Lots more great material for Da Boss's next album.
By J.R. Dunn
American Thinker
July 17, 2026
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.
And just last week, 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 1000-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.
Are any of these companies planning to leave the state ? Some of them, almost certainly, although all of them are playing their cards very close to the vest. The simple truth is that New Jersey has become actively hostile toward business on all levels. It may have the least welcoming business environment in the Northeast, which, considering Massachusetts and New York, is saying something.
What can't be denied is that NJ has the highest corporate tax rate in the U.S. at 11.5%. This is a full two points over the next worst competitor, Illinois - yet another failing state - at 9.5%.
It got that way in 2024 when the state passed the Corporate Transit Fee. Forget the name - it's not a "fee" at all but simply another tax, a 2.5% surcharge added to the standard 9% rate and tailored to affect only the state's top corporations, those with incomes exceeding $10 million annually. It's as if the state government was deliberately targeting them for elimination.
To top that off, the state has proposed new legislation titled the Climate Superfund Act, which would retroactively penalize fossil-fuel companies for the "damage' they have inflicted on the state's environment. The CSA is a pure green wish-fulfillment bill designed to both punish and loot an entire industry. It will reach back to 1995 - over thirty years - to target all companies that share any role in the emission of more than a billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions during that period. These companies will be fined based on the amount of their emissions. The proponents have"estimated"that the CSA will raise $1 billion to $2 billion a year, but this, needless to say, is pocket change. In time, any company that can be even vaguely connected to"climate change"will be forced to pony up, and the predicted total of $40 to $50 billion will balloon to the hundreds of billions. These funds are to be earmarked to"repair, adapt, and mitigate the negative impacts of climate change, such as severe flooding and extreme weather events. Nothing of the sort has occurred anywhere in NJ, but never fear - every tree branch knocked down by a thunderstorm will qualify for CSA funding. This, after all, is the state that required thirty years and over one million to build a twenty-foot concrete staircase in Jersey City.
The CSA has not passed yet, but it will. ExxonMobil didn't make such a crucial decision for no reason.
All the same, the company is not completely out of the woods yet. It will certainly be made to pay through the nose for the Bayway Refinery, as well as all those corner Exxon stations.
NJ Democrats had full warning concerning all this. In 1990, Democrat James Florio became governor with the announced intention of "waging class warfare in New Jersey." After starting out with the largest tax hike in history, he began targeting various industries, much the same as is occurring now. One of them was semi truck sales, which was concentrated on Rt. 46. The Florio administration jacked sales taxes on semis to the highest level in the country. The problem for Florio and his Marxist staff was that the dealerships were less than a half-hour's drive from Pennsylvania. Within weeks, most of them had decamped across the Delaware, taking business, jobs, and taxes with them.
As for the current governor, Mikey Sherrill had nothing substantial to say: "We must create a climate where businesses grow, jobs stay, and families can afford to live here." Instead, she signed a bill setting fines for businesses with more than 50 employees on Medicaid, continuing the death of a thousand cuts for NJ businesses.
Representative Ravi Bhalla was more straightforward. When told that fleeing companies would lead to job losses, he said: "Good."
Twenty, or even ten years ago, the loss of a giant such as ExxonMobil would have caused waves of shock and fear throughout the business and political elites of the Northeast. Today, it scarcely raises a shrug. That's how divorced from reality these people have become.
It's no exaggeration at all to say that this marks the end of New Jersey as a going concern. Tax money will continue to dry up. Further companies, and even entire industries (such as the rest of the fossil fuel industry), will continue making quiet plans to flee while the getting is good. Office vacancies in Newark, Jersey City, Hackensack, and Menlo Park will balloon. Companies that once would have considered setting up in Joisey will now not even touch the place. The working populace will head south, leaving only the old, the destitute, and no-hoper immigrants without skills, language, or futures.
For many decades, Jersey has operated in the belief that its economy was harnessed to that of New York City, so that no matter how badly NJ was run, the City's economy would keep it afloat. No doubt that kind of thinking still prevails. But ya know wut ? New York City is going down at the same time. (Among other things, New York State itself has a Climate Superfund Act that will annihilate its fossil-fuel industries.) So where does that leave Joisey?
And all that has been done - so far anyway - without the participation of a single social democrat. It's all the result of traditional Democrats carrying out traditional Democrat policies. When the DSA does move in - well, the mind boggles.
This is what awaits blue states and cities across the country. New Jersey is just farther along than anybody else.
This article was originally published on American Thinker.