Biden Wants an All-Electric America. The Grid Has a Problem

President Biden expects to reduce U.S. emissions 50% below 2005 levels by 2030, and to arrive at net zero emissions from all the nation’s power plants by 2035. “The gap between wishful thinking and reality is vast”, says naysaying scientist Vaclav Smil.

“People don’t appreciate the magnitude of the task and are setting up artificial deadlines which are unrealistic. People toss out these deadlines without any reflection on the scale and the complexity of the problem.”

Writing in The New Yorker, environmental journalist Elizabeth Kolbert underscores Smil’s bracing caveat, telling us that the U.S. electrical
grid…

”…comprises more than eleven thousand generating plants, more than six hundred thousand miles of high-voltage transmission lines, and some six million miles of distribution lines.”

Our grid has been called “the largest machine ever built by man.” The U.S. electrical system is becoming less reliable. Fossil-fuel power plants are going out of service faster than renewable sources are being installed, which could lead to increasing brownouts and blackouts. In 2000, there were fewer than 50 major outages. In 2020, the number approached 200.

Much of its transmission infrastructure is in need of upgrade, having been built just after World War II and even before, and weighing on that, it is now to undergo a total transformation to accommodate Biden’s flank speed conversion to wind and solar.

a far piece

Power plants have typically been built close to existing transmission lines because such connections are costly to build. But with wind and solar, a power project doesn’t get to pick a convenient location. That means thousands of miles of new transmission lines are needed criss-crossing the country to bring power generated where the wind blows the most and the sun shines the brightest to the population centers where the power is needed. In his infrastructure bill, Biden appropriated $73 billion for thousands of miles of new power lines. Cost estimates range much higher. A 2021 report from the American Society of Civil Engineers says that, with 70% of lines “well into the second half of their expected 50-year lifespans”, more like $200 billion is needed for existing lines. The 2035 goal of decarbonizing demands over a million miles of new transmission lines, in one estimate. The cost of stringing all these lines will, in another estimate, come to more than $2 trillion.

juice locavores

Power utilities, the renewable energy industry, and environmental groups split on which is the better option, transmission at a distance or decentralization of power sources. Keeping it local — rooftop solar and microgrids
for towns and neighborhoods to generate their own electricity — would at least reduce the need for transmission lines and would be on stream far more quickly. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said the administration supports that but decentralized approaches would not be sufficient to achieve the president’s 2035 goal.

So the administration barged ahead with the Inflation Reduction Act with climate provisions that provide for less than $30 billion of what we understand to be largely subsidies for “home energy efficiency upgrades” and “home energy supply improvements”. Bernadette Del Chiaro, director of an organization that lobbies for the rooftop solar industry, said to The New York Times,

“Clearly, the utilities are stuck in the 20th century; they want to build the transcontinental railroad of the electric grid.”

Nimby

Transmission towers and power lines are not welcome by those who live along their route. People don’t want the disruption and the defacement of their woods and farmlands for delivery of power that will benefit some
other state. Announce a project and environmental activists are likely to raise a ruckus. Kentucky and
In this famous 1938 photo by Dorothea Lange, workers install power lines
in the San Joaquin Valley of California under a rural electrification program
launched by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. (Library of Congress)

Virginia have seen plans for 3,000 acres of solar panels delayed. A 720-mile link from Oklahoma wind farms to Tennessee was cancelled when Arkansas refused transit. A line from Kansas to Indiana has been held up for a decade owing to Missouri’s objections. A single Colorado family has stalled for years a transmission project from Wyoming to supply cities on the West Coast.

When passage of a transmission line that was to bring hydropower from Quebec to the Boston area was thwarted by New Hampshire, lying in its path, it was remapped to pass through Maine, whereupon voters struck down that maneuver in a referendum even while work was already under way. Much of the referendum’s backing was provided by NextEra, a nuclear plant operator in Maine that saw hydro as competition.

The Biden administration recognizes such objections, say officials, and hopes stringing power lines along highways, railroad tracks, and other existing rights of way could avoid conflicts.

what grid?

“How will you decarbonize and run the country by wind and solar without a national grid? And what will it take to build a national grid in a NIMBY society like the U.S.?”

That’s Professor Smil again. The 80-year-old Czech-Canadian now retired after a career at the University of Manitoba is a highly-regarded realist who has authored 36 books, heavy with data and brutal fact, the latest being last year’s “How the World Really Works”. Bill Gates says he has read all 36. “I wait for new Smil books the way some people wait for the next Star Wars movie”, Gates wrote in 2017. “He’s a slayer of bulls**t,” says David Keith, an energy and climate scientist at Harvard.

Smil says “without a national grid” because the country doesn’t have a national grid. It is instead, as a Reuters report put it, “a Byzantine web of local, state and regional regulators who have strong political incentives to hold down spending.” Texas didn’t want federal oversight so it isn’t even connected to the rest of the country, which was why it went cold and dark for four days and nights in February 2021 when freezing weather shut down power plants and wind turbines. Hundreds died.

hooking up

There is no shortage of renewable projects, but for lack of a true grid — instead “a Byzantine web of local, state and regional regulators who have strong political incentives to hold down spending” as a Reuters report put it — the hang-up is in hooking them up.

Say you’ve built a power source and perhaps even a transmission line to take its output to market. Just plug it into what we call the grid? Nowhere near that simple. Access is controlled by each state’s utility commission which is often in the grip of local utility companies that may veto your application. More likely, a grid that didn’t anticipate the onrush of renewable power often lacks the capacity for your new offering.

There were almost 3,500 new requests for hookup in 2021 compared to 1,000 in 2015, The Wall Street Journal reported last summer, citing research by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. As example, the Journal wrote that in 2021 renewable-energy developer Recurrent Energy filed more than 20 grid-connection requests in California, a state that needs more energy, yet is experiencing years of waiting. Requests to determine whether an area’s lines can handle the load take an average of three years. A local utility’s aging transformers and dated electrical lines may not be up to the job.

On top of that, the Biden administration is pressing for us all to switch to electric autos with our own garage charging stations; to get rid of gas ranges and water heaters; to heat and cool our houses with heat pumps; and to install solar panels that can feed electricity back to that utility that may not be able to handle it. Rewiring America, a nonprofit that advocates electrifying everything, calculated that if the 330,000 households in San Jose, California, stopped using gasoline and natural gas and made that switch, the city would need three times as much electricity as now. Extrapolate that to the entire country and ask how that is going to work out.

Fill ‘er up!

Autos alone, if fully converted to EV passenger vehicles, would require a 25% boost in electricity production. Renewables would have to supply it all, else more fossil fuel power plants would need to be built and what would be accomplished by converting to EVs?

Part of the president’s goal for 2030 is 500,000 public charging stations in parking lots, schools, and parks, according to $2.5 billion in funding to states, local governments and tribes over the next five years.

Filling up at a gas station is quick and for the average auto will buy you close to 400 miles. But filling up (80% recommended as the last 20% takes forever) takes 20 to 30 minutes at a Level 3 fast-charger to yield something under 200 miles for a modest-size vehicle. That says the time-per-mile that we’ll spend at a charging station is over 25 times what we spend at a gas pump. One easily imagines the pile-up of autos waiting at the public stations and an angry public quickly fed up with the whole idea.

So we clearly will need to clear the junk out of the garage and spend about $2,000 for a Level 2 charger for re-charging overnight (Level 3 is too expensive). The strain on the grid when everyone comes home from work and plugs in will be overwhelming. There seems to be no calculation by the Biden administration of how to be ready with the power at the other end of the hose that the conversion to electric vehicles — cars, bus fleets, government, the all-EV postal service — will demand.

wistful thinking

The media doesn’t dive very deep into the plausibility of Biden’s program. They’ll quote experts who say the enormous transformation of the grid is technically possible by the deadline years, but don’t deal with the obstacles we’ve just explored. Articles conclude with sentences like,

“Analysts generally agree that it is entirely feasible to power many millions of new cars with electricity, but it will take careful planning”

…with no trepidation that only a dozen years remain until the 2035 deadline. Or,

“We know for a fact that such a program is possible, however. We know so for the simple reason that America has tackled grand projects on this scale before.”

Cue stories of the America of yesteryear: the Hoover Dam, rural electrocution, World War II production. That was then, not now. Today’s America takes an eternity to get anything done.

In Five Years, Medicare Runs Short of Money. Republicans to Nix Biden Fix.

President Biden made known his priorities with the release of his budget plan early this month. One feature is a modest increase in the Medicare payroll tax (“huge” and “giant” says the tax-averse Wall Street Journal editorial board) meant to extend the viability of Medicare for another 25 years beyond 2028 when the trust fund’s reserves will otherwise run dry.

The president’s offering will be negotiated over the coming months along with budgets from the House and Senate, and the tax increases are destined not to get past Republicans in the House. But the White House proposals do serve to remind that some action needs to be taken
about Medicare by a Congress that resolutely chooses to ignore what’s coming at us in the future.

We pay 1.45% of income for Medicare, as do employers, for a 2.9% total. single individuals on income over $200,000 and marrieds filing jointly on income over $250,000 pay an extra .9% for a 3.8% total. For income over $400,000 Biden wants to increase the 3.8% to 5.0%. And he wants “business income” to be be swept into the equation. (Owners of professional service businesses have structured them to classify their earnings as profits which heretofore are not subject to the surcharges).

Dreams of avarice

Republican refusal to consider any tax increases stands out against a backdrop of stunning gains in the wealth of the nation’s top earners and business owners. Pay to corporate CEOs has gone steadily upward for decades, skyrocketing 1,460% since 1978.

Even poor results are rewarded, such as $21 million paid to Boeing’s David Calhoun in the year its 737 Max airliner was grounded and the company lost $12 billion. Such as Norwegian Cruise Lines’ CEO Frank del Rio pocketing $36.4 million with its ships dead in the water from COVID restrictions in 2020.

Corporate boards lavish extras. Atop his $34.5 million base pay last year, the board of JPMorgan Chase gave CEO Jamie Dimon a $50 million “retention bonus” just for him to stay on the job another five years and meet performance targets.

When Tim Cook took over from Steve Jobs at Apple in 2011, he was pledged 28 million shares over 10 years provided he stayed on and the stock price rose faster than most other large companies. Both did. Cook’s shares rose to $3.5 billion across the decade.

Jeff Bezos’ worth increased by $13 billion in a single day in 2020 when Amazon’s shares surged 7.9%. He added $74 billion to his net worth at one point that year, which made him personally worth more than McDonald’s or Nike. A “Money Issue” of the Sunday New York Times magazine made the point that for the average full-time Amazon employee, who was paid $37,930 in 2020, to accumulate as much money as Jeff Bezos — $172 billion at the time — that employee would have had to start working in the Pliocene Epoch, 4.5 million years ago, when hominids had just started standing on two feet.

The CEO of giant private equity firm Blackstone, Stephen Schwarzman, took home $1.1 billion in 2021, 85% of it in dividends.

And of course there’s Tesla awarding Elon Musk $56 billion in stock (since sharply reduced by a drop in the company’s stock price). It was as incentive to get Musk to stay with Tesla. He had said, “I did not want to be CEO” but the board considers him indispensable. (A single shareholder sued and the case is yet to be decided by Delaware’s Chancery Court.)

We could fill your day with more of these pay bonanzas. Of course, these are extreme examples, but when the subject is taxes it’s worth reminding how out of hand capitalism has become.

money lust

J. Pierpont Morgan “reckoned that bosses should earn at most 20 times the pay of their underlings”. (Plato argued it should be no more than four times.) In the early 1960s, the typical chief executive at a large American company made what Morgan prescribed — only 20 times as much as the average worker.

It was a different time that brings to mind a John O’Hara world in which the plant owner of the company town lived with family in only a modestly larger house at the top of the hill but joined the rest of Gibbsville at church and country club dinners. George Romney – Mitt’s father — ran American Motors, which produced the Rambler, America’s 3rd most popular car, but he turned down several annual bonuses because he didn’t think one should make more than $225,000 a year (about $2 million today).

The top tax rate in those days was the confiscatory 91%(!). Lyndon Johnson lowered the top rate to 70%. Ronald Reagan dropped it to 50% and then 28% in his final year (but with some 33% rates because 28% led to a revenue shortfall). It is now 37% with a surcharge for high earners.

The irony is that the crushing tax rate in the 1960s didn’t cause high earners to clamor for more money, yet as taxes eased, yielding what one would think were more gratifying paychecks, corporate bosses became ever more obsessed with the money never being enough.

the inequality gap

The ratio of CEO pay to that of a company’s median worker, a benchmark of inequality, has rocketed into the stratosphere. From the 20:1 ration we saw in the 1960s, the average compensation of CEOs across all companies in the S&P 500 had by 2021 risen to 186 times the pay of the median worker at those companies. Median CEO pay was $14.2 million.

The Economic Policy Institute looks at the biggest 350 among them; in that subset CEOs in 2021 were paid 399 times the “typical” employee’s earnings, with CEO compensation – about $1 million equivalent in 1965 — averaging $27.8 million in 2021, an increase of almost 2,700%. In indefensible contrast, EPI shows an increase in inflation adjusted dollars of only 42% for the average worker across the 56 years.

Often as not, these pay packages are largely in options to buy stock at a certain price in the future, and possibly with strings of performance goals attached. But compensation consultants say that is shifting. More and more CEOs are holding out for outright grants.

the storied 1%

The CEO compensation that shows up in the annual filings of public companies is a visible indicator of soaring wealth, but the broader membership in America’s wealthiest 1% is found in the less visible multitude of private companies across the nation – the auto dealerships, bottling plants, multi-unit food franchise holders, real estate developers, etc. – that pass through to their owners millions of dollars a year. In the aggregate it is they, as well as the huge sums of hereditary assets, that comprise America’s wealthiest 1%.

The concentration of wealth in the U.S. has been a constant topic, reflected in assertions such as:

 The richest 1% hold 40% of the nation’s wealth.

 The top 0.1% of households hold about the same amount of wealth as the bottom 90%.

These inequality stratifications are challenged by economists on the right because they count only income. They argue that the low income groups are far better off because of all the transfer payments they receive: food stamps, Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, the Affordable Care Act’s subsidies, rent subsidies, energy subsidies, and refundable tax credits — “more than 100 other federal, state, and local transfer payments”. True enough, but never have we seen it occur to them to fault a capitalist system that has brought about the need for a congeries of social programs, a system where businesses are allowed to pay wages insufficient for self-support and throw it to the rest of us to make up the difference between their inadequate wages and what a worker needs to pay for life.

But look how much of the total tax bill is already paid by top tier earners, goes another argument against any tax increase. “The top 1 percent of all taxpayers paid a bigger share of individual income taxes than the bottom 90 percent combined”, goes the complaint. An editorial by the Journal board itself wants us to know that “the top 1% of earners paid 42.3% of the country’s income taxes”. How could they be asked to pay more, is the implication.

But that is obfuscation. Why does the 1% foot so much of the nation’s tax bill? Because the 1% takes in such enormous amounts of money. They are subject to exactly the same tax brackets as the rest of us, and that’s simply how the math calculates. It is their wildly disproportionate “take” that should be disconcerting, not the taxes thereon.

The editorial goes on to say that the income reported on all the tax returns of the 1% is 22.2% of the total income reported on the returns of the entire nation. That fact comes from the right-leaning Tax Foundation in its analysis of 2020. If they only take in 22.2% of total income, how is itthat they pay 42.3% of all taxes, the Journal wonders. “Whatever else you say about the current tax code, there’s no denying that it is steeply progressive”, the editors tell us. Something is seriously wrong, right?

Well, no. Here’s why: Each of the few who make up the 1% reported high enough income to aggregate to the 22.2%. Each of those high amounts was subject to the higher tax brackets that — using exactly the same tax brackets as the rest is, remember — amount to the 42.3%.

The Journal further tells us that “the top 1% in 2020 earned at least [our emphasis] about $550,000 and paid an average income-tax rate of 26%.”. That’s revealing: 26% is exactly the effective tax rate on $550,000. But $550,000 is the minimum to qualify for the 1%, the Journal said; everyone else earned more, many surely a lot more, so shouldn’t we expect to see an effective rate higher than 26%, the rate for the minimum earner in this select group? (the maximum tax is 37%). What we’re reading is that the group that paid so much of the nation’s taxes managed with the help of tax accountants and the various avoidance gimmickry buried in the tax codes, to pay a reduced rate.

thumbs down

That, as we first said, is the backdrop against which Republicans reportedly would vote 100% to turn down Biden’s proposed tax increases to prop up Medicare, which those same Republicans say they want to leave unmolested — or so they said shouting “Liar” when Biden, during his State of the Union address, pointed to a Republican plan to “sunset” Medicare and Social Security.

Fallout from Lawsuit: Rupert Murdoch Could Lose Control of Fox

Update, March 5: The exposure of Fox News management and television luminaries expressing opinions among themselves that are the opposite of what they have been telling their viewers ever since the 2020 election has raised the question of whether Rupert Murdoch’s control of Fox Corporation could be in jeopardy. Add to that the extremely strong case filed by Dominion Voting
Fox Corp.’s headquarters on New York’s Sixth Avenue displays the network’s notables (l. to r.) Dana Perino, Bret Baier (obscured by traffic light), Martha MacCallum, Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, and Sean Hannity.

Systems and the possibility of a greater than $1 billion jury verdict or settlement against the company and possibly far beyond that in punitive beyond damages.

Murdoch has shown signs of worry. Asked in deposition, “What should the consequences be when Fox News executives knowingly allow lies to be broadcast?”, Murdoch replied, “They should be reprimanded …maybe got rid of.” It’s thought that he is looking for a scapegoat and Suzanne Scott (see article) may be next. Some of Murdoch’s answers seek to make him above the fray. He checklisted all on-air commentators as having “endorsed” the claim of a stolen election, but “Not Fox, no. Not Fox”. In his deposition:

Q: Is it fair to say you seriously doubted any claim of massive election fraud?
A: Oh yes.
Q: And you seriously doubted it from the very beginning?
A; Yes, I mean, we thought everything was on the up and up. I think that was shown when we announced Arizona.

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, professor at Yale School of Management and influential well beyond the New Haven campus, points out that 61% of News Corp. is held by other than Murdoch – “some major institutional investors like Vanguard and others that own large stakes” – and

“I’ve heard from a number of them and actually I’m familiar with a few of the plaintive law firms that are actually looking into this”.

To continue with our original article:

Filings in a Delaware court by Dominion Voting Systems at the end of February laid bare that the full spectrum of principals at Fox News promoted the lie that the 2020 election was stolen while none of them believed it.

Internal communications and depositions by Fox personnel “prove the network knowingly spread falsehoods about Trump’s loss in the 2020 U.S. presidential election in order to bolster its ratings”, the filings report. The network’s on-air personalities amplified false claims that Dominion’s machines were rigged to hand the election to Joe Biden. “From the top down, Fox knew ‘the dominion stuff’ was ‘total bs’”, quotes one of the filings from “a mountain of direct evidence.”

The motive “is not red or blue,” Rupert Murdoch said. “It is green.” By promulgating Donald Trump’s lies about a fraudulent election because it was good for profit, the Australia born and raised media tycoon has shown no qualms about doing the greatest damage to America’s democracy since Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s and before that Charles “Father” Coughlin in the 1930s. Millions have been indoctrinated by the lie perpetuated night and day on Fox that has created a ruinous schism among Americans with little sign of annulment.

On election night when News anchor Bret Baier reported on air that “The Fox News Decision Desk is calling Arizona for Joe Biden”, the reaction was thunderous. Fox had been preparing its viewers for a Trump win, valid or not. Admitting a Biden win was not supposed to happen. If they told their audience the truth about the election, it could destroy their business model, they believed. Tucker Carlson, the host in the 8:00 pm slot who draws the most viewers, texted his producer Alex Pfeiffer,

“We worked really hard to build what we have. Those f**kers are destroying our credibility. It enrages me.”

There was fear of Trump’s reaction. Carlson added that the then-president was good at “destroying things. He’s the undisputed world champion of that. He could easily destroy us if we play it wrong.” He called Trump “a demonic force, a destroyer” in a January 6 message to Pfeiffer. Murdoch explained at his
deposition, he did not want to antagonize Trump because “He had a very large following, and they were probably mostly viewers of Fox, so it would have been stupid”.

truth unwelcome

Doing her job as a reporter, Fox’s Jacqui Heinrich fact-checked a tweet by Donald Trump about Dominion and specifically mentioned Sean Hannity’s and Lou Dobbs’ broadcasts that evening discussing Dominion. She correctly refuted the tweet, that “top election infrastructure officials” said “there is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.” Alarmed at likely viewer reaction to Trump being corrected, Carlson wrote Hannity…

“Please get her fired. Seriously….What the f**k? I’m actually shocked…It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke.”

Heinrich kept her job, but had to delete the tweet.

When Trump’s Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany was shown on Neil Cavuto’s program intoning,

“We want an honest, accurate, lawful count… We want every legal vote to be counted, and we want every illegal vote to be —”

…Cavuto cut away.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa…She’s charging the other side of welcoming fraud and welcoming illegal voting. Unless she has more details to back that up, I can’t in good countenance continue showing you this.”

That did not sit well with management. Raj Shah — a former Trump White House staffer become an executive at Fox Corporation — labeled Cavuto’s action a “Brand Threat.”

the Arizona call

The biggest fear was that the truthful Arizona call had alienated Fox’s Trump-loving audience, causing them to switch to upstart rival Newsmax. Fox personnel seemed in something of a panic about a slide in ratings, and therefore revenue. “Everything at stake here,” Murdoch messaged Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott. News president Jay Wallace wrote to Scott,

“The Newsmax surge is a bit troubling—truly is an alternative universe when you watch, but it can’t be ignored…Trying to get everyone to comprehend we are on war footing.”

The filings show producers and hosts texting their anguish that the Arizona call had caused viewers to lose trust in the network for not telling them what they wanted to hear. For Scott it was damage to “the brand”. Texting with Lachlan Murdoch, Rupert’s son and an executive at Fox, she wrote that Fox’s viewers were going through the “5 stages of grief”. Carlson wrote, “Do the executives understand how much credibility and trust we’ve lost with our audience?” for not going along with Trump’s stolen election lie. “We’re playing with fire, for real….an alternative like newsmax could be devastating to us.”

It was Fox Political Editor Chris Stirewalt who called Arizona for Biden before the competition did. Trump supporters were furious; Fox subsequently fired him. Managing Editor Bill Sammon, who presided over the Decision Desk, commiserated with Stirewalt, writing “It’s remarkable how weak ratings make good journalists do bad things.”

As for Sammon, Scott complained that he did not understand “the impact to the brand and the arrogance in calling AZ.” Murdoch suggested, “Maybe best to let Bill go right away…a big message with Trump people”. Sammon had sinned by letting truth escape. Weeks later he retired.

respecting their audience

The network readily gave the microphone to those making inflammatory claims, such as Trump lawyers/advisers Sydney Powell and Rudolph Giuliani. The latter said on Fox Business,

“Machines can be hacked. There’s no question about that. Their machines can be hacked.”

and on Fox News,

“Not a singular voter fraud in one state; this pattern repeats itself in a number of states”.

Neither comment came with any evidence. With the subject “Watching Giuliani”, Murdoch texted, “Terrible stuff damaging everybody, I fear”. Scott replied, “Yes Sean and even [Jeanine] Pirro agrees.” Fox reporter Lucas Tomlinson to anchor Bret Baier: “It’s dangerously insane these conspiracy theories.”

This much did the folks at Fox believe the opposite of what they were telling their viewers.

Fox host Dana Perino voiced concern that such claims could draw a lawsuit from Dominion. She called the voter fraud allegations “total bs,” “insane,” and “nonsense”. But Suzanne Scott e-mailed that on-air personalities couldn’t afford to “give the crazies an inch right now … they are looking for and blowing up all appearances of disrespect to the audience.”

Ron Mitchell, the senior vice president for prime-time programming and analytics, theorized that Newsmax’s brand of “conspiratorial reporting might be exactly what the disgruntled [Fox News Channel] viewer is looking for.” He advised that Fox should not “ever give viewers a reason to turn us off. Every topic and guest must perform.”

off the leash

So Sydney Powell was free to tell Fox viewers, unchecked:

Maria Bartiromo, Sydney Powell

“We’ve got evidence of corruption all across the country in countless districts. The machine ran an algorithm that shaved votes from Trump and awarded them to Biden. They used the machines to trash large batches of votes that should have been awarded to president Trump and … to inject and add massive quantities of votes for Mr. Biden.

A lot of the machines, particularly by the Dominion company and in which Diane Feinstein and Nancy Pelosi hold interests along with Mr. [George] Soros has a connection to that as well. They actually have the Chinese software or parts in them.”

Fox broadcasted an entire news conference conducted by Powell and Giuliani claiming election fraud.

At a state proceeding in Georgia that December, Giuliani said, “It’s a highly inaccurate machine that does cast doubt on the entire legitimacy of the vote…There’s overwhelming proof of fraud.” Proof was never forthcoming.

The brief said that some of Powell’s claims come from an e-mail from a woman who “explained that she gets her information from experiencing something ‘like time-travel in a semi-conscious state,’ allowing her to ‘see what others don’t see, and hear what others don’t hear,’ and she received messages from ‘the wind'”.

And yet Fox gave Powell repeated air time. Her conspiracy theories went unchallenged when on Bartiromo’s show, despite the host privately calling her claims “kooky”.

Carlson told Laura Ingraham, who hosts the 10:00 pm slot. “Sidney Powell is lying by the way. Caught her. It’s insane.” Ingraham, texted back that “Sidney is a complete nut. No one will work with her. Ditto with Rudy”. She elsewhere in the brief says, “Rudy is such an idiot”. Hannity commented internally, “Rudy is acting like an insane person”.

Fox Corp.’s Shah wrote, “s**t is so crazy right now. so many people openly denying the obvious that Powell is clearly full of it.” Alex Pfeiffer replied: “She is a f**king nutcase.”

No matter. An analysis by Ron Mitchell found that “Fox viewers were switching the channel specifically to watch Sidney Powell as a guest” on Newsmax, says the filing. A few nights later, Powell was a guest on Hannity’s 9:00 pm show.

And yet Hannity called Powell a “f**king lunatic”. In deposition he said, “The whole narrative that Sydney was pushing. I did not believe it for one second”.

But she was appropriate to the Fox audience, apparently. “Respecting this audience whether we agree or not is critical”, Hannity texted during this period.

Former House Speaker Paul Ryan, on the board at Fox, was troubled by the misinformation being fed to viewers by what they believe are trusted sources. Responding to a Ryan e-mail, Murdoch wrote, “Thanks Paul. Wake-up call for Hannity, who has been privately disgusted by Trump for weeks, but was scared to lose viewers.” Rupert Murdoch texted Suzanne Scott, “All very well for Sean to tell you he was in despair about Trump but what did he tell his viewers?” The on-air Hannity instead tells his audience,

“Tonight every America should be angry, you should be outraged, you should be worried, you should be concerned at what has happened in the election.”

ammunition for dominion

The company can point to defamatory remarks by on-air hosts such as Maria Bartiromo saying to Sidney Powell, “You said that there may have been kickbacks to some people who accepted the Dominion software”. Or Jeanine Pirro saying, “The Dominion software system has been tagged as one allegedly capable of flipping votes”.

Lou Dobbs welcomed Powell more than once, agreeing with her that “electoral fraud” was perpetrated by electronic voting machines, “prominently Dominion” and said, somewhat unclearly,

“Whether it’s Dominion, whatever voting machine company is… no one knows their ownership, has no idea what’s going on in those servers”

and spoke of

“the most ludicrous, irresponsible, and rancid system…this is an assault on the core of a democracy.”

“The North Koreans do a more nuanced show,” was Fox News President Jay Wallace’s reaction.

The MyPillow salesman, Mike Lindell, was given repeated air time. Suzanne Scott told shows to put him on air because he would “get ratings.” He “spouted…conspiracies on air after previewing them for Carlson’s staff — cleared to say them, that is. So we heard the like of,

“I’ve been all-in trying to find the machine fraud and we found it, we have all the evidence…I have the evidence. I dare people to put it on. I dare Dominion to sue me ’cause then it would get on faster”.

Off air Carlson told Pfeiffer that claims about manipulated software were “absurd.”

But MyPillow was Carlson’s biggest advertiser. Dominion’s lawyers asked Murdoch why they gave Lindell this special treatment, and Murdoch testified, “The man is on every night. Pays us a lot of money.” The filings have Murdoch admitting late in January 2021, it was “wrong for Tucker to host Mike Lindell to repeat those allegations against Dominion”.

Combing through the Dominion filings one finds Fox News personages calling Trump and his lawyers’ election claims: “total BS”, “Insane”,”Crazy”,”Mind Blowingly nuts”, “off the rails”, “effing lunatics”.

no effect

Will the embarrassment of this exposure cause Fox to change? Not likely. For beginners, none of Fox’s audience know of any of this duplicity, of Fox hosts lying to them, unless they stray from Fox. The network has kept on a tight lid. Howard Kurtz, whose Sunday program is about the media, Fox included Fox, was disallowed from covering the Dominion filings. “I can’t talk about it”, he says.

Simultaneously, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has handed over some 44,000 hours of video footage of the January 6 insurrection to Tucker Carson for his exclusive use. Carlson spent months arguing that there was no insurrection, so we can see what’s coming. We can expect him to select for his documentary placid scenes of the crowd taking selfies, staying within the rope lines, gazing at the splendor of Statuary Hall.

 “Anyone who calls Jan. 6 an insurrection is a liar”, he said in December, 2021.
 “Of all the things Jan. 6 was, it was not a violent terrorist attack”, he said in a September, 2021, show.
 It was “an outbreak of mob violence, a forgettably minor outbreak by recent standards” (150 police officers were injured and several subsequently died).
 “FBI operatives were organizing the attack”, he insisted in a June 2021 show.

As we see, the lying continued at Fox.

A fitting coda to this sojourn into the Fox mentality is Carlson’s monologue of February 16, 2021:

“All of us lie from time to time. That’s the human condition. But imagine if lying was your job. Imagine forcing yourself to tell lies all day about everything in ways that were so transparent and so outlandish that there is no way people listening to you could possible believe anything you said. Then imagine doing that again and again and again every day of your professional life for your entire life. Could you do that?”

No. But he could.

Mar 3 2023 | Posted in Media | Read More »