Rex Tillerson



Rex Wayne Tillerson, a.k.a. "Wayne Tracker" has a bachelor's degree in engineering and began his career at Exxon in 1975 as a production engineer. He rose through the ranks, becoming president of Exxon Yemen Inc. and Esso Exploration and Production Khorat Inc. in 1975, then becoming CEO of ExxonMobil (2006-2016). In 2017, he became the 69th Secretary of State of the United States, serving one of the shortest tenures of any United States Secretary of State.

ExxonMobil
Exxon (later ExxonMobil) has known since at least 1977 that global warming from fossil fuels could be an issue. By 1981, Exxon was "already factoring climate change into decisions about new fossil fuel extraction". In 1995, there was an internal Exxon report that unequivocally stated that "burning the companies' products was causing climate change and that the relevant science 'is well established and cannot be denied.'"

Nonetheless, ExxonMobil (including Tillerson himself) has publicly cast doubt on anthropogenic climate change, and the science behind it in what amounts to a coverup. ExxonMobil has funded climate change-denialist think tanks, including during Tillerson's tenure as CEO. Also during Tillerson's tenure, ExxonMobil was sued in 2016 for allegedly misleading shareholders on climate change (People of the State of New York v PricewaterhouseCoopers and Exxon Mobil Corporation).

In 2013, Tillerson received the (Орден Дружбы) from Vladimir Putin for his "big contribution to developing cooperation in the energy sector." The award preceded the 2014 sanctions against Russia because of Russian intervention in the Ukraine, and has since been tainted by both the deteriorating US relationship with Russia, and the US Treasury Department's $2 million fine against ExxonMobil for violation of the sanctions against Russia beginning in 2014.

Boy Scouts of America
From 2010 to April 30, 2012, Tillerson was also the national president of the Boy Scouts of America (BSA). Tillerson left the BSA a few months before they were forced to release 20,000 pages of documentation on known child sexual abuse cases within the organization. During Tillerson's tenure, the BSA had a policy of mandatory reporting of sexual abuse to authorities, but kept silent about past abuses and the large amount of records they had.

Secretary of State
He is a contender for worst Secretary of State in history. He was also virtually irrelevant in crafting policy. He will be most known for his disdain of U.S. diplomacy. In a period of economic expansion he set about gutting a department that had already suffered under six years of austerity. His disastrous ‘reorg’ has proved a lie to the notion that government should be run like a business. In his brief tenure [he] has found a way to inflict lasting damage to the diplomatic corps and U.S. diplomacy.

Tillerson, though a long-time financial supporter of Republican political campaigns, was not an early supporter of Trump and gave no money at all to the 2016 Trump campaign.

Tillerson's first year in office as Secretary of State has been marked by a combination of official impotence and an unprecedented evisceration of the State Department. It would appear that Trump nominated Tillerson, not for his diplomatic experience (he had none) but rather as a show of power (being the boss of one of the world's largest corporations). Tillerson was largely a figurehead since Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner repeatedly conducted foreign policy without Tillerson's awareness.

Tillerson has repeatedly had to face direct contradictions or belittlings from Trump of virtually every attempt of his public diplomacy:
 * Climate change: Despite being involved in climate change denialism at ExxonMobil, Tillerson has supported the US staying in the and has also supported a carbon tax (although probably just to quash the possibility of cap-and-trade). Trump announced on June 1, 2017 that the US would withdraw from all participation in the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change.
 * Middle East: Trump named his son-in-law, Jared Kushner (who not only has no diplomatic experience whatsoever, but none of his team has any experience either, and Kushner has an overt pro-Israel bias), as a White House envoy to jump-start Middle East peace. Tillerson has been kept in the dark about Kushner's activities and has caused a rift between the two with regard to the Saudi Arabia-Qatar dispute.
 * North Korea: While Tillerson has made repeated diplomatic overtures toward North Korea, he has been repeatedly and publicly contradicted by Trump, forcing Tillerson to correct himself.
 * Russia: Tillerson's and Trump's views on Russia are not obviously contradictory. In 2014 while speaking to ExxonMobil shareholders, Tillerson opposed sanctions against Russia in principle, alleging that sanctions are ineffective because they're hard to implement comprehensively. But what Tillerson was actually saying to shareholders was that they would lose money from sanctions because ExxonMobil had just inked huge business deals with Russia starting in 2012. In 2017, Trump reluctantly and angrily signed into law a bill that added additional sanctions against Russia for interfering in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Trump claimed that the law was partly unconstitutional but then said that the administration would implement the law in full. The Trump administration only released a guidance document for the law after significant goading from Congress.


 * Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP): In 2013, Tillerson said that he supported the TPP. Tillerson has also generally been supportive of free trade, contrary to Trump's nativism. On January 23, 2017, Trump withdrew from the TPP because… Obama, or maybe because… Tillerson.

Perhaps frustrated at being constantly undermined by his boss, or perhaps the penny finally dropped, Tillerson reportedly got to the front of the line in October 2017 and called Trump a "moron".

Due to the sanctions passed under Obama and Trump, Exxon Mobile canceled whatever Tillerson-era deals they had with Russia, formally withdrawing from any attempt to drill in the Arctic like they wanted. Rex is all alone now.

On March 13, 2018, Trump got tired of abusing Tillerson and gave him the coup de grâce by firing him via tweet. Tillerson is not known to even have a Twitter account.