On today’s BradCast: When you’re a monopoly power company — especially in Florida — they let you do it, I guess. [Audio link to full show follows below this summary.]
Before we get to the massive scandal(s) unspooling this week in Florida, a few other notes about corrupt media and corrupt power brokers. Donald Trump‘s favorite “Big Lie” fake news network, One American News (OAN), looks to be on the brink of going out of business, after Verizon joined AT&T to stop carrying their programming this weekend. Sad! At the same time, Trump is threatening to sue actual news network, CNN, because they repeatedly reported on his “Big Lie” attempts to steal the 2020 election. Good luck with that.
Then, it’s on to the mind-blowing story out of the Sunshine State this week, where a leak of thousands of documents from a consulting firm in Alabama, has revealed all sorts of corruption by Florida Power & Light (FPL), the state’s monopoly public utility company. The Florida papers are having a field day as they comb through the documents, publishing damning exposé after damning exposé on the dirt they are finding, which goes all the way up to FLP President and CEO, Eric Silagy, who, according to our guest today, incredibly enough, still has his job!
The documents were released amid a power battle over Montgomery, AL-based Matrix, LLC, a “powerful but little-known political consulting firm that has operated behind the scenes in at least eight states,” according to the Guardian. They reveal a boatload of corruption by FPL, its CEO and many of its executive, including running “ghost candidates” in elections, mounting disinformation campaigns to maintain their monopoly (for example, to oppose residential solar power in the Sunshine State!) and secretly taking over pretty much full control of an “independent”, right-leaning “news” site in Tallahassee called The Capitolist.
The website (which is still online, also incredibly enough) has been influential for years among Florida lawmakers. Its editor and founder is a guy by the name of Brian Burgess, the former Communications Director for FL’s former Governor, now U.S. Senator Rick Scott. According to a deep dive from the Miami Herald, Burgess was being paid some $12,000 a month by FPL — via a web of third parties cut-outs, including the consulting firm Matrix — to publish its propaganda, push its preferred (sometimes fake) candidates, and ruthlessly attack its opponents, including both elected officials and reporters who dared publish stories the power company didn’t like.
For insight into this (these) still unfolding scandal (scandals), we’re joined today by ALISSA JEAN SCHAFER, the FL-based Research and Communications Manager for the Energy and Policy Institute, a non-profit “watchdog organization working to expose attacks on renewable energy and counter misinformation by fossil fuel and utility interests”. Her organization certainly has its work cut out for it with this gobsmacking “web of scandal,” as Schafer describes it.
“If you are a Floridian,” she notes, “you have no choice who your power company is. We are in a monopoly market. So if you have Florida Power & Light, you’re stuck with them. You’re paying that bill every month. If you’re seeing these headlines, I don’t know understand how you can NOT be furious.”
“It’s kind of a crazy state. People like to make fun of us,” concedes Schafer. “But at the end of the day, there are a lot of folks that are being impacted by this nonsense. We have elections coming up, and how are people supposed to know that their votes aren’t being manipulated by these fake candidates that are being propped up by dark money. It’s a very real concern.”
Among those fake candidates, as the Herald reports, was one who was “running” against state Senator José Javier Rodràguez, who proposed legislation to allow landlords to sell cheap rooftop solar power directly to tenants. “I want you to make his life a living hell … seriously,” wrote FPL’s CEO Silagy in a 2019 email to two of his vice-presidents. They then ran a third-party candidate with the same last name as Rodriguez, who split the vote. The state Senator was pushed out of his job by just 32 votes. FPL’s “ghost candidate” later admitted he had been bribed to put his name on the ballot.
There is a lot to discuss today with Schafer on all of this, including how FPL is claiming they broke no laws; their ridiculous claim that rate-payer money wasn’t actually used to hoax rate-payers through these schemes; and how The Capitolist’s editor Burgess is able to claim with a straight face that he has “never pitched nor solicited feedback from FPL executives on any story or business venture” and has “never received a story pitch from any FPL executive.” (Of course not. That’s what Matrix was for! And they were in near daily communications with FPL execs, according to the leaked documents.)
“If we take a step back and look at our investor-owned utilities across the country, whether they are working with Matrix or not, this is a playbook that we do see time and time again,” Schafer explains. “You have a consulting firm as the middle-man to do some of the dirty work, because utilities don’t want their name on it. They want to be able to say, ‘I never spoke to XYZ.’ They can say that because they spoke to the consultant who then spoke to XYZ. You have similar trends of setting up shell companies to pass money through, so that it looks like the utility is just being a utility and not actually a political operative.”
Finally today, Mitch McConnell is apparently furious at being out-foxed by Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on this week’s surprise agreement with Sen. Joe Manchin for a major tax, healthcare and climate deal called the Inflation Reduction Act. McConnell and his fellow Senate Republicans decided to take it out on sick combat veterans who were exposed to deadly chemicals and toxic burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan by voting against healthcare protections for them. Former Daily Show host and actual supporter of America’s veterans, Jon Stewart, had a word or two for those Republican Senators at the Capitol on Thursday morning, including: “If this is America First, then America is fucked.”
Looking like Legalschnauzer posted about this in Jan, 2022. From AL. I’ve been down the rabit whole (sic) https://legalschnauzer.blogspot...atrix-llc.html The committees formed for ghost candidates had Fl. BOE signature matches that were either co-opted or offered by someone… the women involved said they never signed or agreed. “The committees formed for ghost candidates had Fl. BOE signature matches that were either co-opted or offered by someone… the women involved said they never signed or agreed.” https://www.orlandosentinel.com...t2m-story.html “One of the women told South Florida investigators her signature appeared on documents she did not sign. Text messages released Friday show Alvarado asked both of them to provide images of their signatures on a “white background,” and they responded with samples that look similar to those that appear on some of the documents submitted to the Division of Elections.”