While reading Steve Benen’s commentary on the nominee for Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, it occurred to me that his remarks about motivations, namely,
Note, Trump has chosen ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson, a close Putin ally, as his Secretary of State nominee – and Tillerson has publicly criticized U.S. sanctions on Russia for years.
… may actually be more serious than Steve himself realizes.
What is citizenship? The common response is a passive “member of a country”, I suggest, and this is actually a poor response. Citizenship, among other things, presupposes a shared motivation when it comes to national survival; that is, we all value national survival in roughly equal amounts. How to attain it may be a matter of controversy, but it’s a valid and valuable controversy.
But now let’s ask this about Mr. Tillerson. He is the CEO, and reportedly lifelong employee of ExxonMobil, a true multinational corporation. Where does his interests lie?
Does he really have the same view of the national survival of the United States as do the majority of the citizens?
Or are his motivations so tied up in his corporation that they now diverge from the common citizen’s concerns about our traditional enemy? His experience of Russia may be more extensive, but that doesn’t make it better, because the lens in front of his eye is tainted, as it were, with ExxonMobil, a company that can always move away from the USA if necessary, perhaps even to Russia. Nothing really stops it – insofar as the US becomes unattractive to ExxonMobil. And that’s where his self-interest lies – in all the stock, all the money he has tied up in ExxonMobil.
Something to gnaw on going forward.
