IT’S ALL ABOUT THE MONEY (BeepBeep!)

APRIL 20, 2023 – Every month or so for many months running, a good college friend calls me and opens the conversation with, “So, when are this Jack Smith character and Merrick Garland gonna come outta their comas and announce the indictment of your favorite ex-president? Last month you told me it was gonna be right around the corner!”

“Ya gotta be patient,” I say.

When Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg announced the indictment in the porn star payoff case eons ago (in “breaking news” time), I sent my friend a text, “You happy now?” He wasn’t amused. In his judgment, the indictment was a non-event, and that’s turning out to be right, given how quickly the hullabaloo over the arraignment dissipated into thin air.

Back in January we heard that Fani Willis, the Fulton County Georgia District Attorney would soon make an announcement about an indictment of the Duly Defeated for election interference. We’ve all heard repeatedly the “famous phone call” in which the then president said, “I just want to find 11,780 votes.”  It’s now the second half of April, and even pundit chatter about the Georgia investigation has gone totally quiet.

Then there was the Dominion defamation case against FoxProp. When Dominion’s discovery requests yielded what a plaintiff’s lawyer would call “a bushel’s worth of cherry plums,” I thought, Here now is the case that will pull the scales from the eyes of FoxProp viewers and reveal to them once and for all, the raw dishonesty of their formerly heroic hosts, now contemptible cynics who, at day’s end, were lying through their teeth and doing it all just for the money. Finally, democracy will come out the winner!

Call me Dr. Pangloss.

Any for-profit enterprise in the cross-hairs of potentially financially damaging litigation will eventually run a down and dirty analysis of the risks and costs of continuing the litigation through trial and appeal and try to settle below the range produced by the analysis. That’s exactly what FoxProp did in the Dominion case. The number within that settlement range wound up at $787.5 million, which, in a vacuum sounds like one helluva lot of money.

Once the figure is measured against several reference points, however, it’s apparently a good outcome for FoxProp. The points of reference would be (a) risk range produced by the aforesaid financial analysis, (b) FoxProp’s market cap ($17.31 billion as of close today; close to that on day of settlement), and (c) estimated “financial bacon saved” by avoidance of adverse trial publicity (the likes of Tucker Carlson being grilled like a sardine on cross-examination).

On the Dominion side of the table, $787.5 mil minus legal fees (estimated by trial lawyer Ryan Saba of Rosen Saba LLP, at a mere “well over [one] million”) is a very fat figure. Several years ago, private equity firm Staple Street Capital bought a 76% stake in Dominion Voting Systems for $38 million. Do the math and Staple Street’s share of the $787.5 (say, $786 net of fees) works out to $597.36 million—a whopping 1500% ROI!

When faced with that math and money, Staple Street Capital’s directors worried little about how democracy would benefit by Tucker Carlson being skewered on the witness stand at trial. The order was given to the Dominion legal team: “Drop the lance, ditch the white horse, dump the shiny knight’s armor. It’s all about the bucks!”

Meanwhile, we libs, the self-proclaimed defenders of democracy because we vote Democrat, sit at home with our hands pressed to our ears as the FoxProp line-up cry out, “BeepBeep!” in the fashion of invincible Roadrunners.

We’re naive. For both FoxProp and Dominion, it’s all about the money.

It’s all about the money because America’s all about the money. In many ways, people with money will tell you, money is good, money is great, money is the lifeblood of a vibrant society with continuing positive prospects. People without money will tell you it’s the root of all evil; that it corrodes the fiber of that very society the people with money call “vibrant.”

Realistically, money is both good and evil, much in the manner that a hammer, as both tool and weapon, is good and bad.

Keeping in mind this dual nature of money—and our dichotomous relationship to it—maybe we take a page from Staple Street’s playbook. Instead of spending billions on Democrat candidates in 2024, we become the invincible Roadrunners, form the Singed Eyebrow Fund to take FoxProp private and with poetic justice, donate its assets to PBS in exchange for the following public service announcement: BeepBeep!  

(Remember to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.)

© 2023 by Eric Nilsson