Expose Exxon

Expose Exxon

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ExxonMobil announced on January 30 that it reaped $36 billion in profits in 2005–the largest annual profit ever by any American corporation. And, as Grist reported in its excellent online newsletter, in related news, the company is still shirking paying the money it owes fishermen and other Alaskans hurt by the Exxon Valdez spill 16 years ago.

Last week, Exxon lawyers asked a federal court to effectively waive $5 billion in punitive damages related to the massive 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, meant to compensate thousands of Alaskans who lost their livelihoods. The company argued that it has already done enough by spending $3 billion on cleanups and settling other lawsuits. Some in the packed courtroom openly laughed as an Exxon lawyer argued that “harm was largely avoided” by what the company has paid so far.

Fortunately, the good folks at ExxposeExxon have given us the opportunity to do much more than laugh at the outrageous behavior of America’s largest oil company. Watch EE’s new Flash cartoon, a one-minute video showing Exxon toasting the earth in celebration of its record-breaking profits. If you like it, click here to send it around. Then click here to write to Exxon’s new CEO, Rex Tillerson, and tell him to put some of his company’s enormous profits to good use developing clean, renewable energy, as George W. Bush proposed in his SOTU address.

You can also help get the word out about ExxonMobil’s bad deeds by distributing flyers in front of your neighborhood Exxon or Mobil stations. Click here to view the full selection of materials available and download the ones of your choice to print out and distribute. Finally, the campaign is asking sympathetic readers to speed past Exxon and Mobil gas stations! This one is simple–don’t buy the company’s gas.

Not convinced that Exxon is behaving reprehensibly? (Exxon has also funded pseudo-scientists to obscure the facts about global warming and worked to derail international negotiations to reduce global warming pollution.) Or just want to get more informed? Read this backgrounder, put together by EE’s researchers. The conclusion: “ExxonMobil is padding its ever-growing bottom-line at the expense of the world’s environment and America’s national security and economy.”

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The day is dark, the forces arrayed are tenacious, but as the late Nation editorial board member Toni Morrison wrote “No! This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.”

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Onwards,

Katrina vanden Heuvel
Editorial Director and Publisher, The Nation

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