''Subterranean Blues: On ExxonMobil''

From The Nation

''For more than a century, ever since Ida Minerva Tarbell published her exposé of the Standard Oil Company in
McClure’s Magazine in 1903, oil has been one of the great subjects for muckraking American journalists. Much as the unconscious is for a Freudian, oil’s dark sludge seems the product of a subterranean world that stands in sharp contrast to the pretensions of the society saturated by it. We never see it, never think about it, have no idea where it comes from or how it comes to be—yet the sludge is ubiquitous, and all we do depends upon its power. We insist that we want independence, to spin energy out of the transparent elements of light and air, and yet it never really goes away. When everything else has been stripped away, it is what remains.''

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Private Empire
ExxonMobil and American Power.
By Steve Coll.