National coverage in the wake of Tuesday's rallies

Sept. 28, 2011 -- Perhaps boosted by Tuesday's "Save America's Postal Service" rallies across America, several nationally know columnists have taken a critical look at the conventional wisdom that claims that the Postal Service is broke. Writing for The Nation, John Nichols rightly describes the Postal Service's crisis as political, not financial. "Democrats and Republicans in Washington are entertaining proposals that would, in the words of the American Postal Workers Union, 'end the postal service as we know it.' Why? Because of bad policies forced upon the USPS, policies that could be reversed as quickly as they were implemented."

At the New York Daily News, Juan Gonzalez notes how "audits suggest the government has been using post office revenues as a federal pension piggy bank for decades. So what is the solution of Obama's postmaster to the manufactured losses and those long lines at my neighborhood post office? Shut down Saturday service and lay off 120,000 workers, he says. In the midst of a terrible recession, Donahoe proposes driving a great American institution further into the ground."

And for the second day in a row, the Huffington Post took up our cause, hosting a Democracy Now! debate between Chuck Zlatkin, the legislative and political director of the New York Metro Area Postal Union, and Gene Del Polito, president of the Association for Postal Commerce in Washington, D.C.