Posted on 07/17/2026 8:57:56 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
This past spring, Blue America suffered yet another critical blow without much in the way of comment: Standard Oil of New Jersey fled the state for Texas.
Of course, it’s not called Standard Oil anymore. Following several takeovers and mergers, it’s now known as ExxonMobil. But it’s still the same company founded nearly a century and a half ago as the jewel in the crown of John D. Rockefeller’s industrial empire. And now it’s gone.
On March 10 of this year, the company’s board voted unanimously to make the move. The decision was put to a shareholder vote on May 27. No less than 71.3%, nearly three-quarters of corporate shareholders representing 3.5 million shares, concurred. You could scarcely get that number to vote to change the color of the company logo.
And so the largest, wealthiest, and most prominent corporation in the Garden State, a company that had held that status since 1882, ended its connection with New Jersey. Much will remain. The network of gas stations will still exist, as will the Bayway Refinery, one of the largest in the country. But ExxonMobil will no longer be subject to the rules, regulations, and taxes of a state that hates it and has done its best to drive it out.
ExxonMobil isn’t the first company to go, only the largest. It’s the latest in a long line going back over a decade. Hertz moved its headquarters to Florida in 2013. Mercedes-Benz USA moved to Georgia in 2015. More recently, Honeywell moved to North Carolina.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
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The Curley Effect in action.
The blue areas get even bluer.
Folks, this isn’t news anymore. It’s been happening for several years now.
Electronics giant Samsung announced that it was moving from Englewood Cliffs, across the Hudson from Manhattan, to Plano, a suburb of Dallas.
A number of other companies have made lesser but still significant cuts.
* Anheuser-Busch shut down its Newark brewery.
* Stop & Shop closed down ten stores.
* Rite Aid closed several dozen stores in the wake of its recent bankruptcy.
* Macy’s, Kohls, and REI have closed primary retail locations.
.... And Johnson and Johnson, the state’s largest healthcare corporation and the corporate savior of New Brunswick (the city in the 1970s was well on its way to Newarkhood or worse when J&J spearheaded a successful business effort to pull it out of its nose dive), has decided to site a new 1,000-worker facility not in New Jersey, but in Pennsylvania.
* Major layoffs have also increased, including 285 jobs cut by Bristol Myers Squibb and 263 by Novo Nordisk.
* Other healthcare companies seeing serious job losses include Rocket Pharmaceuticals, Novartis, and BioReference Health.
* The financial sector has also been hard hit, with downsizing by Citibank, JP Morgan Chase, Prudential, and Ernst & Young. In transportation, Alstom Transportation and Essendant both shed hundreds of jobs.
Along with those who will pump your gas for you because it is illegal to pump your own gas in NJ.
One of many stupid rules there.
I have to admit though, one good rule they do have is that there are no left turns allowed off or onto Route 1 within many miles of NYC. They use exit ramps instead. To get on, you have to cross and come back around onto an entrance ramp.
Obviously a pain to make a left, but the traffic flows much better on the main throughway.
New Jersey is dying - even faster than New York, and California. They and Illinois are in a race to the bottom first. Both made totally unsustainable pension promises to public sector labor unions and both can’t pay for those promises. In both states, it would take a constitutional change for the state to get out of paying the public sector union in full.
So naturally politicians will do everything else from looting various funds to taxing citizens to death first. Businesses are fleeing as are the more productive people.
My father used to say, New Jerseyites must be the stupidest people in America. In every other state the people are able to figure out how to pump their gas, but in NJ they must be too dumb.
Of course he/I knew it’s a jobs program for the minimum wage crowd.
The good news is that the people who lost their jobs were getting paid well.
Exxon sold its Bayway refinery in 1993.
SAME IDIOT RULES IN OREGON
I think a great political battle over the next decade or two is going to be those blue-state cities and municipalities trying to get federal money to bail out their underwater pension funds. Essentially, asking red staters to subsidize the retirements of blue state government employees.
Republicans have to go to the mat hard to stop that.
I think a great political battle over the next decade or two is going to be those blue-state cities and municipalities trying to get federal money to bail out their underwater pension funds. Essentially, asking red staters to subsidize the retirements of blue state government employees.
Republicans have to go to the mat hard to stop that.
I thought I read that Oregon dropped that a couple years ago.
Absolutely! Republicans need to fight to the death to make sure there are NO BAILOUTS.
Citizens of red states who did not get a vote to determine the profligate ways of blue states should not be on the hook when those blue states inevitably go bust. States are sovereign. Let them sort out their own messes.
Used to be the same in Oregon unless they changed it recently.
Yes, and Tim Walz (MN) says: Hold my beer!
Related:
Today, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals overturned New Jersey’s ban on “assault” weapons.
Standard Oil anymore. Following several takeovers and mergers, it’s now known as ExxonMobil.
The underlying point of the article is valid, but the ExxonMobil situation has almost nothing to do with it. ExxonMobil and its predecessor Exxon have had their corporate headquarters in the Houston area since the early 1960s. They were legally domiciled in New Jersey but paid almost nothing there except annual filing fees required of any company registered in the state.
Wasn’t ESSO Eastern Seaboard Standard Oil?
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