ExxonMobil chair, CEO to NBC: No 'help' is on the way

I recently read this article on RAW STORY. An interview with the Exxon/Mobile chair and CEO Rex Tillerson, where the guy says exactly what people have needed to hear for a long time:

"We work for the shareholder," Tillerson told the anchor. "And the investors who own our stock are over 2 million individual Americans and a lot of pension plans, a lot of teacher retirement plans. And our job is to go out and make the most money for those people so that their pensions are secure, so that they see the benefits of our work."

That pretty much sums it up, folks. That's a right wing corporatist ideology being explained in its purest form. Corporations, and their corporatists pals in Washington on both sides of the aisle, cannot and will not do anything that takes away from profit.

In fact, I don't want a corporation that I'm invested in to act as a social player. It isn't what it's there for, and I acknowledge that. I may sometimes sound like I'm 100% anti-corporate, but I'm not. The corporation exists primarily to make me and other investors money, and that's all it should be expected to do.

The concept of a corporation sounds great in theory. A bunch of people get together and decide they want to make money with their money, and they want it to be with limited liability for any negative actions that occur. It's a beautiful thing, really. I can invest my money, and the only thing that I'll ever have to worry about is losing that money. Compare that to investing in say, the mob, where if someone I know owes money, and dies, I can have a horse head put into my bed until I pay back the money that someone I know owes.

So I don't hate a corporation simply for making money; that's not the point.

What we, as human beings, have to do is make sure those corporations don't go hog-wild trying to make money for us. I may be happy about the money I'm raking in from Corporation-X, but if Corp-X is doing things that are harmful to me or the environment I live in, that's a fucking issue isn't it? All things end up coming back to you in the end, and you have to live with the repercussions of the actions that your preferred corporations take in persuit of your personal gain.

Oversight and regulation is a requirement.

I don't care how it gets done, just as long as it gets done. If you're one of those goofballs that thinks the worse way to do it is to have a centralized government take care of this for us, then show me a better way. Personally, I like the accountability of government regulation. Like this situation we're seeing right here with the high gas prices. There's great concern all over the country that these prices are being achieved by these companies through price gouging, meaning these companies are collaborating (albeit extremely loosely, I can only assume..) and driving up the cost of gasoline.

Now, I don't know if it's really happening. But you're seeing some people in congress calling for investigations into the matter. I'm cynical enough to say that it's only happening on the right side of the aisle because of election year pressures, but that's my point entirely. Since gas prices are hitting people so hard, and people don't want to be screwed over so heavily for such an essensial resource, we look to those we've elected to make sure we're not being screwed. And if they aren't going to act in our interest, then we make sure we find someone that will.

And if you're about to e-mail me and tell me that I'm some big government liberal type, just save yourself some time and effort and simply write "BIG GOVERNMENT LIBERALS SUCK" in the topic of the e-mail and send it with no body whatsoever. I've heard your argument a million times before, and it never, ever impresses me.