ALERT: Time Warner is raising our postage

The heavy hand of Time Warner Inc. is reaching into your mailbox and making it more difficult for smaller publications—like Workers World—to mail out their periodicals.

How did they do it? By writing up new regulations for the U.S. Postal Service that will take effect on July 15 and raise the postal rates for smaller publications by up to 30 percent—while the increase for big corporations, like Time Warner, will be kept down to a more comfortable 10 percent.

Originally, the USPS had proposed a plan that would have raised the rates for all types of publications by equal proportions.

But then the Postal Regulatory Commission—whose five commissioners are appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate—stepped in and rejected that proposal, adopting a very complicated alternative devised by Time Warner. How’s that for hiring the fox to guard the chicken coop?

Everyone knows how postage rates for regular letters keep going up. You probably keep a stash of 2-cent stamps ready to paste next to your old ones. While letters used to be the cheap way to communicate, it now costs more to send a letter to the opposite coast than most phone plans charge for a 10-minute chat.

Workers World mails out many thousands of copies of our paper every week, some of them free to prisoners. We rely on the support of our readers to make up the deficit. Now that deficit is going to be bigger, thanks to Time Warner.

The whole point of this newspaper is to help organize the fight against the giant monopolies that run the economy in the United States and much of the world. Time Warner is one of the biggest, and the fact that it can dictate policy to the Postal Service just illustrates how these giant firms run the government and determine how decisions are made, no matter which capitalist party is in office.

You need a voice of revolutionary opposition like Workers World, one that gives news of how workers and oppressed people are organizing to fight back against the robber barons. Please check out our appeal for donations on page 5 of this issue and help keep Workers World coming by U.S. mail as well as by e-mail and on the web.