I’m one of the lucky ones – lucky because I’ve had the good fortune to share the past ten years of my life with the person I love, despite the fact he’s a Mexican citizen, and I’m an American citizen. I’m lucky because, in 2001 when we met, I had the resources, ability, and the option to move to Mexico and establish a business and a life with Luis. I’m lucky because Luis and I built a rich and rewarding life together.  We enjoy the love and support of both our families, we have a wonderful circle of friends, and we’ve been able to give back to our Mexican community in ways that have been incredibly satisfying. Unfortunately, the past two years have shown us just how fragile that luck has been. My business, a small resort hotel catering to LGBT vacationers to Puerto Vallarta, has suffered greatly since the U.S. economy took its nosedive in late 2008. In 2009, Mexico was the epicenter of the H1N1 flu scare – it nearly shut down the tourism industry for a couple of months. And mounting concerns over the safety and security of travel to Mexico due to drug cartel violence has further decimated the tourism industry and my once-thriving business, despite the fact that the violence is enormously hyped by U.S. media and is mostly localized in a few cities far from Puerto Vallarta. Times are hard. The economic realities of a struggling business in Mexico have compelled me to return

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Today, the postal unions representing America's postal workers is organizing a nationwide "Day of Action" to save the US Postal Service (USPS). National news media have reported extensively on the budget crisis facing the USPS, but has done a typically abysmal job of explaining why the crisis exists. These are the facts... Republicans, with the support of the Postmaster, are demanding service cuts and layoffs due to the U.S. Postal Service’s (USPS) inability to fund $5.5 billion due on September 30 to its federal retiree health fund. The expected 100,000 layoffs, in addition to exacerbating an already grim unemployment picture in the U.S., will hit African-Americans and veterans particularly hard – two groups that already have much higher unemployment rates than the national average. But apart from the employment issue, we need to be asking why the USPS is in such dire straits in the first place. The biggest budget problem by far facing the USPS is the mandate placed on it by an outgoing Republican congress in 2006, requiring USPS to pre-fund, over a decade, its employee pensions for 75 years. The USPS is among a handful of employers still offering a defined benefit pension plan that provides real security to retirees after a lifetime of work. The pre-funding requirement, never asked for by the postal unions, was and remains a poison pill for a federally run postal delivery service. No other pension plan, either public or private, is required to pre-fund pension obligations for 75 years into the

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 I didn't write this... but posted it because it is well worth reading! America's System Failure: Only a Wave of Democratic Participation Can Save This Country As welcome as it was, the removal of George W. Bush was not enough to cure what ails us. It goes to the root of our political system. by Christopher Hayes  February 3, 2010 There is a widespread consensus that the decade we've just brought to a close was singularly disastrous for the country: the list of scandals, crises and crimes is so long that events that in another context would stand out as genuine lowlights -- Enron and Arthur Andersen's collapse, the 2003 Northeast blackout, the unsolved(!) anthrax attacks -- are mere afterthoughts. We still don't have a definitive name for this era, though Paul Krugman's 2003 book The Great Unraveling captures well the sense of slow, inexorable dissolution; and the final crisis of the era, what we call the Great Recession, similarly expresses the sense that even our disasters aren't quite epic enough to be cataclysmic. But as a character in Tracy Letts's 2007 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, August: Osage County, says, "Dissipation is actually much worse than cataclysm." American progressives were the first to identify that something was deeply wrong with the direction the country was heading in and the first to provide a working hypothesis for the cause: George W. Bush. During the initial wave of antiwar mobilization, in 2002, much of the ire focused on Bush himself. But as the

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Are Bailouts for the Super-Rich Inevitable? Ask Paul Krugman “There’s every reason to believe that this will be the rule from now on: when push comes to shove, no matter who is in power, the financial sector will be bailed out.” Paul Krugman, 3/29/10 “The recovery of big banks not only benefited bankers. It also created huge paydays for hedge fund managers, with the top 25 taking home an average of $1 billion in 2009.” New York Times, 4/1/10 Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist and influential New York Times columnist, says Wall Street institutions have become so big and powerful that they will never be allowed to fail. The only hope he sees is to regulate them thoroughly. He greatly prefers the stricter rules now being offered by Barney Frank in the House to the softer ones coming from Chris Dodd in the Senate. (Neither bill truly tackles the derivatives casino.) Krugman criticizes Senate Republican leaders who portray proposed bank regulations as just another Wall Street bailout. In fact these hypocritical leaders are doing all they can to thwart the Obama administration’s modest reforms and befriend Wall Street, hoping to net some cold, hard political cash from the bankers. Unfortunately, when Krugman says bailouts are inevitable, he’s handing the government haters another round of ammunition. “See, the liberal/pinkos are going to just keep on bailing out Wall Street,” they piously intone. But, why isn’t Krugman calling for an end to all financial bailouts for the wealthy, instead of announcing

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The more I think about this Massachusetts election outcome, the more I am concerned... but not about the Democrats.  I worry for the Republic.  I think both parties are in much deeper trouble than their leaders realize.  And that spells trouble for the Republic. Why? America has become ungovernable.  Every election is about "throwing the bums out," no matter who's in the majority.  Seems to me we have a major populist shift in attitude in the country, with no populist leadership coming from either party, because they're both in thrall to their corporate masters. Candidates talk a populist game in the heat of the campaign, but they don't govern that way (Brown rode around Massachusetts in a pickup truck to polish his populist bonafieds). The anger is growing, but is unfocused.  That anger is evidenced by the utter breakdown of civility either in the halls of Congress or in the political discourse taking place everywhere. It's reflected in the xenophobic hatred of immigrants and an uptick in violence against racial and other minorities.  The teabaggers, birthers, and the Town Hall screamers are evidence of the growing rage, but there is also a growing rage among traditionally left-leaning voters, who have not yet realized it, but they have some common cause with these so-called nut-cases on the right. Rules in the Senate, and the peculiar dynamics of how we apportion Senators and how they're elected, in particular, make it impossible for either party to effectively address the populist demands of voters. 

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