greece and Ireland are in trouble because they borrowed in a currency they cannot create, the Euro. The US, OTOH, can create endless amounts of US dollars to pay its debts, ameliorate the damage the bankers have done and potentially fix the economy with a universal bailout of the population.
The Euro is a foretaste of what a gold standard would be like. Government, before it could spend, would have to buy or borrow gold from the private sector. A government gold standard is thus fascist since it privileges special interests such as gold owners, gold miners and bankers.
Yes, the US government has socialistic aspects but that is because the US population got good and sick of the fascist gold standard. Must we relearn that lesson or should we quit chasing our tails and move forward to genuine reform?
Trevor Morgan
Interesting. The gold standard is fascist?
But gold was in use as a standard millennia before fascism came into being.
How can this stack up?
JonnyJames
The decaying Empire. Just like the others before them
High rate of violent crime
Accute socio-economic stratification
Endemic institutional corruption
decaying transportation infrastructure
decaying civic infrastructure
decaying or lack of moral framework
decaying social structure,
Teachers, police, firefighters laid off by the 10s of thousands
Imperial wars wasting trillions
Austerity is already here, but now it will accelerate
Homeless Children and Veterans
Shame on you
Homeless Children, Veterans, Elderly and Disabled
Shame on me
Steven Rowlandson
Oh how the people and the government are the same. They are spoiled babies that refuse to live with in their means. If you don’t have money to spend with out borrowing you bite the bullet and don’t spend untill pay day.
Jack Barnes: Someone dropped a bomb on the bond market Thursday – a $1 billion Armageddon trade betting the United States will lose its AAA credit rating.
In one moment, an invisible trader placed a single trade that moved the most liquid debt market in the world.
The massive trade wasn’t placed in bonds themselves; it was placed in the futures market.
Steve/NotLiverpool
All these post offices closing. Maybe that’s why the Silver Keisers are missing?
How the hell is Troy anyway Max? I bet he is eating well on our money.
Post offices round my neck of the woods are rarely used for postage. They should be called benefit giro cashing offices, where you can also post.
Benefits payments.
Immigrants sending money home.
Immigrants taxing expensive cars.
Prison resettlement payments.
Changing £ to E, for a chavvy trip to Ibiza
More benefits payments.
Passport applications.
Driving licence changes.
A. Kadlcík
@Steven Rowlandson,
While there are similarities between the people and a government, there are also huge differences. One of them being that the government(s) can create its own money while an individual cannot. Thus, an individual has to live within his means; a government does not have to.
Now there are external limitations to government spending, of course. Oil, or any resource that comes in a limited supply – and is difficult or impossible to recycle – is a boundary that no government issued money can cross; even if gold was used, by the way. But any other thing – be it production, service, research, pensions, etc. – can be financed by the government.
Another limitation, as F. Beard mentioned, is if the government cannot really control its monetary policies; the central capability being the creation of money. This is the case of the EU countries. A country like Greece has lost – without a fight – its sovereignty by becoming a part of the EU/EMU.
To adopt gold standard (physical or gold-backed) would mean the government taking a good aim and shooting itself in the foot. Then again who knows, maybe the people actually want to give up the sovereignty of their country. If there was a referendum where the people decided they do not want to have an independent country, then who am I to criticise such a choice…
Vortex
We are many they are few. Rebellion is not a part time undertaking. The who “we” have “placed” in positions of public trust have been seduced by the moneyed interest who have the means….ie leisure and fiat currency. Those who have, up to now, temporarily hamstrung us with overspecialized knowledge/compartmentalization and stupified our intelligence and emotional intelligent furry are going to meet resistance soon…..and these parasites and molesters of decency will be dealt with. Both the puppets and their illegitimate masters.
America is not a place its an idea and ideas are…….
adampeart
Good riddance! The USPS is a freaking waste of taxpayer money. I say do away with it altogether and legalize private mail delivery. I’d hardly call this ‘austerity.’ It should be called ‘common sense.’
Dark Markets
“Today it’s the US Postal Service closing down 3700 additional offices. Tomorrow it will be Social Security, Medicare and so on and so forth.”
meanwhile, stupid, distracted, misinformed, entertainment-stuffed & wallowing Americans are too stupified to notice, that EVERYWHERE he goes, BEN BERNANKE – the guy dishing out TENS of TRILLIONS of cheap confetti “Bernanke Bucks” $$ to ENTITLED, CONNECTED BANKSTERS, ONLY – walks around with a self-satisfied smirk on his face, like he and the Fed are doing a GREAT JOB! of running the U.S. economy…
(the are… of running in to the DITCH, the CESSPIT of royalist gross inequality and Irish famine-esque poverty & despair.)
Dark Markets
@JohnnyJames – big fan.
re RATM (Rage Against the Machine) GREAT band… too bad they were ahead of their time. In the late ’90s, when Rage was making it big-time, middle-class Americans were doing reasonably well, with all the jobs from the PC & internet boom, and there wasn’t much of a market for RATM’s “raging against the machine” !
It wasn’t until the END of the Clinton admin (Jan. 2001) that the Rubin-Summers-Paulson “of, by & for Golddamn Sachs” agenda started kicking in to high gear: #1. DEREGULATING the ENTIRE U.S. financial markets (= license to loot, plunder, pillage, rape, & swindle), and
#2. OUTSOURCING U.S. jobs, entire factories, ENTIRE INDUSTRIES to China, so Bob Rubin’s pals on Wall Street & City-of-London could make short-term “profits” sucking the last dimes out of the American middle-class they had just eviscerated…
noah
IMO the closing of the postal offices is a direct consequense of the emergence of the email. And the use of PDF’s as a legal document. People dont send letters anymore. I dont see the connection to social security and medicare and so forth!?
Spend more fuel to go to the nearest post office = makes you more in debt and subject to more control.
It’s enough to make you go postal.
*boom, tish*
the geithners and bernankes are going to need more body guards…
(and a pope-mobile)
…I wonder if that old former Hitler-Youth Ratzinger will loan out the keys
We, (society) are so fucked! It saddens me to see that humanity can not manage to balance itself. We need to have a calamity event for us to “let the pieces where they fall” and rebuild. As if we do not see what past societies tore themselves up for. wealth and greed. I am not against striving to achieve more in life and financial well being, but not by transfering my obligations to my fellow citizen of this planet.
In the end it is all in vain as there “sour apples” always manage fuck up our well being.
I would very much like to see these “apples,” “chopped” before they rot away on their own and contaminate more “apples.”
We are in the end game
It’s about time the USPS took a hit. Hopefully more federal agencies will receive the same treatment.
If you know people who work for the State, you are well aware of the downsizing, furloughs and other income adjustments that the state workers have had to endure.
States agencies dont have a blank check like our federal agencies.
The federal agencies need to start functioning like they have a budget!
Why not postal video bingo parlors? The usual signs and bulletins : “We cash checks”, “We accept food stamps”, “Cash for gold (teeth) – no questions asked”, “Talk to Louie, say Sam sent you”.
OTOH, local small-scale “delivery” services ought to see more demand. Anyone with means to set up an electric bike (or tuktuk, other vehicle) relay might have something of an opportunity – for a while. The same goes for “lankiosks”. Etc.
The real increase will be in goons and gangsters, the usual product of social decay (not just lack of money). Lack of money is a more serious issie in the US, than in many other places, due to the literally mindless veneration of it. And, the dependency on having it, due to the rather rather dispersed and isolated (“individualistic”) social structure. Or lack thereof. Which is being continually abraded.
Why do I worry? “No man is an island”. The same goes for countries, cultures, communities, and so on.
John on Australian Housing and Banks.
Oh oh!
http://www.youtube.com/user/stellaconcepts#p/u/0/MUTIMwwYL24
So there is austerity ahead. So times may be tough. I lived through austerity and an undeclared war called a confrontation and came out of the end of it into the swinging 60′s.
My stock of silver is slowly growing…
Cuts for social services (USPS, FAA) and increases in transfers to the wealthy (bank and corporate bailouts). Just another step towards third world America.
Austerity worldwide while they laugh at us.
1- Use bitcoins (cuts money supply to International Mother F-ckers)
2- Buy More Silver (will eventuall crash JPM)
3- Don’t vote (will cut oxigen supply to lobbying and hence fascism)
4- Give yourself a raise: stop paying taxes to prop up *your* economy.
If it gets real bad, I’m sure the International Mafia Fund will step in and save the Day.
Time to crank up Megadeth’s “How The Story Ends”.
Greece and Ireland are in trouble because they borrowed in a currency they cannot create, the Euro. The US, OTOH, can create endless amounts of US dollars to pay its debts, ameliorate the damage the bankers have done and potentially fix the economy with a universal bailout of the population.
The Euro is a foretaste of what a gold standard would be like. Government, before it could spend, would have to buy or borrow gold from the private sector. A government gold standard is thus fascist since it privileges special interests such as gold owners, gold miners and bankers.
Yes, the US government has socialistic aspects but that is because the US population got good and sick of the fascist gold standard. Must we relearn that lesson or should we quit chasing our tails and move forward to genuine reform?
Interesting. The gold standard is fascist?
But gold was in use as a standard millennia before fascism came into being.
How can this stack up?
The decaying Empire. Just like the others before them
High rate of violent crime
Accute socio-economic stratification
Endemic institutional corruption
decaying transportation infrastructure
decaying civic infrastructure
decaying or lack of moral framework
decaying social structure,
Teachers, police, firefighters laid off by the 10s of thousands
Imperial wars wasting trillions
Austerity is already here, but now it will accelerate
You want Rage?
You got it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0j0GCbMC7A
believin all the lies that they’re tellin ya
buyin all the products that they’re sellin ya
When they say “jump” You say “how high?”
What? the land of the free? Whoever told you that is your ENEMY!
But gold was in use as a standard millennia before fascism came into being. Trevor Morgan
Government privilege for private interests is probably as old as government itself.
This is greid’s proven policy.
This is greid’s tunnel.
This is why I fight.
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2010/11/03/article-1326187-0BE35300000005DC-908_634x348.jpg
The tunnel people of Las Vegas: How 1,000 live in flooded labyrinth under Sin City’s shimmering strip
By Daily Mail Reporter
Last updated at 11:18 AM on 4th November 2010
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1326187/Las-Vegas-tunnel-people-How-1-000-people-live-shimmering-strip.html#ixzz1TKCjmq67
Homeless Children and Veterans
Shame on you
Homeless Children, Veterans, Elderly and Disabled
Shame on me
Oh how the people and the government are the same. They are spoiled babies that refuse to live with in their means. If you don’t have money to spend with out borrowing you bite the bullet and don’t spend untill pay day.
Ads by Christian groups pressure lawmakers to protect the poor in debt talks
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/ads-by-christian-groups-pressure-lawmakers-to-protect-the-poor-in-debt-talks/2011/07/26/gIQAJyd6aI_story.html
What the heck was ever the big deal about shutting down Saturday delivery?
I go pickup my mail about every 2 weeks even if I don’t want too.
And why didn’t the post office get into secure electronic info transfer years back when they saw that was the trend.
Even today Banks/Post Offices/governments are still trying to live in the past when it comes to secure transfers of cash/info.
If John Boehner is a moderate, we have a problem
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bs-ed-rodricks-gop-20110727,0,7087136.column
Investors: The $1 Billion Armageddon Trade Placed Against The United States
http://etfdailynews.com/2011/07/25/investors-the-1-billion-armageddon-trade-placed-against-the-united-states/
Jack Barnes: Someone dropped a bomb on the bond market Thursday – a $1 billion Armageddon trade betting the United States will lose its AAA credit rating.
In one moment, an invisible trader placed a single trade that moved the most liquid debt market in the world.
The massive trade wasn’t placed in bonds themselves; it was placed in the futures market.
All these post offices closing. Maybe that’s why the Silver Keisers are missing?
How the hell is Troy anyway Max? I bet he is eating well on our money.
Post offices round my neck of the woods are rarely used for postage. They should be called benefit giro cashing offices, where you can also post.
Benefits payments.
Immigrants sending money home.
Immigrants taxing expensive cars.
Prison resettlement payments.
Changing £ to E, for a chavvy trip to Ibiza
More benefits payments.
Passport applications.
Driving licence changes.
@Steven Rowlandson,
While there are similarities between the people and a government, there are also huge differences. One of them being that the government(s) can create its own money while an individual cannot. Thus, an individual has to live within his means; a government does not have to.
Now there are external limitations to government spending, of course. Oil, or any resource that comes in a limited supply – and is difficult or impossible to recycle – is a boundary that no government issued money can cross; even if gold was used, by the way. But any other thing – be it production, service, research, pensions, etc. – can be financed by the government.
Another limitation, as F. Beard mentioned, is if the government cannot really control its monetary policies; the central capability being the creation of money. This is the case of the EU countries. A country like Greece has lost – without a fight – its sovereignty by becoming a part of the EU/EMU.
To adopt gold standard (physical or gold-backed) would mean the government taking a good aim and shooting itself in the foot. Then again who knows, maybe the people actually want to give up the sovereignty of their country. If there was a referendum where the people decided they do not want to have an independent country, then who am I to criticise such a choice…
We are many they are few. Rebellion is not a part time undertaking. The who “we” have “placed” in positions of public trust have been seduced by the moneyed interest who have the means….ie leisure and fiat currency. Those who have, up to now, temporarily hamstrung us with overspecialized knowledge/compartmentalization and stupified our intelligence and emotional intelligent furry are going to meet resistance soon…..and these parasites and molesters of decency will be dealt with. Both the puppets and their illegitimate masters.
America is not a place its an idea and ideas are…….
Good riddance! The USPS is a freaking waste of taxpayer money. I say do away with it altogether and legalize private mail delivery. I’d hardly call this ‘austerity.’ It should be called ‘common sense.’
“Today it’s the US Postal Service closing down 3700 additional offices. Tomorrow it will be Social Security, Medicare and so on and so forth.”
meanwhile, stupid, distracted, misinformed, entertainment-stuffed & wallowing Americans are too stupified to notice, that EVERYWHERE he goes, BEN BERNANKE – the guy dishing out TENS of TRILLIONS of cheap confetti “Bernanke Bucks” $$ to ENTITLED, CONNECTED BANKSTERS, ONLY – walks around with a self-satisfied smirk on his face, like he and the Fed are doing a GREAT JOB! of running the U.S. economy…
(the are… of running in to the DITCH, the CESSPIT of royalist gross inequality and Irish famine-esque poverty & despair.)
@JohnnyJames – big fan.
re RATM (Rage Against the Machine) GREAT band… too bad they were ahead of their time. In the late ’90s, when Rage was making it big-time, middle-class Americans were doing reasonably well, with all the jobs from the PC & internet boom, and there wasn’t much of a market for RATM’s “raging against the machine” !
It wasn’t until the END of the Clinton admin (Jan. 2001) that the Rubin-Summers-Paulson “of, by & for Golddamn Sachs” agenda started kicking in to high gear: #1. DEREGULATING the ENTIRE U.S. financial markets (= license to loot, plunder, pillage, rape, & swindle), and
#2. OUTSOURCING U.S. jobs, entire factories, ENTIRE INDUSTRIES to China, so Bob Rubin’s pals on Wall Street & City-of-London could make short-term “profits” sucking the last dimes out of the American middle-class they had just eviscerated…
IMO the closing of the postal offices is a direct consequense of the emergence of the email. And the use of PDF’s as a legal document. People dont send letters anymore. I dont see the connection to social security and medicare and so forth!?