As the insidious Herpetis stupidus virus slowly spreads through the populace, creating severe mental deterioration in its wake, more and more citizens are ignoring the death of the United States Post Office...

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As the insidious Herpetis stupidus virus slowly spreads through the populace, creating severe mental deterioration in its wake, more and more citizens are ignoring the death of the United States Post Office.   In a greedy effort to gradually bankrupt and eventually privatize the Postal Service, Republican legislators have been given huge political donations by UPS, FedEx and other private postal services.   The intent behind the contributions is to undermine a Constitutionally mandated public postal service and, as such, represents a deliberate attempt to violate American citizens' civil rights!   Why liberal broadcasters and magazines are only now recognizing these facts is not only shocking, but disgusting!   Where the heck is the media when we need them?   Where the hell is the "Justice" Department and its slimy Attorney General as Republicans steal seventy five years of prefunded fairytale future medical coverage from post office funds and "lend" it to the U.S. Treasury, planning never to repay the bogus loan?

Wake up dunderheads!   Pretending to be stupid, even before being infected by H stupidus, not only makes us more susceptible to the ravages of the virus (which makes macaroni out of brain cells), but insures that our already miserably educated children will never have any hope of a future.   The current Republican plan represents a massive takeover and ownership of virtually all agencies of government by private entities.   This has always led to disaster, from failed airport security to the enormous waste of taxpayers' money for Blackwater International and hundreds of thousands other absurdly over paid carpetbaggers in recent Middle Eastern conflicts.   The practical truth, understood so well, ironically, by the late President Richard Nixon, is that if federal agencies can be owned by the government and overseen by competent salaried private business entities, they can be run extremely efficiently.

Meanwhile, Tea Party members, many with an honest criticism of "Big Government" and a legitimate concern with shrinking the waste and increasing the effectiveness of the federal bureaucracy, have been seduced by the mainstream Republican scheme to privatize as much of the federal government as possible.   The problem lies in the huge difference between the goals of "legitimate" Tea Party members and classical Republican opportunists.   The opportunists fully understand that any agency taken out of the government and privatized, will cost citizens anywhere from two to ten times as much as it would cost if the government could run it efficiently.   Removing many of the decisions currently in the hands of both Republican and Democratic Congressional prostitutes, decisions based on political donations, and placing them in the hands of salaried private professional administrators could easily save hundreds of billions of dollars every year.

To illustrate this point, consider the U.S. Postal Service.   Supported entirely by postage, it has not cost taxpayers a cent since the Nixon administration.   In 2006, in an effort to eventually bankrupt it, lame duck Republicans voted to force the service to provide seventy five years worth of medical insurance, that is for members they assumed would never exist and never utilize those benefits.   The money was to be raised in ten short years and "lent" to the treasury, thus creating a huge Post Office deficit for the first time in history.   Meanwhile, one might be surprised to find that as much as thirty percent of the mail found in a typical mail truck might belong to UPS, FedEx or a host of other private carriers!   You see, it is cheaper for them to use the U.S. Postal Service thereby pocketing more than half of what they were paid by the poor unsuspecting customer.   If they use our Post Office to send a package or letter to a remote rural area, the private carrier can pocket an even larger profit.   Ironically, the private company might never ship anything to some areas using its own vehicles!

Consider that the same 2006 lame duck Republican Congress sent Congressional concubines Tom Delay and Billy Tauzin to the Pharmaceutical lobby to ask them to author Medicare Part D.   Since that time, Part D has cost seniors well over a hundred billion dollars in overpayments due to illicit and unconstitutional price fixing.   If private insurance companies were hired to oversee, but not own Medicare contracts and bonused for legitimate efficiency, not only would fair prices be negotiated, but out of pocket costs to previously cheated seniors would also be drastically reduced.   The same would go for durable medical goods, oxygen and medical laboratory costs.   Agency after agency could be made more and more efficient with business minds managing them (but not owning) them as opposed to the current lobby owned Congressional prostitutes.

Al Finkelstein        02/06/13

Authors Website: http://www.ofinky.squarespace.com

Authors Bio:

Dr. Allen Finkelstein, writing since 2006 under the penname “O’finky,” was born in New York, where he attended the Hebrew Academy of Nassau County as a boy. He continued his religious training in South Florida until his family, needlessly fearing that he would become a Rabbi, transferred him to public school. It was in the Hebrew day school where the young O’finky was strongly encouraged to write and exercise his imagination. Later, he managed to weather a stormy academic career at the University of Florida, where writing creatively was strongly discouraged. As an undergraduate, majoring in pre-med, English, and philosophy, each department strongly “advising” him to switch to another, he finally graduated with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and a master’s degree in education.

After teaching math and science at various primary school levels for a few years, despite some fond regrets, O’finky left teaching for osteopathic medical school in West Virginia. After graduating as a D.O. in 1981, he moved back to the Tampa Bay area where he completed his internship and still practices and teaches family medicine. As a physician, the author became very active in the early ‘90’s desperately promoting to his largely deaf colleagues and to his patients the idea of rescuing Medicare from the hands of the greedy lobbies. In 2006, at the urging of his imaginative physician assistant, he started publishing a political blog, “The O’finky Factor.”

Writing as “O’finky,” the honorary name bestowed upon him by his Irish friend and the wonderful people he met in Ireland, the author’s articles have always been marked by great controversy and some have been republished in places as far away as Russia and South America. As Allen Finkelstein, O’finky has published some forty five articles in OpEdNews. A lifelong liberal Democrat, nonetheless his writing tends to decry the party’s penchant for trying to promote a righteous agenda far too quickly for acceptance by a moderate public, thus impeding the very progress which they so desperately seek. Ironically, it is the painstaking revelation that people would rather believe the truth hidden in fiction rather than in facts that was the inspiration for his first novel, The President’s Ledger, published in 2013.