ExxonMobil: The Company You Hate to Love to Hate

By Robert Wilonsky Wed., Aug. 9 2006 at 8:38 AM

Categories: News

Yesterday, Dallas-based ExxonMobil sent out this press release touting its Green Team, which consists of some 100 "low to moderate-income high school students [who] spend their summer vacations beautifying Dallas parks, building houses and taking classes taught by college instructors." Noble stuff; worth celebrating; waytago, kids. The Green Team's sponsored by Exxon and managed by folks from City Hall, and the kids are paid for their work, which includes "landscaping and maintaining parks, athletic fields and recreation centers across Dallas" and even building two houses for low-income residents on Chippewa Drive in West Dallas that were occupied only yesterday. So, see, ExxonMobil's one of the good guys.

Of course, that release followed Monday's announcement that ExxonMobil once more was going to post record second-quarter earnings. That came on the same day the Houston Chronicle reported that the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality was accusing ExxonMobil of "failing to timely disclose that a [January 23] spill at its Baytown refinery had coated a nearby public housing project with oil," among other misdeeds. And that came a few days after The Wall Street Journal figured out that the now-infamous Al Gore-An Inconvenient Truth parody circulating on YouTube was made not by some basement loner, but a guy who works for ExxonMobil's lobbyists. For fun, we've included the Good Morning America-Jake Tapper report on that video. But we did mention ExxonMobil's paying kids to landscape local parks during the long, hot summer, right? --Robert Wilonsky