SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
robert weissman
Trump's 'Phony Energy Emergency' Used by DOJ to Target State Climate Laws
"There is no energy emergency, and Trump's stated reasoning for it is as much a scam as every other pathetic con and hustle this president attempts," said one consumer campaigner.
May 02, 2025
Defenders of climate and the rule of law blasted the Trump administration on Friday for using what one consumer campaigner called a "phony" emergency to wage lawfare against states trying to hold Big Oil financially accountable for the planetary crisis.
On Thursday, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) filed complaints against New York and Vermont over their climate superfund laws, which empower states to seek financial compensation from fossil fuel companies to help cover the costs of climate mitigation. The burning of fossil fuels is the main driver of human-caused global heating.
Separately, the DOJ also sued Hawaii and Michigan "to prevent each state from suing fossil fuel companies in state court to seek damages for alleged climate change harms."
"The use of the United States Department of Justice to fight on behalf of the fossil fuel industry is deeply disturbing."
Hours later, Hawaii became the 10th state to sue Big Oil for lying about the climate damage caused by fossil fuels. The Aloha State's lawsuit targets ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, BP, and other corporations for their "decadeslong campaign of deception to discredit the scientific consensus on climate change" and sow public doubt about the existence and main cause of the crisis.
"The federal lawsuit filed by the Justice Department attempts to block Hawaii from holding the fossil fuel industry responsible for deceptive conduct that caused climate change damage," Hawaii Attorney General Anne E. Lopez said. "The use of the United States Department of Justice to fight on behalf of the fossil fuel industry is deeply disturbing and is a direct attack on Hawaii's rights as a sovereign state."
The DOJ on Thursday cited President Donald Trump's April 8 executive order, " Protecting American Energy From State Overreach," which affirms the president's commitment "to unleashing American energy, especially through the removal of all illegitimate impediments to the identification, development, siting, production, investment in, or use of domestic energy resources—particularly oil, natural gas, coal, hydropower, geothermal, biofuel, critical mineral, and nuclear energy resources."
Trump also signed a day-one edict declaring a "national energy emergency" in service of his campaign pledge to "drill, baby, drill" for climate-heating fossil fuels. The "emergency" has been invoked to fast-track fossil fuel permits, including for extraction projects on public lands.
Acting Assistant Attorney General Adam Gustafson of the DOJ's Environment and Natural Resources Division said in a statement Thursday, "When states seek to regulate energy beyond their constitutional or statutory authority, they harm the country's ability to produce energy and they aid our adversaries."
"The department's filings seek to protect Americans from unlawful state overreach that would threaten energy independence critical to the well-being and security of all Americans," Gustafson added.
Robert Weissman, co-president of the consumer advocacy watchdog Public Citizen, on Friday accused the Trump administration of "using a phony energy emergency declaration to illegally attack state climate and clean energy laws."
"There is no energy emergency, and Trump's stated reasoning for it is as much a scam as every other pathetic con and hustle this president attempts," Weissman continued. "Fake constitutional claims based on a fake emergency cannot and will not displace sensible and long overdue state efforts to hold dirty energy corporations accountable."
"These corporations have imposed massive costs on society through their deceptive denial of the realities of climate change, and through rushing us toward climate catastrophe," he added. "It's good policy, common sense, and completely within state authority, for states to hold these corporations accountable."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Criminal Corporations Are Not People, But Trump Just Pardoned One Anyway
"If you're a corporation in a favored industry, you can break the law. You can get caught. You can be prosecuted and sentenced with a $100 million fine, and it doesn't matter," said one consumer advocate.
Apr 03, 2025
In what could be a U.S. first, President Donald Trump last week pardoned a criminal corporation, a move that largely flew under the proverbial radar amid his pardon spree for white-collar criminals including at least one of his supporters.
On March 28, Trump pardoned HDR Global Trading, the owner and operator of the cryptocurrency exchange BitMEX; company co-founders Arthur Hayes, Benjamin Delo, and Samuel Reed; and former business development chief Gregory Dwyer.
The company and the four men hads each pleaded guilty to one count of violating the Bank Secrecy Act "by willfully failing to establish, implement, and maintain an adequate" anti-money laundering program, as required by law. In January, the U.S. Department of Justice sentenced BitMEX to a fine of $100 million, while the executives were sentenced to criminal probation and ordered to pay civil fines.
While experts noted that Trump acted within his rights to pardon the corporation, there is no known precedent for a president taking such action.
Trump's corporate pardon sends a clear message: “If you’re a corporation in a favored industry, you can break the law. You can get caught. You can be prosecuted and sentenced with a $100 million fine, and it doesn’t matter”
[image or embed]
— Rick Claypool (@rickclaypool.bsky.social) April 2, 2025 at 7:18 AM
Noting the U.S. Supreme Court's highly controversial 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling—which affirmed corporate personhood and the dubious notion that unlimited outside spending on political campaigns is free speech—Stanford Law School professor Bernadette Meyler toldThe Intercept that "while we have seen the rise of a trend of treating corporations as persons in other areas of law, we haven't seen that so far in the area of pardoning."
Kimberly Wehle, a professor at the University of Baltimore School of Law and preeminent pardons expert, wrote for The Hill on Tuesday that the BitMEX pardons send the message that "companies involved in financial crimes don't have to worry about accountability under this president, as least when it comes to crypto, for reasons that he has no incentive to ever make known."
"BitMEX can continue its prior criminal practices with federal impunity, and maybe even rely on the pardon to thwart future investigations into related conduct by federal lawmakers or state prosecutors," Wehle added. "The biggest losers in this deal are, once again, the American people, including the more than 77 million who might finally be realizing that they voted for lawlessness last November."
"The biggest losers in this deal are, once again, the American people."
Brandon Garrett, a Duke University law professor specializing in corporate crime and punishment, told The Intercept that the BitMEX pardons are part of a wider pattern of impunity under Trump, who "now seems to be systematically pardoning corporate malefactors left and right without respect, really, to any real serious consideration about the merits of the cases [or] the larger policy implications of issuing these pardons."
As the consumer advocacy watchdog Public Citizen recently noted, "The Trump administration has dropped, withdrawn, or halted investigations and enforcement actions against over 100 corporations in its first two months in office."
Beneficiaries include companies owned or led by Trump donors or allies, including private prison giant GEO Group; Zelle network banks JPMorgan and Bank of America; crypto firms Coinbase, Gemini, Kraken, OpenSea, Ripple, and Robinhood; and Elon Musk's SpaceX.
"Trump's corporate pardons show the president's true base is the billionaire executives and corporate elites lining up to indulge their greed at the trough of Trump's corruption," Public Citizen research director Rick Claypool said last week. "Trump's soft-on-corporate crime approach invites a corporate crime spree and potentially catastrophic abuses for America's consumers, workers, and communities."
Public Citizen co-president Robert Weissman added that the Trump administration's "effective no-enforcement policy against corporations virtually guarantees more financial scams, more workplace discrimination, more poisoning of the air and water, more food contamination, more fraud, more disease, and more preventable death."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Trump's Social Security Lies Seen as 'Prelude to Vicious Cuts'
"Social Security has survived wars, pandemics, and recessions," said one advocate. "But unless there is a rapid course correction, it may not survive Donald Trump and Elon Musk."
Mar 05, 2025
After boasting about gutting climate initiatives, terminating thousands of federal workers, and withdrawing the U.S. from the World Health Organization at the start of his address to a joint session of Congress Tuesday night, President Donald Trump rattled off a series of now-familiar falsehoods about Social Security that advocates say are aimed at justifying deep cuts to the program.
"Believe it or not, government databases list 4.7 million Social Security members from people aged 100 to 109 years old. It lists 3.6 million people from ages 110 to 119. I don't know any of them," Trump said, regurgitating the lie—also peddled by Elon Musk—that Social Security benefits are being paid out on a large scale to people who have been dead for years.
"I know some people who are rather elderly but not quite that elderly," said Trump as he continued to list numbers, at one point declaring that a person in Social Security Administration (SSA) databases is "listed at 360 years of age."
SSA, which Trump and Musk are in the process of eviscerating and possibly privatizing, automatically halts payments by age 115. Even Trump's handpicked acting SSA commissioner has refuted the claim that Social Security benefits are being paid out to tens of millions of dead people.
The president's remarks were seen as part of a broader effort, spearheaded by Musk, to create the appearance of rampant waste and fraud to make the case for cutting Social Security, which lifts more people above the poverty line in the U.S. than any other program.
"Tonight's speech by President Trump should be highly alarming to the 70 million Americans on Social Security and to anyone who is earning benefits by paying into the program. His speech was full of lies," said Max Richtman, president and CEO of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare.
"Just because someone may be in SSA's database, doesn't mean that they are receiving benefits unless they are alive and eligible—something Elon Musk and his DOGE minions should have learned before propagating these claims," Richtman added. "Trump and Musk's claims of 'fraud' in the Social Security program would be laughable if they weren't so harmful, and have already been widely discredited."
Robert Weissman, co-president of Public Citizen, also weighed in, calling Trump's Social Security lies "the prelude to vicious cuts."
"They want to cut Social Security and Medicaid. This is their core agenda. Reverse Roosevelt. They are no longer even hiding it."
SSA data shows that just 0.1% of Social Security recipients are over the age of 100. A report published last year by SSA's inspector general, whom Trump recently fired, found that of the $8.6 trillion in Social Security benefits paid out between 2015 and 2022, just 0.84% of the payments were deemed improper.
"Social Security has vanishingly low rates of fraud, far less than private-sector retirement programs," Alex Lawson, executive director of the progressive advocacy group Social Security Works, said in a statement late Tuesday. "Lying about it is a convenient way to justify cutting off benefits to people deemed enemies or undeserving under the guise of 'fraud.'"
"Social Security has survived wars, pandemics, and recessions," said Lawson. "But unless there is a rapid course correction, it may not survive Donald Trump and Elon Musk."
Democratic lawmakers also sharply condemned Trump's comments on Social Security, which came days after Musk falsely characterized the program as a Ponzi scheme.
"Trump is making up stats about Social Security so he has an excuse to cut your benefits," said Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.).
Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) noted that "all you hear is Republican laughter" as Trump spouted lies about Social Security.
"They want to cut Social Security and Medicaid," Khanna wrote on social media. "This is their core agenda. Reverse Roosevelt. They are no longer even hiding it."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular