'BradCast' 7/15/2020 (Guest: Lisa Graves on Charles Koch's scheme to privatize USPS)

Published: July 16, 2020, 1:47 a.m.

b"On today's 'BradCast':\\xa0 The hack of top Twitter accounts today underscores the dangers of computerized voting -- if a multi-billion dollar company like Twitter can't protect its own servers from hackers, how will under-funded local election officials protect our elections and computerized voting, tabulation and registration systems across the country this November?\\xa0 Voting by mail is also threatened by the new, Trump-appointed (and wholly unqualified) Postmaster General, who this week directed all postal workers to essentially slow down mail delivery, which will accomplish little more than help USPS' main competitors UPS and FedEx. That is probably the point, according to LISA GRAVES of True North Research, who joins us to explain her stunning new report on billionaire Charles Koch's nearly 50-year effort to privatize the Postal Service. Since the 1970s, Koch has spent millions of dollars funding a rogue's gallery of hard-right "libertarians" and Republicans to kill off the USPS, which Graves describes as a "marriage between [his] ideological agenda and greed". She also explains why the Postal Service is now on the brink of insolvency, thanks to the Koch-backed 2006 Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA), championed by Koch-funded Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), which handcuffed the independent federal agency. Graves warns things could get much worse for USPS, very quickly, right before the crucial November election. Also today:\\xa0 Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg has been released from the hospital.\\xa0 Rep. Steve Watkins (R-KS) has been charged with felony voter fraud.\\xa0 Plus:\\xa0 results from Tuesday's primary election and runoff in Alabama, Texas and Maine -- where Sen. Susan Collins will face her most difficult re-election bid ever against Democrat Sara Gideon, who appears to have won the Democratic nomination to unseat Collins in November..."