Bill Moyers Talks with Lisa Graves about the Ongoing Threat to the US ... (1)
ANNOUNCER: Welcome to Moyers on Democracy. Lisa Graves is one of the nation's foremost experts on how special interest groups work to distort our political system. She served in Washington at the Department of Justice, the US Senate Judiciary Committee and the Administrative Office of the US Courts. She's an adjunct law professor at George Washington University Law School and has testified as an expert witness in both houses of Congress. She's a frequent guest on TV and radio news and her research has been cited in critically acclaimed books, newspapers and magazines. Her new report, THE BILLIONAIRE BEHIND EFFORTS TO KILL THE U.S. POSTAL SERVICE is a deep dive into how Charles Koch marked the U.S. Postal Service for privatization in the early 1970s and how he is using the Koch empire to push his political agenda to this day, when the postal service is ripe for taking. There's a link to the report at Billmoyers.com. Here now is Bill Moyers.
BILL MOYERS: I really am glad to talk to you, and appreciate your taking this time.
LISA GRAVES: I'm really glad to be with you, Bill, and I really appreciate the invitation.
BILL MOYERS: You've taken this deep dive of research into the efforts over the last 40 years to kill our Postal Service. Summarize what you found.
LISA GRAVES: Well, I was shocked by what my research showed, which was that this outlier idea of privatizing our Postal Service is not a recent idea. It's one that Charles Koch has been staking for more than 40 years. And Charles Koch, as many people know, is one of the richest men in America, one of the richest men in the world. And he runs a privately held conglomerate known as Koch Industries. And back in the early 1970s, he started funding men who were pushing the idea of privatizing our Postal Service.
BILL MOYERS: What was his goal? Why did he want to abolish the government Postal Service? It's the only agency of government mandated in the US Constitution.
LISA GRAVES: Well, when I looked into his background, and I've been looking at him for a number of years, one of the things that becomes quite clear is that he actually really represents a pretty radically reactionary view of government. It's one that believes that government should not be doing anything that they think the private sector can do or should do or could profit from. And so it's rooted in a fundamental hostility to the idea of the public, the notion of things being public and held for the public, for the benefit of the public, and not for the benefit of private individuals. And so it really is an ideological objection to the Postal Service. And when he became the main funder for the Libertarian Party in the 1970s, one of its planks became expressly to abolish the U.S. Postal Service.
And then in the 1980s they pushed for that through a commission that Reagan created at their instigation. The privatization commission, which again called for privatizing our Postal Service.
RELATED: Money & Politics BILL MOYERS: You write in your report, THE BILLIONAIRE BEHIND EFFORTS TO KILL THE U.S. POSTAL SERVICE, that Koch has used his connections, his influence, his vast wealth, one of the richest men in the world first to wreck and ultimately privatize the post office. How has he pursued that goal?
LISA GRAVES: At the end of the Reagan administration, what Koch did was bring onto his team the man who was the head of the Office of Management of Budget for President Reagan, a man who's a little notorious for being the guy who signed off on the notion that ketchup should be considered a vegetable for school lunches. James Miller came over to Citizens for a Sound Economy. He's the longest serving member of that board, of that operation for Charles Koch, which now goes as Americans for Prosperity. And from that post, he continued to argue for the privatization of our Postal Service for there to be competition for first class mail. He helped instigate efforts with the Cato Institute, which is another part of the Koch operation to push for privatization. And then ultimately, in 2003, James Miller was rewarded with a post on the Board of Governors for the Postal Service. And from that perch in 2006, he pushed through this bill called the Postal Accountability and Efficiency Act, the PAEA, which really has dramatically harmed our Postal Service.
BILL MOYERS: What exactly did that 2006 legislation do for the Postal Service?
LISA GRAVES: That bill did three things. The first thing was that it required the Postal Service to use its reserve of about $17 billion to fund this novel fund, which was to pay into a pool about $5 billion per year for a number of years, to fund future retiree health benefits. That's different from retiree pension benefits. So, it was an unprecedented fund to fund the future health benefits of basically future retirees. Most companies in America that offer that benefit have offered it on a pay-as-you-go basis. No other government agency and no private business has such a requirement to fully fund decades of potential healthcare benefits in advance.
BILL MOYERS: They were singling out the Postal Service, loading it with this burden for the future that they would not ask of any other government agency. Right?
LISA GRAVES: That's correct. Only the Postal Service, no other agency and no other business has a requirement to fully fund decades of healthcare benefits in advance. And so that was unprecedented. It was an effort to really weight down the Postal Service. And either they would succeed by pushing the Postal Service into bankruptcy, so that it could be basically privatized. Or if the Postal Service managed to pay all that money into a pool, it would make the Postal Service more attractive to future investors as part of an initial public offering. In fact, one of the efforts of the Bush administration before this bill described how investors would be reluctant to take on the Postal Service because of its potential future liability. So, it was clearly designed with a view toward privatization in mind.
BILL MOYERS: There were two other things you said.
LISA GRAVES: The two other things were first it limited the Postal Service from raising the cost for the first-class stamp by about a penny a year. So that throttled its potential for revenue artificially. And then the third thing it did was it barred the Postal Service from offering banking services or other commercial services that would compete with the private sector, even though the Postal Service historically had been involved in some banking operations.
BILL MOYERS: Some people would claim perhaps or argue perhaps that they were trying to assure the failure of the post office.
LISA GRAVES: That's how I read that 2006 act. You can call it an accountability and efficiency act, but it really was an effort to undermine, fatally undermine our U.S. Postal Service.
BILL MOYERS: Long-term strategy, that was 14 years ago on a campaign that had begun in the 1970s.
LISA GRAVES: That's right.
BILL MOYERS: You report that Charles Koch created a shadow Republican Party, calling it Americans for Prosperity, and there were other groups connected to it. But in time what began as a Libertarian right-wing effort became the agenda of the Republican Party.
LISA GRAVES: And that was really made possible by the terrible decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in Citizens United, which unleashed these dark money operations. It's called dark money because it's not disclosed necessarily who gives money to these groups. And Charles Koch began operating an expanded set of organizations. They've gone by three or four different names, and then they have these little shell groups beneath them that they give money to. And Americans for Prosperity is a key component of that operation. What that allows them to do is to spend millions and millions on ads in our elections without disclosing who the true donors really are. In many ways, the Koch operation is superior to the Republican Party's operation in its ground game in the states, because it has pretty regular contact with its members throughout the year to prepare them for the election, while the parties come in mostly toward the end of a cycle and reach out to people to get them to vote.
BILL MOYERS: Wasn't Koch's group behind the Tea Party?
LISA GRAVES: One of the things I did earlier this year was write an op-ed for the NEW YORK TIMES in which we detailed some of those data points, in which we know now that Charles Koch's operations, Americans for Prosperity and its sister group called FreedomWorks were really providing the infrastructure for the Tea Party in 2009-2010. And that's when Jane Mayer wrote about the Tea Party, and tied it to Koch money. What Jane documented was that the scaffolding, the infrastructure for the Tea Party was really provided by FreedomWorks and by Americans for Prosperity. They were holding a number of events for the Tea Party. And really advancing their position through that Tea Party effort. And the thing about the Tea Party is that, you know, it arose in 2009 that sort of was launched during, on tax day, at least that's the mythology of it, of that year after President Obama was sworn in. When in fact he had only been president for a couple of months, and suddenly there was this effort to blame him for the economy, for taxes and more. And so those roots, that's another way in which Charles Koch's money has really helped fuel the far right in America.
BILL MOYERS: What I take away from Jane Mayer's book, DARK MONEY and from your report, THE BILLIONAIRE BEHIND EFFORTS TO KILL THE U.S. POSTAL SERVICE is that it was a well-coordinated and a well-financed movement to try to turn much of the American government over to private, for-profit organizations, corporations in particular.
LISA GRAVES: What's really surprising in a way about the way they were able to construct this was that, if you recall, during the Bush administration, the economy had crashed in a cascade leading up to a massive financial crisis in September of 2008. And at that time, there was a clamoring for controls on Wall Street, for efforts to rein Wall Street in, because it had really gambled extensively. And so there was a push for reform. And Obama won in part based on his desire to redress Wall Street. To hold these companies accountable, to rebuild our economy. And what Charles Koch and his operations were able to do was to turn the anger from Wall Street toward the government, to blame the government for that crisis, rather than to blame the big banks. Americans for Prosperity lobbied extensively against the financial reform package that the Democrats were trying to put through in Congress to try to prevent another meltdown like that from happening again.
BILL MOYERS: At the risk of repeating myself, let me sum up. It's no longer just Koch's cause- shutting down the Postal Service, privatizing it, eliminating universal service. These have become open Republican priorities, right?
LISA GRAVES: Yes. Open in the sense that you can see the obstruction happening. The Senate under Mitch McConnell has refused to take action to provide funding. There's this force for privatization. And in fact, Charles Koch's Americans for Prosperity has been running ads this summer against senators to urge them not to provide funding for the Postal Service. But at the same time, you have these predatory capitalists who would be eager to have the Postal Service fail and have the profitable lines to go to private businesses.
