Michael Flynn resigned as National Security Advisor on Feb. 13 amidst reports of his having promised the Russian government that the Trump administration would lift some of the sanctions placed on Russia by President Obama during his administration.
What we have to ask ourselves, however, is why Americans in the U.S. government would want an end to Russian sanctions? The answer to this question can be found in a complicated web that extends throughout the federal government and connects back to one central motive — oil.
The principal figure who ties the Trump administration to the oil industry is Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who was CEO of corporate goliath ExxonMobil for over a decade before his confirmation. Tillerson is also a former chair of the American Petroleum Institute, the largest lobbying group for the oil and natural gas industry in the United States. Even with all direct ties cut from ExxonMobil, he is still set to receive a compensation of over 2 million shares in the company in 10 years, an amount currently valued at approximately $180 million. Tillerson’s interests are, for all intents and purposes, ExxonMobil’s interests.
During his time at ExxonMobil, Tillerson cultivated many close connections to the Russian government. In 2013, he received the Order of Friendship from Vladimir Putin. Tillerson has close business ties to the Russian president, as well as to Igor Sechin, the head of the state-owned Russian oil company Rosneft and the second most powerful man in Russia. Business ties like these are why Tillerson spoke out in 2014 against the sanctions placed on Russia.
Tillerson isn’t a just a fanatic Russophile out of love for the vodka. He and ExxonMobil have a vested interest in free trade with Russia. So far, ExxonMobil has lost over $1 billion due to the sanctions placed on Russia, and if they can manage to lift the sanctions, they are in position to negotiate a $500 billion deal with Russia to extract oil from Siberia. How convenient for ExxonMobil, then, that their CEO of over 10 years is now the top diplomat for the United States.
Tillerson isn’t the only government figure under the thumb of Big Oil. The oil and natural gas industry poured over $100 million into lobbying in 2016 alone. In the Trump administration specifically, head of the EPA Scott Pruitt has received over $300,000 in contributions from the industry during the course of his career. From February 2015 to his confirmation, Secretary of Energy Rick Perry was on the board of directors for Energy Transfer Partners, the corporation responsible for the Dakota Access Pipeline. Trump himself is connected to the oil industry, as a shareholder in Phillips 66, an oil company investor in the DAPL, and he owns stock in ExxonMobil, Chevron and Royal Dutch Shell, as well as pipeline construction company Kinder Morgan. The government is at the beck and call of the leviathan that is Big Oil.
We shouldn’t be surprised, of course. The government has always, to some extent, made its decisions at the behest of oil companies. The U.S. government funded the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Syria in 1949 and installed a military dictatorship so it could build pipelines on Syrian lands. The same tactics were employed in 1953 in Iran when the democratic government nationalized its oil supply, and again in Bolivia during 1971 for the same reason. Access to Afghanistan’s oil supply was the reason that throughout the 1980s, the Reagan administration funded the “mujahedeen" that would eventually become the Taliban. The 2003 war in Iraq was orchestrated by Halliburton to give the company control of the oil supply while making a pretty penny off of military contracting, all thanks to former CEO Dick Cheney occupying an extremely valuable position in the executive branch. (Sound familiar?) As recently as 2011, military intervention in Libya was organized by American corporations to grant them access to its massive oil reserves.
As long as the United States government exists in its current form, it will always be subject to the whims of corporate powers like the petroleum industry. This is the nature of neoliberal “democracy.” Until this capitalist superstructure, in which the rich rule and the rest of us serve their interests, is completely destroyed, we will never be free.
