David Morris

As every 6-year-old learns that there is real and there is make-believe. The massive post office deficit that is driving management to commit institutional suicide by ending six-day delivery, closing half of the nation's 30,000 or so post offices and half its 500 mail-processing centers, and laying off more than...

After winning the Illinois primary, Mitt Romney delivered a victory speech in which he deplored America's lost "can do spirit."  Unsurprisingly, he blamed it on government.  If elected he promised, "We're going to get government out of the way." Then he offered a few examples of what he meant....

A few weeks ago Congressman Barney Frank (D-MA who is retiring from the House this year, gave a memorable interview to New York magazine in which he criticized President Obama for aggressively pushing health care reform.  Frank says he warned Obama the Democratic Party would pay "a terrible price."

A few days ago 26 states argued before the Supreme Court that the health law's dramatic extension of Medicaid coverage constitutes unconstitutional federal coercion. "Congress easily could have designed an act that encouraged rather than forced states to expand their Medicaid programs," their brief submitted to the Court argues....

For its first 200 years the American Republic slowly, sometimes infuriatingly slowly and at horrific human cost (e.g. the Civil War) expanded the franchise.

In 1870 the 15^th Amendment gave blacks the right to vote. In 1920, the 19^th Amendment extended the franchise to women. In 1924 Congress granted...

Recent events make clear the need for a new language to describe the raging debate about sex and birth. Consider the problematic word that dominates our conversation: pro-life.

Most pro-life organizations more accurately should be labeled pro-sperm. For they insist the sperm has the inalienable, indeed the God-given right to...

On February 8, 1921 twenty thousand people, braving temperatures so low that musical instruments froze, marched in a funeral procession in the town of Dimitrov, a suburb of Moscow. They came to pay their respects to a man, Peter Kropotkin, and his philosophy, anarchism.

Some 90 years later few know...

Is the Super Bowl a socialist enterprise? The question may be provocative but not, I believe, inappropriate. After all, Indiana, the site of the next Super Bowl, is currently governed by those who insist government should play a minimal role. And socialist is the word they, and their Republican brethren...

Recent comments by Mitt Romney, still the probable Republican nominee for president, all but guarantee the inequality issue will remain front and center this election year.

When asked whether people who question the current distribution of wealth and power are motivated by "jealousy or fairness," Romney insisted, "I think...

Let me suggest a surefire way Barack Obama can win a second term: stand in the doorway of a post office scheduled for closing and declare, "Not on my watch." He will be standing with tens of millions of Americans who are rising up to defend our must trusted and...

This is the giving season and we Americans are prodigious givers. Nearly two-thirds of us donate to charities each year. This year we will send more than $225 billion to charities. More than a quarter of this giving will occur in December.

Those are the bare facts. But...

The rise of the Occupy Wall Street movement puts into stark relief the populism of the Tea Party. Or should we call it populism at all? For the Tea Party represents something ahistorical: the first mass uprising against the masses.

The Tea Party began with a rant from the...

In the 1976 movie, Network, anchorman Howard Beale implores his viewing audience:

Things have got to change. But first, you've gotta get mad!... You've got to say, 'I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Then we'll figure out what to do about the...

For those who thought my last post ended somewhat abruptly, you're right. It did. That essay should have been titled, "The Case For The Post Office-Part I."

Part I discussed the first 170 years of this "wondrous creation" that is the Post Office and how it repeatedly...

In the next few days we may decide the future of the Post Office. The signs are not auspicious. President Obama has agreed to a plan to cut Saturday delivery. The Post Service's management wants...

A few days ago I received notice of a New America Foundation (NAF) hosted conference in Washington, D.C. called "Beyond Primacy: Rethinking American Grand Strategy and the Command of the Commons." At the conference NAF released a formal...

Two days after Standard and Poor's downgraded U.S. government bonds, David Llewellyn-Smith, writing in the Sydney Morning Herald noted, "We now face the ludicrous circumstance in which the United States government holds... a lower (credit) rating than Microsoft, despite issuing its own currency (the world's reserve), being able to...

A man is wise with the wisdom of his time only and ignorant with its ignorance. Observe how the greatest minds yield in some degree to the superstitions of their age. Henry David Thoreau

Throughout human history societies have been informed and instructed by the superstitions of their age. For...

In all the talk about the federal deficit, why is the single largest culprit left out of the conversation? Why is the one part of government that best epitomizes everything conservatives say they hate about government -- waste, incompetence, and corruption -- all but exempt from conservative criticism?

Of course,...

Thanks to Christopher Mitchell, Director of the Telecommunications as Commons Initiative at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance for his contributions to this article. You can follow his reporting on public networks at www.muninetworks.org.

Conservatives would have us believe the public sector can't compete with the private...