I don't know whether we are dealing with a Chicago phenomenon, I haven't had this problem in a serious way until recently. I think it is recent phenomenon, something happened at that the USPS in the last six months or so -- maybe it was just the Chicago area Post Office, but I doubt it. Federal institutions tend to work across the board.
I don't things in general are specially screwed up in Chicago as opposed to other large US cities. There are things in Chicago that are specially screwed up -- public transit has gone to hell, just at the time when gas prices make it more imperative than ever. Part of that is a state/federal problem -- the CTA is (duh) not self-maintaining from a Chicago or Cook County taxbase. It relies heavily on support from the feds and the state. Politically people outside Chicago and the collar counties, downstate we call it here, resent giving anything to Chicago, short-sightedly, they do not see that they are sunk as well if we are. (Plus the gov keeps blowing the transit budget on pointless vote-buying stuff like free rides for seniors, like he's not going to jail instead of back to Springfield.) The feds have not, as far as I know, been overly generous in supporting mass transit.
But still, even there, other major US cities have done decent things with mass transit, and not just ones that started with a newer system, like the DC Metro or the Bay Area BART. New York's system is about the age of Chicago's, more than a century, and while it's pretty crappy compared to Paris, Rome, Moscow, Prague, or public transit generally in countries that believe in public transit, New York has been improving markedly over the last 20 years or so and the deterioration in the both the CTA and the suburban trains in Chicago has been precipitous in the last ten years, the last five years in particular, I'd say.
Some of what happens with stuff like mass transit in Chicago, especially anything nonfederal, has got to do with the astounding level of corruption in Illinois -- not just Chicago. Remember we just sent our downstate (Kakankee) Republican ex-gov to jail. I don't know how to measure these things, and I don't know if Chicago is more crooked than NYC, which certainly has been pretty crooked at various points (Tammany Hall, the Koch administration, at least I know about those), or LA or Kansas City or, heaven help us, New Orleans. There is a culture of corruption here, like in Louisiana, that takes a perverse pride in crookedness, though. To suggest an answer a question posed earlier in this thread, it is at least possible that federal operations like the USPS are affected by the _culture_ if not directly by the politics of the Machine.
But with the Post Office I don't think we are facing specifically Chicago problem.
Enough of this for now.
--- On Sat, 9/20/08, John Thornton <jthorn65 at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> From: John Thornton <jthorn65 at sbcglobal.net>
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] America today
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Saturday, September 20, 2008, 6:11 PM
> Jordan Hayes wrote:
> >>> the last three months, when I must have had
> another half dozen
> >>
> >> In the last 6 months I've had this happen 4
> times.
> >
> > Why don't you folks use a real delivery service?
>
>
> Because I have no real control over how someone ships
> something to me.
>
> John Thornton
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk