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Thursday, December 10, 2020
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RSN: FOCUS: David Sirota and Andrew Perez | The Establishment Is Gearing Up Against Even a Public Option
10 December 20
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FOCUS: David Sirota and Andrew Perez | The Establishment Is Gearing Up Against Even a Public Option
David Sirota and Andrew Perez, Jacobin
Excerpt: "The health care industry coalition that aired television ads vilifying Medicare for All during the presidential campaign is gearing up to block a promised public health insurance option."
Tax records we've reviewed show a health care industry front group run by a former Hillary Clinton aide has already amassed millions to block a public health insurance option. Even small reform isn't possible without confronting powerful interests.
..... and is already calling on President-elect Joe Biden’s top health nominee to focus on fortifying the current private insurance–based health insurance system, despite his longtime support for Medicare for All.
On Monday, after Biden said he would nominate Medicare for All supporter Xavier Becerra as his health secretary, the Partnership for America’s Health Care Future (PAHCF) issued a statement saying they “look forward to working with the Department of Health and Human Services under the new administration to build on and improve what’s working, where private coverage, Medicare and Medicaid work together to expand access to coverage and care, and fix what’s broken.”
PAHCF’s members include top lobbying groups representing health insurers, drugmakers, and for-profit hospital conglomerates. Under the existing system that the group is defending, up to twelve million Americans have lost their medical coverage during the COVID-19 pandemic, as health insurance industry profits have skyrocketed because people have avoided elective medical procedures.
Now, new financial disclosures reviewed by the Daily Poster shed light on just how much money PAHCF has been able to amass in its crusade to block significant health care reforms. In 2019, the group raised more than $55 million and spent roughly $20 million, ending the year with $36 million in assets, according to its tax return filed with the IRS last month.
Pretending Millions Have Not Lost Their Health Insurance
PAHCF is led by a former top Hillary Clinton aide and operated out of the offices of Forbes Tate Partners, a DC lobbying firm run by former top Democratic staffers on Capitol Hill.
During the 2020 Democratic presidential primary campaign, PAHCF spent $4.5 million on television ads attacking Medicare for All, and it also spent millions this year to block a state level public option plan in Colorado.
President-elect Joe Biden campaigned in support of a public health insurance option to compete with health insurers, and his new HHS pick Becerra backed a public option when he served on the House Ways and Means Committee that considered such a proposal during Democratic health care reform efforts in 2009.
Back then, Becerra declared: “It would be difficult for me to believe that you could have meaningful reform of the system that will bring prices down and help provide coverage for all Americans who don’t have it unless you have the options out there that really would create that competition.”
Any movement on a public option will likely hinge on which party controls the Senate after the two runoff races in Georgia in January. Democrats need to win both in order to take back the chamber.
Nevertheless, PACHF is already redoubling its effort to demonize a public health insurance option.
The organization recently touted a deceptive poll aiming to derail any public option movement. It said its poll found that “78 percent of voters with health insurance coverage are satisfied with their coverage.”
Tens of millions of Americans are uninsured or underinsured, and millions of Americans have lost their insurance during the pandemic.
PAHCF Tax Returns Detail Millions of Dollars of Spending
PAHCF has succeeded in shrouding its agenda in an innocuous name — but behind its gauzy platitudes and cheery brand are millions of dollars from the country’s most powerful corporate lobbying groups.
According to its 2019 tax return, PAHCF’s board of directors included executives at America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), a top DC lobbying group for health insurers; Pharmaceutical and Research Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), Washington’s biggest drug lobby; and the Federation of American Hospitals, which lobbies for investor-owned hospital companies.
OpenSecrets reported yesterday that PhRMA raised a staggering $527 million last year.
In 2019, when PAHCF was focusing most of its fire on Medicare for All, most of its $20 million in spending went toward attempts to influence public opinion, but it only reported to Congress that it spent $60,000 on federal lobbying efforts.
The organization’s tax return for that year says it spent $18.4 million on lobbying. Why the difference? The IRS form line for lobbying includes both direct lobbying and grassroots lobbying. The IRS defines grassroots lobbying as “any attempt to influence any legislation through an attempt to affect the opinions of the general public or any part of the general public.”
Last December, the Washington Post reported that lobbyists for PAHCF helped write op-eds by two Montana state lawmakers and one Ohio state senator bashing Medicare for All and scaremongering about government-run health care. That’s an example of grassroots lobbying.
While PAHCF doesn’t disclose how much its members donate, it reported receiving six contributions of $5 million, and more than a dozen seven-figure gifts overall.
Investor-owned hospital chain Tenet Healthcare has reported contributing more than $2.1 million to the coalition, including $1.5 million in the first half of 2020.
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RSN: Jane Mayer | Dianne Feinstein's Missteps Raise a Painful Age Question
10 December 20
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Jane Mayer | Dianne Feinstein's Missteps Raise a Painful Age Question
Jane Mayer, The New Yorker
Mayer writes: "In a hearing on November 17th, Dianne Feinstein, the senior Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, who, at eighty-seven, is the oldest member of the Senate, grilled a witness."
Reading from a sheaf of prepared papers, she asked Jack Dorsey, the C.E.O. of Twitter, whether his company was doing enough to stem the spread of disinformation. Elaborating, she read in full a tweet that President Trump had disseminated on November 7th, falsely claiming to have won the Presidential election. She then asked Dorsey if Twitter’s labelling of the tweet as disputed had adequately alerted readers that it was a bald lie.
It was a good question. Feinstein seemed sharp and focussed. For decades, she has been the epitome of a female trailblazer in Washington, always hyper-prepared. But this time, after Dorsey responded, Feinstein asked him the same question again, reading it word for word, along with the Trump tweet. Her inflection was eerily identical. Feinstein looked and sounded just as authoritative, seemingly registering no awareness that she was repeating herself verbatim. Dorsey graciously answered the question all over again.
Social media was less polite. A conservative Web site soon posted a clip of the humiliating moment on YouTube, under the headline “Senator Feinstein just asked the same question twice and didn’t realize she did it,” adding an emoji of someone covering his face with his hand in shame, along with bright red type proclaiming “Time to Retire!!” Six days later, under growing pressure from progressive groups who were already outraged by her faltering management of Amy Coney Barrett’s Supreme Court confirmation hearing, Feinstein released a statement announcing that she would step down from the Democrats’ senior position, while continuing as a non-ranking member of the committee. Feinstein’s office declined to comment for this article.
Feinstein first became nationally known for the grit she showed in 1978, when her fellow San Francisco city officials Harvey Milk and George Moscone were shot dead. She has had a distinguished twenty-eight-year tenure in the Senate, taking on a range of powerful interests, from gun-rights groups to the C.I.A. The moment marked a sad turning point for Feinstein and a reckoning for the Senate, which runs on the seniority system. The presumption has been that it’s up to voters to fire aging senators who can no longer effectively serve. But voters rarely do. As Paul Kane, who covers Congress for the Washington Post, wrote in 2017, the Senate was then the oldest in history. Its eight octogenarians were almost twice the number that had simultaneously served before. According to the Senate Historical Office, all of them held positions of vital importance to the country. And while several were regarded as wise and effective, others had disruptive health problems that clearly undermined the Senate’s ability to function.
Twitter and other social-media platforms are exposing lawmakers’ infirmities to new and harsher scrutiny, violating an unspoken culture of complicity and coverup. Prior to the recent reëlection of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, the Internet was ablaze with close-up photos of his bandaged, purple hands, setting off wild speculation about the health of the seventy-eight-year-old Republican from Kentucky. The physical and mental fitness of Trump, who is seventy-four, and Joe Biden, who is seventy-eight, have also been extensively covered. “In the 24/7 news cycle we have now, you can’t really hide,” one former top aide to Feinstein told me.
Some former Feinstein aides insist that rumors of her cognitive decline have been exaggerated, and that video clips taken out of context can make almost anyone look foolish. They also bridle at singling out her condition, because declining male senators, including Strom Thurmond, of South Carolina, and Robert Byrd, of West Virginia, were widely known by the end of their careers to be non-compos mentis. “For his last ten years, Strom Thurmond didn’t know if he was on foot or on horseback,” one former Senate aide told me. The former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, of Nevada, is said to have snapped at a staffer who claimed to be relaying what Byrd thought. “Knock it off,” Reid supposedly said. “Everyone knows it’s what you think.” In contrast, one former aide to Feinstein argues that, even if her faculties are diminished, “she’s still smarter and quicker than at least a third of the other members.”
But many others familiar with Feinstein’s situation describe her as seriously struggling, and say it has been evident for several years. Speaking on background, and with respect for her accomplished career, they say her short-term memory has grown so poor that she often forgets she has been briefed on a topic, accusing her staff of failing to do so just after they have. They describe Feinstein as forgetting what she has said and getting upset when she can’t keep up. One aide to another senator described what he called a “Kabuki” meeting in which Feinstein’s staff tried to steer her through a proposed piece of legislation that she protested was “just words” which “make no sense.” Feinstein’s staff has said that sometimes she seems herself, and other times unreachable. “The staff is in such a bad position,” a former Senate aide who still has business in Congress said. “They have to defend her and make her seem normal.”
Feinstein has always been known as a difficult taskmaster. She is said to have told someone applying for a job in her office, “I don’t get ulcers—I give them.” A stickler for detail, she demanded to see every page going out of her office with her name on it. But with her diminishing capacity, this has become increasingly difficult. The former Senate staffer who still works with Congress declared, “It’s been a disaster.” As the ranking Democrat, Feinstein ordinarily would be expected to run the Party’s strategy on issues of major national importance, including judicial nominations. Instead, the committee has been hamstrung and disorganized. “Other members were constantly trying to go around her because, as chair, she didn’t want to do anything, and she also didn’t want them doing anything,” the former Senate staffer said. A current aide to a different Democratic senator observed sadly, “She’s an incredibly effective human being, but there’s definitely been deterioration in the last year. She’s in a very different mode now.”
Tensions began erupting in the summer of 2018, during Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings, when the other Democrats on the committee belatedly learned that Feinstein’s office had sat on Christine Blasey Ford’s allegation that Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her when they were in high school, instead of immediately alerting them or the F.B.I. Ford had demanded that Feinstein keep the explosive charge confidential. But, inevitably, word of it leaked elsewhere to the media, triggering a second round of circus-like hearings that angered all sides.
The internal criticism grew more intense this fall over Feinstein’s handling of Amy Coney Barrett. Feinstein had bungled a question about abortion during Barrett’s 2017 appeals-court confirmation hearing, provoking conservative indignation by casting it clumsily as a question about Barrett’s extreme religious beliefs. “Dogma and law are two different things,” Feinstein observed. “The dogma lives loudly in you—and that’s a concern.” The backlash over the question effectively indemnified Barrett from any further questions about how her faith affected her judicial rulings.
According to several sources, Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Minority Leader, was so worried that Feinstein would mismanage Barrett’s confirmation hearings that he installed a trusted former aide, Max Young, to “embed” in the Judiciary Committee to make sure the hearings didn’t go off the rails. He had done the same during Kavanaugh’s confirmation as well. Schumer brought Young in from the gun-control group Everytown to handle strategy and communications and serve as Schumer’s “eyes and ears” on Feinstein, as one Senate source put it. Schumer’s office declined to comment.
The precaution nonetheless failed. The Democrats’ strategy was to portray Barrett’s confirmation process as a travesty, jammed through the Senate in the final weeks before the Presidential election by hypocritical Republicans bent on using brute power to replace the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg with her ideological polar opposite. The Democrats sought to fire up their voters by highlighting the illegitimacy of the process. But, to the Democrats’ dismay, Feinstein instead hugged the Republican chairman of the committee, Lindsey Graham, thanking him for his “fairness” and for running “one of the best set of hearings that I’ve participated in.”
By the end of the confirmation hearings, public-opinion polls showed more support for Barrett than before they began. Progressive advocacy groups demanded that Feinstein step aside. Ilyse Hogue, the president of the reproductive-rights group NARAL Pro-Choice America, issued a statement accusing her of having failed to make clear that Barrett posed “a grave threat” to “every freedom and right we hold dear.” Instead, Hogue said, Feinstein had “offered an appearance of credibility to the proceedings that is wildly out of step with the American people. As such, we believe the committee needs new leadership.” Brian Fallon, the executive director of the progressive advocacy group Demand Justice, who was a former aide to Schumer, was even more blunt. “It’s time for Senator Feinstein to step down from her leadership position on the Senate Judiciary Committee,” he said. “If she won’t, her colleagues need to intervene.”
Schumer had several serious and painful talks with Feinstein, according to well-informed sources. Overtures were also made to enlist the help of Feinstein’s husband, Richard Blum. Feinstein, meanwhile, was surprised and upset by Schumer’s message. He had wanted her to step aside on her own terms, with her dignity intact, but “she wasn’t really all that aware of the extent to which she’d been compromised,” one well-informed Senate source told me. “It was hurtful and distressing to have it pointed out.” Compounding the problem, Feinstein seemed to forget about the conversations soon after they talked, so Schumer had to confront her again. “It was like Groundhog Day, but with the pain fresh each time.” Anyone who has tried to take the car keys away from an elderly relative knows how hard it can be, he said, adding that, in this case, “It wasn’t just about a car. It was about the U.S. Senate.”
Some who have watched the situation unfold fault Schumer, and the Democratic establishment in California, for not having intervened before Feinstein ran for reëlection in 2018. “She should have gone out on top in 2018,” said a former Senate aide who continues to admire her, but who pointed out that many of Feinstein’s peers retired selflessly. “We only have a hundred senators. I don’t think she should be there,” the former aide said. “Someone should have told her.” But it’s unclear whether Feinstein would have listened. As one of the current aides to a different senator notes, “In her defense, Feinstein has had to fight for everything she’s gotten. She didn’t get where she is as a woman in politics by listening to the men.” Whether Feinstein will serve out the remainder of her term, which will end in 2024, when she is ninety-one, is a matter of speculation among some of those who have worked with her.
Meanwhile, the Feinstein situation has triggered the latest round in a larger generational fight in the Democratic Senate caucus. Unlike the Republican leadership in the Senate, which rotates committee chairmanships, the Democrats have stuck with the seniority system. Some frustrated younger members argue that this has undermined the Democrats’ effectiveness by giving too much power to elderly and sometimes out-of-touch chairs, resulting in uncoördinated strategy and too little opportunity for members in their prime.
A glimpse of the discontent became visible last month, when Sheldon Whitehouse, of Rhode Island, who at sixty-five is considered a younger member, challenged the claim of Richard Durbin, the seventy-six-year-old senator from Illinois, a long-serving member of the Party’s leadership, to be next in line to fill Feinstein’s seat as the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee. Whitehouse argued that Durbin had enough powerful positions already. He proposed a rule change that would bar Durbin, as the Party’s second-ranking leader, or “whip,” from being eligible to also take the top post on the committee. Another senator proposed a less stringent rule change that would bar the whip from also holding a top position on more than one committee or subcommittee. In a secret ballot on Wednesday, this second rule passed. It will enable Durbin to be the whip and the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, but requires him to relinquish an additional seat that he has held as the ranking Democrat on the subcommittee overseeing defense spending.
This may settle the immediate strife within the Democratic caucus. But Congress’s gerontocracy problem shows no sign of abating. If Republicans hold the Senate majority next year after Georgia’s two runoff races, the likely chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee will be Chuck Grassley, of Iowa. Now eighty-seven, he is just three months younger than Feinstein. And he has said that he is considering running for reëlection in 2022.
Georgia's secretary of state Brad Raffensperger. (photo: Nicole Craine/The New York Times)
Federal Court Trial to Restore 198,000 Georgia Voters Purged From Rolls
Nicole Powers, Greg Palast's Website
Powers writes: "On December 10, Federal District Court Justice Steve Jones will hear a one-day trial of demand for injunction by Black Voters Matter and others to restore immediately the registration of 198,000 voters wrongly purged from rolls."
The lawsuit was filed last week with the United States District Court Northern District of Georgia Atlanta division (Case number: 1:20-cv-4869).
The case alleges that Secretary of State (SOS) Brad Raffensperger violated the National Voter Registration Act when he removed around 198,000 citizens from the voter rolls by claiming they had moved from the address listed on their voter registration. Joined by the Transformative Justice Coalition and Rainbow PUSH, Black Voters Matter et al v Raffensperger states that none of those citizens had moved.
This lawsuit is based on the expert reporting of The Palast Investigative Fund and the official report that was released on September 1, 2020 by the ACLU of GA.
In summary the state of Georgia has wrongly cancelled the voter registration of voters because they supposedly moved — but they had not moved. Specifically, the state said that thousands of voters had submitted postal Change of Address forms — but the Post Office says they did not. Additionally, Georgia — in violation of federal law — used an unlicensed contractor who used the wrong list. The National Voter Registration Act says the state must use a licensee of the US Postal Service — they did not.
Oath Keepers. (photo: Susan Walsh/AP)
How Oath Keepers Are Quietly Infiltrating Local Government
Ciara O'Rourke, POLITICO
Excerpt: "In a small county in Texas, the far-right group is racking up wins at the ballot box. Is a constitutional showdown coming?"
n late August, the constable in a small county outside Fort Worth logged on to his Facebook account and called for the execution of a mayor nearly 2,000 miles away.
“Ted Wheeler needs to be tried, convicted and executed posthaste,” John D. Shirley wrote on Aug. 31. “He has blood on his hands, and it’s time for justice.”
What precipitated Shirley’s outburst against the mayor of Portland, Ore., was the shooting death on Aug. 29 of a member of a right-wing group called Patriot Prayer by an antifa activist. The killing was a violent escalation of clashes that had roiled Portland in the weeks since George Floyd was suffocated to death by police. Shirley said “patriots” in “socialist-controlled cities” needed to protect themselves. As the presidential election approached, he warned of “open conflict.” Twitter suspended his account shortly after, but he continued to post about violent disputes on Facebook with crescendoing alarmism.
“If you doubt these lefties won’t put you and your family against a wall and pull the trigger, then you aren’t paying attention,” Shirley said on Oct. 10. “Their hatred for you is palpable. We dare never let them regain power again.”
Since 2018, Shirley has been the constable of Hood County, a conservative, mostly white community outside of Fort Worth popular among retirees. As constable, Shirley is empowered to serve warrants and subpoenas and make arrests. It might seem odd that an elected member of law enforcement would incite violence against another democratically elected official in one of the nation’s largest cities. But Shirley was also a sworn member of Oath Keepers, which in recent months has been warning of a civil war.
Depending on whom you ask, Oath Keepers is either “the last line of defense against tyranny” or an extremist militia. They describe themselves as a nonpartisan association of tens of thousands of current and former military, police and first responders who pledge to defend the Constitution and refuse to obey orders they consider unconstitutional. The Southern Poverty Law Center on the other hand lists Oath Keepers as “one of the largest radical antigovernment groups in the U.S. today” and has kept tabs on incidents involving members that may betray the idea that the group is just about defending the Constitution. In 2010, for example, a man in Tennessee driving a truck with an Oath Keepers logo was accused in a plot to arrest two dozen local officials.
By the time he was posting about Wheeler, Shirley had been an Oath Keeper for more than a decade, serving on the organization’s board of directors, as its national peace officer liaison, and as the Texas chapter president. But he isn’t the only elected official in Hood County affiliated with the group. One member, a newly elected justice of the peace, said in February that Oath Keepers was having a “surgence” there. Shirley has described an incoming county commissioner as an Oath Keeper.
I first learned about Oath Keepers in Hood County in March, when I received a message about the group’s growing presence there. Some residents have speculated that there are even more elected officials who are Oath Keepers, though no one else I spoke with said they belonged to the group and many denied knowing much about it at all.
Oath Keepers has made inroads across the country with thousands of law enforcement officers, soldiers and veterans. Still, it’s not common for elected officials to openly identify as members, said Sam Jackson, a University of Albany professor who wrote a new book about the organization. After all, Jackson said, this is a group that, in 2014, was prepared to shoot at police who weren’t on their side during the Bundy standoff, when hundreds of armed civilians confronted federal rangers trying to impound a Nevada rancher’s cattle that had been grazing on protected land.
Daniel Peters, a left-leaning gadfly who regularly challenges conservative county commissioners, told me that Shirley’s ominous postings made him afraid for his safety. Shirley, he said, “is very openly calling for violence toward people like me.”
Mendi Tackett, a Democrat who stays at home with her kids, said she thinks there’s a “healthy number of people here who are definitely in on the ideology.” It’s concerning that active law enforcement or military personnel could be involved with the organization, she told me, but she suspects that “some of these folks are more talk than they are actual action.”
Either way, what’s happening in Hood County may represent a shift for a group that was once seen as a governmental antagonist but is now establishing itself inside the halls of the elected officialdom. And it is setting up potentially dangerous conflicts between officials with different ideas of what constitutes legitimate government authority. Over the past 10 months, Shirley has promoted protests over orders to slow the spread of Covid-19 and cast doubt on a peaceful local demonstration against police brutality. And despite their avowed neutrality, the group’s attention of late has focused on defending one individual—Donald Trump—who himself has been accused of undermining the constitutional transfer of power by refusing to concede an election he lost resoundingly.
“Our POTUS will not go down without a fight,” Oath Keepers said in a recent email blast. “He WILL NOT concede. This election was stolen from We The People. We will prevail but we need your help! Or we lose our democracy.”
Oath Keepers was formed in 2009 after the election of Barack Obama. When the group’s founder, Stewart Rhodes, announced its debut, he wrote in a blog post that its primary mission would be “to prevent the destruction of American liberty by preventing a full-blown totalitarian dictatorship from coming to power.”
Ascertaining how widespread support is for that mission is subject to debate. In 2014, Rhodes said Oath Keepers had about 35,000 members who paid dues to the organization. This year, the Atlantic reported there were nearly 25,000 names on a membership list the magazine obtained.
But Hood County, named after the Confederate Army General John Bell Hood, could offer insight on a very local level of how the group has continued to grow in small but measurable ways across the country.
An early clue came this February at a candidate forum for local Republicans. Dub Gillum a retired state trooper who was running for justice of the peace in Hood County’s Precinct 4, said on Feb. 11 that Oath Keepers was experiencing “a resurgence—or surgence—in Hood County.”
When I reached out to Gillum he told me he did not remember saying that there was a “surgence” of Oath Keepers in Hood County. “Personally,” he said, “I do not see a ‘surgency’ of Oath Keepers in Hood County but rather a resurgence of patriotism.”
Gillum said he started following Oath Keepers on Facebook in 2010, when the social media platform suggested it to him as a group he might like. The Oath Keepers’ mission resonated with him. It felt like a reaffirmation of the oath he took when he became a state trooper in 1990. Oath Keepers was a networking resource for him when he was a trooper, he said, but he’s never attended any of the group’s events. He doesn’t consider himself “active” in the organization.
About a week later, on Feb. 20, Hood County News, the local newspaper, reported that Oath Keepers, “one of the nation’s largest anti-government militia groups,” was scheduled to hold a rally on Feb. 24 at the Harbor Lakes Golf Club in Granbury, the county seat named for another Confederate general that has twice won recognition as the “Best Historic Small Town in America.”
Rhodes, a former Army paratrooper and Yale Law School graduate who once worked for Texas Congressman Ron Paul, was supposed to lead the rally for “all Oath Keeper candidates running in the primary.” The event was also billed as a swearing-in for anyone who wanted to take the “Oath to the Constitution” for the first time.
But the next day, the paper reported that the meeting was canceled after the golf club backed out, saying the event was “misrepresented in the planning” and that the rally’s agenda was “unbeknownst to Harbor Lakes.”
Still, on Feb. 22, a post on the website Hood County Today written by Nathan Criswell, the county’s former Republican Party chair, declared “Oath Keepers emerge in Hood.” A local chapter would soon be operational in the county under John Shirley’s leadership, Criswell said.
On Feb. 25, an “insider’s perspective” of Oath Keepers written by the constable was published on the site. Shirley said he had first heard about Oath Keepers in 2008 and reached out to Rhodes before the group was even officially formed. Shirley “was immediately fascinated with the idea of peace officers and soldiers rededicating themselves to their oaths and to the Constitution,” he wrote.
He defended Oath Keepers as a “nonpartisan organization almost exclusively dedicated to teaching first responders and soldiers to respect their oaths, know what the Constitution says and how that knowledge applies to their jobs.” Descriptions of the group as a “right-wing,” “racist,” “anti-government” militia were “ad hominem attacks” lacking evidence, he said.
But some residents were alarmed by a scene that unfolded outside a local gym a couple months later. By then, the coronavirus pandemic had hobbled communities across the state and Governor Greg Abbott had ordered gyms, among other businesses, to shut down. Lift the Bar Fitness in Granbury followed that direction, at least for a while. By April, David Todd Hebert, who owns the gym with his wife, had grown impatient with what he considered an unconstitutional mandate from ”King Abbott.” They decided to reopen the gym even if it meant going to jail.
The gym announced on Facebook that members could finally come back even though Abbott’s executive order was still in effect. Someone commented that the police better “bring a lot of guns” if they were planning to stop them, Hood County News reported.
When Lift the Bar Fitness opened on April 28, about 10 Oath Keepers turned up “to make sure that we stayed open,” Hebert told me. They were friendly, he said, and they’d heard he was going to get arrested. They wanted to document any violations of his constitutional rights.
Hebert didn’t get arrested. In fact, he said, no officers showed up. But the story started to spread through the county. I heard that armed Oath Keepers prowled the parking lot and scared off city police officers who arrived to shut down the gym. In one telling, there was a near shootout between the cops and the Oath Keepers, Shirley and Stewart Rhodes among them.
“That didn’t happen,” said Matt Mills, the county attorney who also stopped by the gym that day and confirmed that both Shirley and Rhodes were there. But even if Granbury officers had arrested Hebert, it’s unlikely the case would have gone anywhere. Mills has refused to prosecute anyone who violates the governor’s orders, which he also considers unconstitutional.
Mills is not an Oath Keeper, he said, and he told me he didn’t know much about them. But the organization continued to extend itself to conservatives in the deeply red county, where Republicans hold every elected office.
On May 2, a group called Hood County Conservatives announced on Facebook that Scott London, a former New Mexico sheriff, would be “speaking about the New Organization (The Oath Keepers in Hood County)” at their upcoming meeting at the county courthouse.
Oath Keepers showed up to Black Lives Matter protests at the courthouse the following month. The events, held on June 6-7 in spite of some reported threats directed at one of the demonstration’s teenage organizers, were peaceful. But from their perch in the impressive limestone building that anchors the county’s charming downtown square, Shirley and two other constables asked Sheriff Roger Deeds whether the county had any riot shields, Deeds said.
It didn’t, perhaps because the county of about 60,000 people didn’t need them. But a couple weeks later the commissioners court accepted a donation of eight riot shields to be used by the sheriff’s office, Shirley and another constable, Chad Jordan. The agenda for the June 23 commissioners court meeting said the shields were donated by Scott London. Dub Gillum told me Oath Keepers had paid $1,000 for the “needed tactical equipment.”
Like several elected officials and most residents I spoke with in Hood County, Deeds, who once belonged to the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, and last year backed a successful effort to declare the county a “Second Amendment sanctuary,” was aware of Oath Keepers but said he wasn’t too familiar with the organization. He said he isn’t a member and doesn’t think any of his deputies are either, though some folks in town suspect otherwise. His office also has never coordinated with Oath Keepers, he said, but he doesn’t “believe they’re bad people by any means.”
David Fischer, the county’s Republican Party chair, told me he knows some people in Hood County are Oath Keepers but said it’s “not an issue in this county — we don’t talk about it, it doesn’t come up very much. ... I’m aware there are Oath Keepers here, but that’s all I know.”
When I asked him about some of the things Shirley has said on social media—about leftists murdering people, and that Ted Wheeler should be executed—he laughed.
“Constable Shirley is kind of outspoken,” he said. “He’s an elected official so nobody can do anything to him.”
Shirley, who has described Hood County leaders as “RINOs & closet authoritarians,” doesn’t get along with the other officials and thinks the commissioners court is “out to get him,” Fischer said. The constable’s comments also aren’t representative of the Republican Party in Hood County, Fischer said — “not at all.” The GOP chair said Shirley hasn’t even interacted with the party since he was elected.
In September, around the time Shirley’s Twitter account was suspended, Twitter also banned the accounts of Stewart Rhodes and Oath Keepers under its violent extremism policy. Oath Keepers had tweeted that there would be “open warfare against the Marxist insurrectionists by election night, no matter what you do” and that “Civil War is here, right now.”
As Election Day neared, both Republicans and Democrats in Hood County feared violence was looming across the United States. Smoking a cigarette outside the county’s early voting site after casting a ballot for Trump in late October, J.W. Williams said he was bracing for another civil war. He was sure there would be conflict, and that leftists would start it.
“You want to defund the police?” he said. “Better not, because the police are the only things keeping us from doing what we want to do.”
Shirley, meanwhile, warned that antifa and Black Lives Matter activists would cause mayhem every election cycle unless Democrats were “stopped cold.” Hood County did its part, voting for Trump by about 64 percentage points and electing every other Republican on the ballot by comfortable margins.
By the end of the week, it was clear that despite the county’s efforts, Trump had lost, even if he refused to concede. The kind of unrest that Shirley had predicted didn’t materialize, but the president marshaled his supporters around a new cause — overturning what he called a rigged election.
There is no evidence of widespread voter fraud but an avalanche of misinformation about the election has fueled falsehoods about hundreds of thousands of trashed Trump ballots and election officials tampering with votes cast for him. Some Republicans have called on the president to accept the election results. Shirley is not among them.
Until Trump does concede, Shirley said, “we fight.”
The morning after the election, Shirley wrote on Facebook that his previous speculations that Americans were experiencing a psychological operation had been “putting it lightly.”
“We’re living in evil times, folks,” he said. “Buckle up.”
He started to use new hashtags: #StopTheSteal and then #StopTheCoup. He continued to claim that Trump had won the election.
“YOU CAN FEEL IT IN YOUR BONES,” he said on Nov. 7. “THIS WAS TAKEN FROM US ILLEGALLY. THE ONLY WAY WE LOSE IS IF WE DON’T FIGHT. LEAVE IT ALL ON THE FIELD. IT’S TIME TO SEPARATE THE WINTER SOLDIERS FROM THE SUNSHINE PATRIOTS.”
Shirley called Bill Gates the “master manipulator of the heist” and shared posts from Steve Bannon, who was permanently suspended from Twitter after suggesting FBI Director Christopher Wray and infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci should be beheaded.
The constable traveled to Washington for the so-called Million Maga March on Nov. 14, and later described wading through the rally to keep “his fellow countrymen safe.” When he posted a photo from the event, he boasted there was no violence.
“ANTIFA was too scared of Proud Boys and Oath Keepers,” he said. “They actually hid behind a police line at SCOTUS.”
Despite the overheated posts flying on social media, Hood County, outwardly at least, looks like a lot of small American towns. People’s kids play sports together and their parents watch amicably from the sidelines, even if they disagree about politics. Hebert, the gym owner who worked in law enforcement in Louisiana, said “it’s got some small-town politics but it’s not that kind of county, even as close as it is to Fort Worth.”
Chris Coffman, city manager of Granbury, said that while there was polarization on the extreme ends of the political spectrum, “by and large people love each other here. They get along with each other, help each other.”
In some ways, though, the community’s facade as a tourist town and one of the best places to retire feels misleading, said Adrienne Martin, chair of the Democratic Party. “There’s a lot of ugly stuff underneath the surface that nobody talks about, that nobody deals with.” Her husband grew up in Granbury and he doesn’t recognize it anymore, she said. “It used to be a little quaint small town. Now it’s Trumpville.”
Dozens of flags supporting the president snap in the wind across the county, and Trump campaign signs line the roads. Robert Vick, the Democratic state Senate candidate, told me that one of his campaign signs was shot up with bullet holes. He worried about Shirley’s rhetoric, and in what ways it could inspire people who read and believe it. He pointed to the alleged militia plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer as an example. Recent court filings claim that the men accused had drawn up a Plan B to take over the Michigan Capitol and stage a weeklong series of televised executions of public officials.
After I was alerted to Shirley’s posts earlier this year, I reached out to him for comment several times. He never responded to me directly but in October, he posted a letter addressed to POLITICO on his Facebook page.
“You attempt, in vain, to smear the Oath Keepers by trying to link constitution loving patriots to hate groups while in the same breath tell people ANTIFA isn’t violent and isn’t an organized terrorist group,” he said. “Shame on you. Your lies do nothing but further expose you for the frauds & conmen most Americans already know you are. Your sad attempt at pushing the loony left into a civil war will fail. Trump is going to win, and then we’ll see how our government will choose to deal with insurrectionists.”
Jack Wilson, an incoming county commissioner who was endorsed by Governor Abbott, also declined to talk when I reached him by phone. Wilson is a firearms instructor who has worked as a reserve sheriff’s deputy and attracted national attention when he shot and killed a gunman at a church on Dec. 29, 2019. At the time, Shirley tweeted his admiration, calling Wilson a hero.
“And more than that he’s an #OathKeeper,” Shirley said. “He’s served his nation and communities most of his life. Hood County is lucky to count him among our citizens.”
But on Nov. 24, Shirley announced on Facebook that he was stepping back from the organization.
“I’ve decided to retire from being an active member in Oath Keepers,” he said. “I’ve been part of that organization for 10 years and it’s time to let other younger patriots take up the mantel.”
He added that he was taking a “much needed break from social media,” and that he may be back at some point.
“I’m currently of the opinion that all social media was designed to be or has become weaponized,” he said.
I tried to ask Shirley about his decision to retire as an active member of Oath Keepers but he didn’t respond to my questions.
His account briefly appeared to be deactivated. But his silence lasted only about a week. Since then, he’s posted more than 30 times, a mix of claims about the election and debunked misinformation. He’s recently shared posts about 200,000 votes supposedly hijacked from Trump in Georgia and suitcases full of fraudulent ballots there. On Dec. 7, he shared an email from Scott London to Granbury City Council members and Hood County commissioners discouraging them from pursuing or enforcing any new coronavirus restrictions, and reminding them of their oaths to the Constitution.
“We are the #DigitalConstitutionalMilitia. Our weapons of war are FB posts, Tweets, YouTube Videos, TikTok,” Shirley said back in November. “It’s up to US to do OUR part of this existential battle for the soul of #America. Patriots… You have your orders.”
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies before a House Financial Services Committee hearing in 2019. (photo: Andrew Harnik/AP)
48 AGs, FTC Sue Facebook, Alleging Illegal Power Grabs to 'Neutralize' Rivals
Shannon Bond and Bobby Allyn, NPR
Excerpt: "The FTC and 48 attorneys general across the nation filed much-anticipated lawsuits against Facebook on Wednesday, accusing the social media giant of gobbling up competitive threats in a way that has entrenched its popular apps so deeply into the lives of billions of people that rivals can no longer put up a fight."
"For nearly a decade, Facebook has used its dominance and monopoly power to crush smaller rivals and snuff out competition, all at the expense of everyday users," said New York Attorney General Letitia James, who led the states' investigation. "Today, we are taking action to stand up for the millions of consumers and many small businesses that have been harmed by Facebook's illegal behavior."
The suits are the latest salvo against Big Tech and come less than two months after the U.S. Justice Department and 11 states sued Google, alleging the company violated competition law. Together, the efforts to rein in the power of the tech giants mark a new era for U.S. regulators, who for decades allowed the technology sector to grow rapidly with few restraints.
Lawsuits take aim at Facebook's alleged 'buy-or-bury' strategy
Wednesday's lawsuits take particular aim at Facebook's blockbuster acquisitions of photo-sharing app Instagram, for $1 billion in 2012, and messaging app WhatsApp, for $19 billion in 2014. Thanks in large part to the growth of the two hugely popular properties, more than 2.5 billion people use one of Facebook's apps every day.
The attorneys general allege that the deals for Instagram and WhatsApp broke competition law. Prosecutors are asking a federal court to intervene by possibly forcing a sale or spinoff of those apps.
In addition, authorities are asking the court to prevent Facebook from making any acquisitions worth more than $10 million while the case proceeds.
In its separate suit, the FTC is also pushing to have Facebook unwind its purchases of Instagram and WhatsApp.
"Today's enforcement action aims to restore competition to this important industry and provide a foundation for future competitors to grow and innovate without the threat of being crushed by Facebook," said Ian Conner, director of the FTC's competition bureau.
Facebook, according to the lawsuits, cut off other apps viewed as potential competitors from critical access to its data and systems.
"In an effort to maintain its market dominance in social networking, Facebook has employed a buy-or-bury strategy to impede competing services," James said. "They also sent a clear message to the industry: Don't step on Facebook's turf. Or as one industry executive put it, 'You will face the wrath of Mark,'" she said, referring to CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Facebook's general counsel, Jennifer Newstead, dismissed the legal challenges as "revisionist history." In a statement, she said the company's takeover of Instagram and WhatsApp had been approved by federal regulators at the time of the acquisitions.
"Now, many years later, with seemingly no regard for settled law or the consequences to innovation and investment, the agency is saying it got it wrong and wants a do-over," she said.
Facebook said it faces plenty of competition from other social media companies, including messaging platform Snapchat and video-sharing app TikTok.
Big Tech is in the regulatory spotlight after years of a laissez-faire approach
The 48 attorneys general — representing 46 states, the District of Columbia and Guam — involved in the lawsuit and federal investigators have been conducting probes into Facebook for more than a year.
Attorneys general from Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina and South Dakota did not join the states' suit, which legal experts say could turn into a landmark case against one of the most powerful companies in the world.
After years of taking a laissez-faire approach to the tech giants, regulators and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have grown increasingly concerned about the influence that the biggest tech companies wield over how people live, work, shop and receive information about the most vital topics of the day, such as presidential elections and the coronavirus pandemic.
Sally Hubbard, a former antitrust lawyer in New York's Office of the Attorney General and author of the new book Monopolies Suck, said industry onlookers have long criticized Facebook's aggressive tactics.
"Facebook has ensured that any company that is innovating is just destroyed. Copy, killed or acquired — that's the modus operandi of Facebook," Hubbard said. "This is a big deal. I think we're finally turning the tide and reinvigorating our antitrust laws. Everybody is going to benefit when we have markets that are competitive and functioning."
Facebook and Google are not the only tech behemoths under intense government scrutiny. Others, including Apple and Amazon, are under examination by the Justice Department and the FTC, as part of a wide-ranging review.
"There was a long period where antitrust enforcers and regulators were saying, 'We need to stay hands off Big Tech,' and it's really becoming clear with cases like this that that time is over," said Charlotte Slaiman, a former FTC lawyer who now leads competition policy at the Washington-based advocacy group Public Knowledge.
Lawmakers on Capitol Hill are circling the companies, too. In a damning report in October accusing Facebook, Google, Apple and Amazon of abusing their market dominance, House Democrats zeroed in on Facebook's acquisition strategy. The report quoted messages between Zuckerberg and a top deputy in which they discussed "neutraliz[ing]" a potential competitor as a reason to pursue Instagram.
The report concluded that Facebook's lack of competition has led to lower quality, harming users' privacy and fueling the spread of online misinformation. It cited internal documents showing that Facebook is now more worried about competition among its own products than the threat of rivals.
On Wednesday, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., said he welcomed the lawsuits. "Facebook has illegally maintained its monopoly, allowing it to engage in other abusive conduct," he said in a statement. "This should never have happened."
Courts could pursue a range of remedies to address claims against Facebook
In the most extreme outcome, the lawsuits could result in Facebook being forced to spin off parts of its business or face far-reaching restrictions on how it operates.
But experts say other outcomes remain possible. Among them, forcing Facebook to allow people to post simultaneously across platforms not owned by Facebook, letting users view posts from competing social networks within Facebook and permitting friend lists and other data to be exported to rival platforms.
"So it's easier for people to leave Facebook if they're not happy with how Facebook is running things," Slaiman, the former FTC lawyer, said.
This idea, known in tech circles as "interoperability," could help introduce more competition into social media and give people more choices, state and federal investigators say.
"When Facebook doesn't have competition, it can abuse us all. It doesn't have a competitor that is requiring it to do better. People don't have an option," said Hubbard, the former New York antitrust enforcer.
Facebook has already faced questions over how it handles user privacy and data. Last year, the company agreed to pay the FTC $5 billion for failing to protect data from being shared with third-party apps.
Experts say from dominating online advertising, which has a cost that can be passed off to consumers, to harvesting vast amounts of data that can be used to target users with ads or other content, Facebook exerts an unfathomable amount of power that has gone virtually unchecked since the company was founded in a Harvard University dorm room in 2004.
"People are used to having been abused by monopoly by having prices jacked up on them. People understand when their cable bill is high and they only have a choice in one or maybe two providers," Hubbard said. "People have a harder time understanding how Facebook's monopoly power makes their life worse."
Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell listens during a Senate Banking Committee hearing about the quarterly CARES Act report on Capitol Hill. (photo: Susan Walshl/Getty Images)
Bankers Are Enriching Shareholders - and Putting the Global Economy at Risk
Julia Rock, Jacobin
Rock writes: "Even as they face big losses on commercial real estate loans, the nation's largest banks are once again being permitted to continue paying out billions of dollars of dividends to shareholders."
As economic trouble mounts, Trump officials are letting Wall Street banks pay out billions in dividends to shareholders. Bankers are taking self-serving risks with the world economy, because they know that if anything goes wrong, they’ll be bailed out.
uring the last financial crisis, banks paid out dividends to shareholders even as losses mounted and the financial sector headed toward collapse. Now, even as they face big losses on commercial real estate loans, the nation’s largest banks are once again being permitted to continue paying out billions of dollars of dividends to shareholders — and a top Trump appointee at the Federal Reserve has pushed to weaken rules requiring banks to keep large cash reserves on hand to cover losses.
In essence, regulators are allowing banks to spend capital on making payments to shareholders — which could amount to over $50 billion this year — rather than requiring them to save more resources to either lend during the pandemic or protect against a financial collapse that could require another government bailout.
Officials from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York have found that restricting dividends at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic would have significantly increased the amount of capital that banks had on hand to lend to consumers and businesses dealing with the economic fallout.
According to their models, “dividends are an important factor in determining whether the U.S. banking industry would have sufficient capacity to absorb losses and expand lending. In particular, when we assume banks suspend dividend payments, we find that they are less prone to meaningfully reduce their capital buffers and thus have more room to increase lending,” the study authors found.
“Allowing Banks to Reduce Their Reserves of Risk-Reducing Capital”
When the pandemic sent much of Europe into lockdown this spring, banking regulators in the UK and the EU acted swiftly to pressure banks to halt dividends. But in the United States, the Fed decided against halting shareholder dividends.
The Fed did take some action: the central bank announced in late June that large US banks couldn’t pay higher dividends to their shareholders than they had paid in the second quarter of 2020 and that payments had to comply with a formula based on recent income. The Fed also temporarily halted share buybacks. In September, the Fed extended the cap on dividends and the ban on buybacks to continue until the end of 2020.
The June decision on buybacks came after the Fed announced the results of the year’s “stress test” — economic projections that the Fed is required to make annually under the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, to survey the ability of the nation’s largest banks to withstand a crisis based on different scenarios.
The advocacy group Americans for Financial Reform said in a statement following the stress tests,
For years, the Federal Reserve has systematically weakened stress test modeling practices and assumptions used to forecast bank losses in a recession. This has the effect of allowing banks to reduce their reserves of risk-reducing capital and distribute these reserves to shareholders and executives.
Federal Reserve vice chair for supervision Randal Quarles — a Trump appointee who has pushed deregulation — said in late September that “large U.S. banks entered this crisis in strong condition, and the Fed has taken a number of important steps to help bolster banks’ resilience,” including halting stock buybacks and capping dividends.
Critics say it is absurd to allow banks to pay dividends at all when the country is experiencing an economic crisis that could still get much worse.
“This is a time for large banks to preserve capital, so they can be a source of strength in a robust recovery,” Federal Reserve Board governor Lael Brainard, an Obama appointee, said in June when she voted to halt dividends.
I do not support giving the green light for large banks to deplete capital, which raises the risk they will need to tighten credit or rebuild capital during the recovery. This policy fails to learn a key lesson of the financial crisis, and I cannot support it.
A Push to Reduce Capital Requirements That Protect Against a Collapse
Not only did Quarles vote to allow banks to continue paying dividends, but he has been pressuring Congress to reduce capital requirements below the original levels set by the Dodd-Frank Act.
In July, senators Elizabeth Warren and Sherrod Brown sent letters to Quarles and Fed chair Jerome Powell, excoriating Quarles for pressing Congress to further ease Dodd-Frank bank capital requirements.
“This change would, in effect, allow the banking regulators to reduce capital requirements below their 2008 levels — the same inadequate levels at which the banking system was once brought to the precipice of collapse,” the senators wrote in their letter to Quarles.
The letter also detailed the actions that the Fed had already taken to loosen capital requirements for banks since the outset of the crisis, which include: allowing banks to pay dividends even after cutting into their capital buffers to lend, easing rules on how much capital banks must maintain in relation to loans and other assets, and failing to halt dividends.
By lowering capital requirements while still allowing dividends, the Fed is both indicating that the economy is bad enough that banks need lower capital requirements to incentivize them to lend and strong enough that banks can still pay dividends.
Moral Hazard Strikes Again
Some Fed officials have said that halting dividend payments to shareholders would signal that regulators are concerned about the health of the financial system, and that easing capital standards will make consumer credit cheaper — helping to fund an economic recovery.
But Marcus Stanley, policy director at Americans for Financial Reform, said this isn’t a real concern.
“The idea that the Fed needs to reassure the markets by letting banks pay dividends is the kind of backward logic that you fall into if you accept Wall Street’s assumptions about what is good and what is bad,” Stanley told us. “Fed officials up to and including Powell are flashing red warning signs about what will happen absent additional fiscal stimulus. No bank dividend payment is going to obscure those signals to the market.”
Stanley added that easing capital standards won’t help consumers, because their problem right now isn’t a lack of credit, but a lack of income.
There’s also a longer-term concern associated with the Fed’s policies of allowing banks to pay dividends during a moment of immense uncertainty. A key cause of the last financial crisis was that capital requirements on banks weren’t stringent enough. And yet, the banks paid shareholder dividends until the government decided to bail them out.
It created what economists call “moral hazard,” because now banks make decisions with the knowledge that they will be bailed out when the moment comes. Knowing that they will be bailed out, bankers have stronger incentives to take risks with bank resources, leaving the economy in a more fragile state.
“Strong capital bases help avoid the problem of moral hazard in the first place,” Stanley said, adding that “dividends privatize profits without regard to whether a bank might fail in the future.”
In other words, paying out dividends privatizes bank profits by shielding the money from being seized by lenders if the bank becomes bankrupt.
The banks are now undergoing a second round of stress testing, which Quarles announced in June, meaning they are required to submit their capital plans again. This is the first time the banks have had to undergo stress testing twice in one year, but critics say the Fed is only conducting the test to send the message that the banks are fine. The results will be announced on December 18.
Soldiers stand as supporters of the opposition party, the National Democratic Congress (NDC), protest outside Ghana's electoral commission ahead of official results in Accra on Wednesday. (photo: Francis Kokoroko/Reuters)
Ghana: Five Killed in Election Violence
Al Jazeera
Excerpt: "Ghana's President Nana Akufo-Addo won re-election with 51.59 percent of the vote, results from the election commission showed on Wednesday, as deadly violence gripped the West African country."
READ MORE
Joe Biden. (photo: Grist/Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
Most of America's Dirty Power Plants Will Be Ready to Retire by 2035
Emily Pontecorvo, Grist
Pontecorvo writes: "A new analysis published in the journal Science last week offers a potential roadmap for the incoming Biden administration to manage the wind-down of all fossil fuels plants, not just coal plants, more systematically."
he U.S. energy transition is well underway. Electricity from solar and wind is increasingly competitive with natural gas power, and the grid is hemorrhaging coal plants that no longer make economic sense. But without any real national climate policy managing the decline of fossil fuels, the transition is scattershot, messy, and full of carnage.Power companies announced more than 13 coal plant retirements this year, in many cases moving up previously announced closures and shortening the window of time the communities that live near and work at those plants have to think about what comes next. In May, a company called GenOn gave workers at one of its coal-fired power plants in Maryland just 90 days’ notice that it was closing.
A new analysis published in the journal Science last week offers a potential roadmap for the incoming Biden administration to manage the wind-down of all fossil fuels plants, not just coal plants, more systematically. Even better, it shows that shutting down the nation’s fossil fuel–burning power plants in the next 15 years to achieve Biden’s goal of 100 percent clean electricity by 2035 isn’t as economically risky as previously thought.
Emily Grubert, a civil engineer and environmental sociologist at Georgia Tech and the author of the study, mapped out every coal-, gas-, or petroleum-powered generator running in the U.S. in 2018, the most recent year for which complete data was available. She estimated when each one could be expected to retire, based on fuel, technology, and when it was built.
Power plants typically last 30 to 50 years, and construction costs are paid off over the course of their lifespans. If policy forces a plant owned by a utility to shut down early, that utility’s customers could remain on the hook to cover the debt, while also having to pay for whatever new source of energy is replacing it. The prematurely retired plant could thus become what’s known as a stranded asset. But Grubert found that the vast majority of plants — more than 70 percent — will actually reach the end of their expected lifespans before 2035, and should theoretically be paid off by or around then.
“It’s really important when we have this kind of data,” said Mijin Cha, an assistant professor in urban and environmental policy at Occidental College who was not involved with the study, “because often things like stranded assets, they get used to kind of put fear into people’s minds about the inability to transition to a low-carbon future.” The study reveals that in fact, a 2035 decarbonization deadline would strand very few power generation assets — as long as companies stop building new fossil fuel-burning power plants starting now.
In his climate plan, Biden committed to making an “unprecedented investment in coal and power plant communities” including helping to diversify their economies and securing health and retirement benefits for workers. If power plants were forced to close at the end of their estimated lifespan or within five years of that date, as Grubert suggests in her study, the government could roll out these resources over time and target communities as their facilities close.
That would also give communities ample time to plan for the future. “If you know a plant is going to shut in the next 10 to 15 years, that’s very different than if you’re given 90 days notice,” said Cha, “in terms of what you can plan for, and what investment you can attract.” She said many of the communities with economies tied to the fossil fuel industry will need more basic investments, like expanded access to broadband internet, before they can even think about attracting new industries.
Grubert likened the process of a plant closure to the stages of grief: The announcement will be met with anger at first, but with enough time communities can accept what’s happening and move to a more productive place. “The thing that worries me the most is if there’s not a really, really durable commitment to decarbonization,” Grubert said. If outrage and protests can convince lawmakers to reverse decisions that close power plants, the possibility of a just transition for workers and communities goes out the window. “Then you are back where we started, which is basically just firing everybody one morning and telling them ‘good luck to you,’ which is a really bad outcome.”
The new study offers a strong case for the managed decline of fossil fuel–fired power plants by 2035, but questions remain about how to achieve it. Even if most fossil fuel plants will be old enough to retire before 2035, that doesn’t mean they will. Plant owners often keep them open for much longer — Grubert found that there’s already about 100 gigawatts worth of infrastructure past its prime, including a coal-fired generator in Nebraska from 1915. While many utilities say they plan to reduce their emissions to net-zero by 2050, a recent analysis by the Energy and Policy Institute, a nonprofit utility watchdog, found that almost none of those plans move quickly enough to achieve Biden’s goal of a carbon-free electric grid by 2035.
There’s also no single, swift action the Biden administration could take to require all fossil fuel–burning power plants to shut by 2035. Ari Peskoe, director of Harvard University’s Electricity Law Initiative, told Grist that instead, the government could try to approximate that deadline through environmental and economic regulations.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) could regulate greenhouse gas emissions, and states could choose to adopt even stricter rules. Some are already doing so — three coal plants in Colorado may be forced to shut down in 2028, two years earlier than previously planned, to meet the state’s climate targets and an air quality rule that seeks to improve visibility in Rocky Mountain National Park.
On the economic side, a power plant’s viability depends on what the owner is allowed to charge customers. Power plants that are owned by utilities are regulated by state agencies, while independent generators must follow the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s rules. Cheap renewables are already weakening the case to keep open old coal plants in regulatory proceedings, and with more subsidies for clean energy, or fewer for fossil fuels, that trend will continue.
The other side of the coin is preventing new gas-powered generators from being built. Peskoe said the EPA could put stricter rules on new plants, and he expects to see rule changes in interstate electricity markets that make the economics of building a new plant less favorable. “They can also stop pipeline expansion too, which is obviously related to power plant expansion,” he added.
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