In case you missed it, here's Rachel Maddow's incisive report last night: "Exxon Too Big to Care."
Here it is for your quick and easy consumption:
link to video
[Automated transcript, now cleaned up and enhanced for easier reading and comprehensive review; Enhancements and images provided by this poster.]
Rachel Maddow:
Sort of, especially for viewers in Arkansas. if you live in Arkansas, this is for you. If you know anyone who lives in Arkansas, give them a call, tell them it tune in. This might be helpful if you live in Arkansas.
Okay, ready? all right.
The fifth most profitable corporation in the entire country right now, the fifth most profitable, number five, is the Ford Motor Company. Ford is back and they are back in a big way. number five. Number four, on the most profitable companies in the country list is Microsoft. seriously. this is an list from 1998. I promise. This is the most recent fortune 500 list. Microsoft cracked the top five. they are number four. number three is Apple. that sort of makes sense, right? Apple is just an absolute juggernaut right now. Number two, second most profitable corporation in the country. a little mom and pop operation called Chevron. Giant oil company pulled in $26 billion in profit last year alone. Not bad, right? As you can see, the top four most profitable corporations in the country are all within a few billion dollars of each other. All clustered together.
But none of those companies, none of them comes anywhere close to matching the undisputed king of Corporate America. Top Dog. Single most profitable corporation in the entire country is -- Boeing? Wow. Exxon. ExxonMobil leaves everybody else in the dust. all of those company, when they go to sleep at night, they dream about becoming ExxonMobil when they grow up. Big numbers are hard to get your head around but to see how rich ExxonMobil is, consider this. Wal-Mart, Google, McDonald's, American Express and Goldman Sachs, you have to put them all together to equal one ExxonMobil.
Yeah, combined. ExxonMobil is doing fine. Who is not fine is those who live above Exxon's Pegasus pipeline. Residents are still evacuated from their homes. One of the incredible things we learned is that many of the residents who live over the pipeline did not know the pipeline was there until it burst.
Supposed to be a 20-inch pipeline run from Illinois to Texas.
Knowing nothing of the pipeline.
I had no idea. and I'm the fourth or fifth house from it.
Now they know. A bad way to find out it's there, right? We also know about previous safety violations as it relates to that specific Exxon pipeline. In 2010 the Federal Government fined Exxon for failing to inspect a different portion of that same pipeline as frequently as is required by law. Sounds bad, right? Not only did they not do it because they got caught and the federal government nailed them for it. You want to know what fine was for that?
The fine was, $26,000. Okay just for some perspective, so Exxon made $44 billion in profit last year. That breaks down to with, per day profit of $122 million a day. That's what they make in profit in one day. That $26,000 fine on that pipeline that burst in Arkansas, the day that fine was assessed by the Federal Government, that represented this much of their profit that day:
Look at ratio of the two dots there. Barely a blip. That's just for one day's profit. You think that motivates a company like this to do the right thing? After the Deep Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 President Obama signed a law it strengthen the fines that can be levied against oil can companies when they do something wrong. The law doubled the maximum civilian penalty for a pipeline violation. Doubled it. It had been $100,000. Now it is $200,000. Aah, because that will scare them.
Exxon's last big oil spill before this one [Mayflower] in Arkansas, was when one of their pipelines burst under the Yellowstone River in Montana in 2011. A year before that disaster, federal officials had told Exxon that that particular pipeline was subject to a number of probable violations of the law. Among the regulations that Exxon was in apparent violation of were emergency response training and rules governing the potential corrosion of pipes and having out of date maps and records for that specific pipeline. And then of course that pipeline burst, flooding the Yellowstone River with oil and Exxon was hit with a proposed fine for those violations and a few others. The proposed fine was, $1.7 million. again, just for context sake in terms of the day that fine was levied.
Here is how that fine relates to the profits that Exxon made in that single day. Exxon made that day about $122 million in profit and here is that giant $1.7 million fine they were slapped with. Not even a gnat bite into their profits for that one day.
In terms of the latest spill in Arkansas, Arkansas's Attorney General has been so far pretty much all over this. We had him on the show earlier this week. He has been touring the affected area. He said his head hurt all day yesterday from being exposed to the fumes in Mayflower for a couple of hours. He is now demanding a trove of documents from Exxon including inspection reports for the pipeline. There is news today a number of residents of Mayflower, Arkansas affect had by spill have filed the first class action lawsuit against Exxon for what happened there.
So again, to our viewers in Arkansas, to anybody affected by this spill. Here is the thing to know about fighting Exxon. There is something to know about fighting Exxon over this thing that they just did to you and your State. There is nothing that Exxon fears from the Federal Government. They have so captured the parts of the government that are supposed to punish them when sort of thing happens that the pain that that sort of punishment could cause them, redowns to them essential not at all. If Exxon or any other oil company is deterred from this sort of bad behavior, it will not be because of the government holds them to it. It'll be because the individuals or even the State who have been wronged. They will be the ones that make Exxon know they have done wrong. They will be the ones that force them to make it right.
And yes, Exxon can afford it.
But can we afford the never-changing pursuits of Big Oil Corporations, like Exxon?
Pursuits for evermore larger piles of profits, no matter the social and environmental costs, left in their oily wakes. For future (and current) generations to contend with ...
larger
No matter where we might live ... or even be forced, not to live ...
Launch Slideshow -- 37 Images from EPA
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