Post Office to the First Amendment: Drop Dead (Sign the petition!)

[Sequoia]

Everyone who visits the Common Dreams site is reading articles that were first published or commissioned by print publications. Without these print publications, there would be a lot less material for all of us to read, and some of our most important reporters and thinkers wouldn’t get paid to write.

Yet the independent magazines and small publications that contribute to Common Dreams are under attack by government bureaucrats and media conglomerates. Unless we take action now, the wide variety of voices and viewpoints available on sites like this one will become considerably diminished.

This crisis which could have devastating effect on new media revolves around Americas very first and arguably most visionary and progressive media policy: postal rates for periodicals.

Because the Post Office is a monopoly, and because magazines must use it, the postal rates always have been skewed to make it cheaper for smaller publications to get launched and to survive. The whole idea has been to use the postal rates to keep publishing as competitive and wide open as possible. This bedrock principle was put in place by James Madison and Thomas Jefferson. They considered it mandatory to create the press system, the Fourth Estate necessary for self-government.

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/04/17/575/

Please go to www.stoppostalratehikes.com and sign the letter to the Postal Board protesting the new rate system and demanding a congressional hearing before any radical changes are made. The deadline for comments is April 23.

[ananda]

1. I feel positively curmudgeonly..

.. when I learn that the USPO is raising rates again.

This is ridiculous!

Petition signed.

[soothsayer]

6. ...and when you call it the USPO instead of USPS...!

ah the good old days...!

[Captain Hilts]

2. The cost of mailing books has gone up also. That used to be seen as censorship.

To mail a book first class it cost me nearly ten dollars, had I sent it book rate, they were going to charge me $16 - and it would have taken much longer to get there.

[bdamomma]

done

[bdamomma]

3. done

[patrice]

4. done

[MuseRider]

5. Done. n/t