Exxon move to expand power to pollute; DJT lies gain traction

The Lever reports:

Exxon Declares War On Its Dissenters

The fossil fuel giant is suing investors to intimidate them from ever trying to influence corporate decisions.

ExxonMobil has launched an extraordinary lawsuit against two investment firms for the alleged offense of filing climate-focused shareholder proposals. The fossil fuel giant’s underlying goal: killing a federal regulatory effort that would make it easier for all U.S. shareholders to voice environmental and social concerns about the companies they own.

Critics say the company is also trying to intimidate shareholders from ever proposing such resolutions again in the future — under threat of being tied up in expensive litigation and incurring punitive financial penalties.

If successful, the Exxon lawsuit could set a legal precedent wrestling control away from regulators and cracking down on activist investors working to enact more climate-friendly policies.

And if DJT gets re-elected, we can rest assured that ExxonMobil will be free to pollute, cause the sea level to rise 50 feet, and make species go extinct as it wishes. 

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The WaPo reports about DJT's progress in converting lies into truths among his supporters:

Trump has made significant inroads in convincing Republicans that his lies are the truth. That applies to election integrity especially — the basis of Trump’s “big lie.”

Even more significant, Americans appear to have diverged on the meaning of honesty itself. Among Republicans, fewer now say that Trump regularly makes misleading statements. Slightly more view him as more honest than they did in 2018, despite an extraordinarily large amount of evidence that Trump often does not tell the truth. During Trump’s presidency, The Fact Checker documented more than 30,000 misleading or outright false claims, and since he began his second campaign for the White House against Joe Biden, he’s introduced new falsehoods to his catalogue: Inflation is “almost 50 percent” under President Biden; “nearly 1 million jobs held by native-born Americans” have been lost to immigrants. In a single December interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity, Trump made 24 false or misleading claims in five minutes — one every 12.5 seconds.

Six years ago, just about 1 in 4 Republicans (26 percent) agreed that millions of fraudulent votes were cast in the 2016 election. Now, 38 percent of Republicans — and 47 percent of strong Trump supporters — believe that is the case. Among all Americans, belief in this false claim hardly changed because Democrats moved sharply in the opposite direction from Republicans. Trump often made this claim to justify his loss of the popular vote to Hillary Clinton in 2016, when the electoral college propelled him to the Oval Office.

Trump has convinced 70 percent of Republicans — and 81 percent of his strong supporters — that Biden won the 2020 election because of voter fraud, though not a single allegation has been proven. Slightly more than one-third of Americans overall believe this.

 

Voters who support DJT tend to be very low information voters and significantly deceived by years of DJT's lies. The power of those people to vote based on truth has been taken from them by deceit. Unfortunately, votes based on lies count just as much as votes based on truth.