Liza has a most excellent post up over at Culture Kitchen about the newest depredations of our corporate overlords.

Earlier this year, the Postal Regulatory Commission (PRC) rejected a postal rate increase plan offered by the U.S. Postal Service. Instead of implementing a plan that would spread equitably the rate hikes across all bulk mail clients, they opted to implement a modified version submitted by and partial to media giant Time-Warner Inc.

The new postal increase drafted by TimeWarner-AOL and approved by the PRC favors large bulk mail users like the magazine publishing divisions of TimeWarner-AOL by increasing the rate of small independent publishers by as much as 20%. Just to put things into perspective, for a publication like The Nation, this translates into paying $500,000 extra in postage yearly and in perpetuity (or until the next postal increase comes along).

As Teresa Stark put it in Disseminate Information, Protect Democracy, "While it is understandable that Time Warner would relish the idea of making it more difficult for new competitors, there is no reason to think that it is in the interest of the American people or the market economy".

This is bad every way you slice it. It protects the media oligopoly that already owns most of the content streaming into our brains from competition. It's bad for New York publishing. It's bad for independent publishing. The Nation is actually one of the most widely read of the political magazines, far outstripping tendentious fluff like National Review; if they're having problems, so will smaller publications. Independent publishing is being Wal-Martized.