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Summary
Summary
Steve Coll investigates the notoriously secretive ExxonMobil Corporation, revealing the true extent of its power. He draws here on more than four hundred interviews; field reporting from the halls of Congress to the oil-laden swamps of the Niger Delta; more than one thousand pages of previously classified U.S. documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act; heretofore unexamined court records; and many other sources.
Summary
Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Coll goes deep inside ExxonMobil Corp., the largest and most powerful private corporation in the United States, for this penetrating and newsmaking study.
Author Notes
Steve Coll, winner of a 1990 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory journalism, has been managing editor of the Washington Post since 1998 and covered Afghanistan as the Post's South Asia bureau chief between 1989 and 1992. Coll is the author of four books, including On the Grand Trunk Road and The Taking of Getty Oil .
Reviews (6)
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Coll is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of the best-seller Ghost Wars (2004), an in-depth account of CIA activity in Afghanistan from the time of the Soviet invasion to the aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Center, and six other books. His latest is a thorough examination of ExxonMobil, a direct descendant of the 1911 breakup of Standard Oil, one of the most lucrative multinational companies in the world and the most successful oil company by a considerable margin. His account begins with the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil-spill disaster and moves quickly to the years 1999-2005, during which the company was headed by CEO Lee Iron Ass Raymond. Raymond, a friend of Dick Cheney's, effectively led ExxonMobil to produce the highest yearly profits of any company in history during a time when rising energy prices hit ordinary Americans in the pocketbook. Raymond used his influence to lobby hard against climate-change initiatives and any attempts at governmental regulatory action that would protect the environment. This deeply researched volume includes stories of kidnapping, pirates, politics, business, and some history.--Siegfried, David Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IN the great reach for colonies that Europe began hundreds of years ago, at center stage were several curious entities that wielded more power than many governments. The United Company of Merchants of England Trading to the East Indies (commonly known as the East India Company) and its counterpart, the Dutch East India Company, fielded their own warships and armies, coined money and ruled territory eventually taken over by Britain and the Netherlands. Later, the seizure of land by Cecil Rhodes's British South Africa Company also preceded the spread of British pink across the map. Centuries from now, historians sweltering away on an overheated planet and looking back to our own times will surely see multinational oil companies as similar players. The way they're reshaping today's world, however, is not by carving out future colonies, but by searching for the oil and gas we're so hungry for in ever more risky places: beneath oceans, in Canadian tar sands, in underground rock formations that require "fracking" and in the environmentally fragile Arctic waters newly accessible as the polar ice cap shrinks -thanks, of course, to our addiction to fossil fuels. That addiction is likely to change the very level of the seas the East India Company's ships sailed in their hunt for cloth and spices, and the floods and droughts ahead may set in motion desperate migrations dwarfing those of colonial times. Steve Coll's mammoth portrait of Exxon Mobil, "Private Empire," abounds in empire-size figures. In the first half of last year alone, the company's profits were $21.3 billion. When the chief executive Lee Raymond stepped down a few years ago, his retirement package was worth $398 million. If revenue were counted as gross domestic product, the corporation would rank among the top 30 countries. Unsurprisingly, Exxon Mobil runs one of Washington's biggest lobbying operations, with not only a well-staffed office on K Street (where a Democratic director was smoothly brought in to replace a Republican after the 2008 elections) but some 20 additional former senators, representatives, legislative aides and others under contract. Yet this book isn't so much a story of Exxon Mobil's influence over the American government. Rather, it's a picture of a corporation so large and powerful - operating in some 200 nations and territories - that it really has its own foreign policy. Coll quotes a 1999 cable from the United States Embassy in Chad noting that Exxon was ignoring American diplomats there. He then asks: "And why should it be otherwise? Exxon Mobil's investments in the Chad-Cameroon oil project would amount to $4.2 billion. Annual aid to Chad from the United States was only about $3 million." Exxon Mobil's foreign policy, orchestrated by a political division including National Security Council and State Department alumni, sometimes coincides with that of the United States, and sometimes diverges. For example, the corporation had no enthusiasm for invading Iraq. Yes, Iraq has all that oil, but with most remaining reserves ever harder to get at, oil executives knew that whoever ran Iraq would ultimately depend on the technology and capital of the Exxon Mobils of the world. And yes, it might have been nice to own Iraqi oil wells outright, but long-term stability and security mattered more. Today, although the company has billions invested in tearing up wetlands and forests to extract oil from Alberta's tar sands, it doesn't much care whether an expanded pipeline system that would stretch from Canada to the Gulf Coast gets the go-ahead from the Obama administration. If Exxon Mobil can't send that oil to the United States, it can easily sell it to Japan or China. Just like the British South Africa Company, which pioneered the use of Hiram Maxim's machine gun during the Matabele War, Exxon Mobil has its own armies - and, in these days of outsourcing, also hires those of others. In Chad, its 2,500 security men patrolled the countryside in white radio-equipped S.U.V.'s, watching for guerrillas as the company set up an intelligence operation bigger and better than the local C.I.A. station. In the war-racked Niger Delta, it gave boats to the Nigerian Navy, deployed its own vessels at sea to scout for pirates and "recruited, paid, supplied and managed sections of the Nigerian military and police." On their uniforms, the Nigerian police sported Mobil's familiar red flying horse. In Aceh, Indonesia, Mobil paid the salaries of Indonesian counterinsurgency forces who tortured and murdered prisoners on company property. Payments kept flowing even after the American government cut off aid to the Indonesian military because of such abuses. LIKE other journalists before him, Coll points out that Exxon Mobil's lobbying has not been confined to keeping oil and gas taxes low and regulations lax. It has also shaped what people think on the biggest issue of our time. For some years, the company claimed that human contributions to global warming were negligible and gave millions of dollars to organizations that churned out studies accordingly. In the last few years, the corporation has subtly, gradually pulled its head out of the sand on this issue, not admitting earlier errors but simply stressing that the world's economies still demand huge amounts of oil and gas - which is alas, true. Exxon Mobil executives care less about Americans' belief in climate change, Coll suggests, than they do about Americans' belief in punitive damages from lawsuits. After the next Exxon Valdez spill, or the next Jacksonville spill (in which an Exxon service station leaked 24,000 gallons of gasoline into a Maryland community's water supply), what a jury decides could subtract billions from the bottom line. Small wonder that after the Valdez, a company representative quietly called a University of Wisconsin professor to offer money if he would write an article for a "respectable academic journal," arguing against punitive damages. This man spoke up, but we don't know how many other scholars received and may have acted on the same offer and said nothing. "Private Empire" is not as original and absorbing as Coll's excellent Pulitzer Prize-winning "Ghost Wars," about the C.I.A.'s arrogant bungling in pre-2001 Afghanistan. Oil company executives trained and shielded by public relations staffers are inherently bland compared with the earlier volume's C.I.A. cowboys and Afghan sheiks. Long a correspondent and editor at The Washington Post and now a staff writer for The New Yorker, Coll is a careful reporter but sometimes doesn't know when to stop. "Private Empire" could easily afford to shed 150 of its nearly 700 pages. Do we really need to know where all the major Exxon Mobil figures grew up and went to college? Or do we really need half a page listing all the names and amounts involved when over a dozen executives gave to the campaign of an oil-friendly Texas congressman? Despite these quibbles, the book assuredly does what it sets out to do: show the inner workings of one of the Western world's most significant concentrations of unelected power. And just how that power is wielded matters enormously because oil companies play such a crucial role in the carbon economy to which we are so fatefully attached. Adam Hochschild is the author, most recently, of "To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918." He is writing a book about Americans in the Spanish Civil War.
Choice Review
Coll, an award-winning journalist/author, provides an insider story of ExxonMobil, one of the most powerful corporations in the US. Starting with the underlying reasons for the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, which set the stage for Lee Raymond's rise to leadership, the author unveils the extent of ExxonMobil's involvement in domestic and international activities. With annual revenues larger than the economy of many countries, the company generously funded US election campaigns, empowered its favorite allies abroad, and used the CEO's acquaintance with government officials to overcome local and global operation obstacles. Because of its long-term investment in numerous countries, ExxonMobil established its own foreign, security, and economic policies that in some cases have had more influence on local politics/security than that of the US embassy. The company also invested in research to challenge growing scientific evidence showing environmental impacts of emissions from fossil fuel combustion. This activity cost Raymond his position. Rex Tillerson, the current CEO, successfully changed the corporation's communication strategy with its opponents and the public. The book concludes with an account of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. This well-documented work is a must read for those interested in energy and environmental issues. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries. J. Tavakoli Lafayette College
Guardian Review
ExxonMobil is so rich it can outspend the US government and has a better credit rating than the US treasury. It is truly an empire, "a corporate state within the American state". A huge lobbying operation in Washington helps it influence foreign policy and win contracts abroad, and it has few qualms about dealing with dictators in oil-rich nations. The key figure in the book is Lee "Iron Ass" Raymond, chief executive until 2005. A friend of Dick Cheney, Raymond is also a fierce climate-change sceptic, and the oil giant funded anti-climate change research. "We don't run this company on emotions," Raymond once declared; all that mattered was "the relentless pursuit of efficiency". There's no doubting ExxonMobil's operational expertise, and Steve Coll, a Pulitzer-winning journalist, shows how changes in the world oil industry since the 1950s meant the company had to adapt to survive. But its power remains unchecked, making this thorough and accessible portrait of the secretive corporation fascinating and deeply disturbing - Ian Pindar ExxonMobil is so rich it can outspend the US government and has a better credit rating than the US treasury. It is truly an empire, "a corporate state within the American state". A huge lobbying operation in Washington helps it influence foreign policy and win contracts abroad, and it has few qualms about dealing with dictators in oil-rich nations. - Ian Pindar.
Kirkus Review
A thorough, sobering study of the pernicious consolidation of Big Oil. With admirable restraint, New Yorker contributor and two-time Pulitzer winner Coll (The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century, 2008, etc.) demonstrates how the merger of Exxon and Mobil has allowed the company to wield more power and wealth than even the American government, in the manner of John D. Rockefeller. Exxon had functioned as an independent corporate state since its antitrust breakoff from Standard Oil in 1911, and was ranked by profit performance in the top five corporations from the 1950s through the end of the Cold War. With the catastrophic spill of the Valdez in Alaska in 1989, the network of secrecy and internal security within Exxon was exposed but hardly tempered. The iron chief who emerged from the crisis, Lee Raymond, reappraised risk and security within the organization and took a hard line against efforts to extract from it punitive damages. Moving the headquarters to Texas in 1993, the company retrenched in its nose-thumbing determination to encourage and supply America's thirst for oil, casting around at more far-flung spots in the world that could provide the crude--such as where Mobil held attractive assets, in places like West Africa, Venezuela, Kazakhstan and Abu Dhabi. The Exxon-Mobil merger in 1999 created a global behemoth and also provoked small wars at drilling spots where the poor and disenfranchised deeply resented the foreign workers on native soil and disrupted the extraction by violence and insurgency. Raymond and his cohorts' cynical spin on the denial of global warming and the role of the burning of fossil fuels makes for jaw-dropping reading, as does the company's cunning manipulations of the war in Iraq to garner an oil deal. The Obama administration's emphasis on renewable energy sources and environmental concerns has barely challenged the formidable political power of Big Oil. Leaks, reserves, PACs, hydrofracking, bloated corporate profits and more: all pertinent concerns nicely handled by Coll in this engaging, hard-hitting work.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Coll (Ghost Wars) combines a corporate history of the world's biggest energy company with a survey of energy geopolitics. He begins with the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989, suggesting that the ongoing public criticism it generated fostered a corporate culture that is conservative, defensive, highly disciplined, and focused on cost and efficiency. While Coll covers corporate leadership and the Mobil and XTO mergers, he concentrates on the company's relentless pursuit of replacement oil reserves, its tactics to mitigate threats from environmentalism and alternative fuels, and its attempts to influence government policy. He follows the company's maneuvers in politically unstable parts of the world such as Africa and Indonesia and shows how it has coped with nationalism in Russia and Venezuela. He closes with BP's Deepwater Horizon debacle and a summary of where the United States stands today with regard to the environmental and economic costs of fossil fuel dependency. VERDICT In a very long work, Coll manages to keep his text clear, informative, and at times riveting. Highly recommended for students of the energy economy as well as for motivated general readers. [See Prepub Alert, 11/21/11.]-Lawrence Maxted, Gannon Univ., Erie, PA (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
A few days before the Exxon Valdez ran onto Bligh Reef, tens of thousands of Hungarians marched through Budapest. The demonstrators turned the commemoration of an 1848 uprising against Austrian rule into a revolt against Soviet-backed communism. "Resign!" they shouted outside downtown buildings housing Communist Party bureaucrats. "Freedom! . . . No more shall we be slaves!" They carried flags from Hungary's pre-Communist era and demanded the withdrawal of Soviet military forces. "Ivan, Aren't You Homesick?" and "Legal State, Not a Police State" declared their protest signs. The defiant march added to the cracks spreading that spring through the structures of global politics. The Berlin Wall fell a few months later, in November. The Soviet Union fissured and then disappeared. Democratic and free-market revolutions and revivals swept through Central Europe, Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Ethnic, religious, and territorial conflicts, long subdued by the cold war, erupted one after another. The world was remade, tossed, liberated--and reopened for international business. The Valdez wreck stunned Exxon and its rising leader, Lee Raymond. The disaster would change the corporation profoundly. Internal reforms imposed by Raymond in response to the accident would turn one of America's oldest, most rigid corporations into an even harder, leaner place of rule books and fear-inspiring management techniques. At the same time, Raymond and the rest of Exxon's leaders would gradually pass through the introspection triggered by the Valdez spill and seek out the oil and gas plays that opened so unexpectedly after 1989. An age of empire beckoned America and Exxon alike. In a bracingly short time, Anglo-American optimism and idealism about free markets, foreign investment, and the rule of law found adherents in the most unlikely world capitals. Brand-new nations brimming with oil and gas and others previously closed to Western corporations hung out FOR LEASE signs to lure geologists from Houston and London: Russia, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Angola, Qatar, and tiny Equatorial Guinea, on the West African coast, soon to market itself through its Washington lobbyists as the "Kuwait of Africa." These post-cold war opportunities for American, British, French, and Italian oil companies could be ambiguous, risky, and sometimes fleeting. Resentful nationalism and suspicion of the United States and Europe persisted in many capitals of the new oil powers. State-owned petroleum companies from China, India, Brazil, and elsewhere were rising quickly as competitors. Exxon might be America's largest and most powerful oil corporation, but it would require all the political influence, financial resources, dazzling technology, speed, and stamina that its leaders could muster to seize the lucrative oil deals made possible by communism's fall and global capitalism's revival. The United States now stood unchallenged as a worldwide military power. Exxon's empire would increasingly overlap with America's, but the two were hardly contiguous. Pentagon policy, after the Soviet Union's demise, sought to keep international sea-lanes free; to reduce the global danger of nuclear war, terrorism, and transnational crime; to manage or contain Russia and China; to secure Israel; and to foster, against long odds, a stable Middle East from which oil supplies vital for global economic growth could flow freely. Exxon benefited from the new markets and global commerce that American military hegemony now protected. Yet the corporation's activity also complicated American foreign policy; Exxon's far-flung interests were at times distinct from Washington's. Lee Raymond would manage Exxon's global position after 1989 as a confident sovereign, a peer of the White House's rotating occupants. Raymond aligned Exxon with America, but he was not always in sync; he was more akin to the president of France or the chancellor of Germany. He did not manage the corporation as a subordinate instrument of American foreign policy; his was a private empire. Exxon's power within the United States derived from an independent, even rebellious lineage. The corporation had been hived off from John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil monopoly in 1911, after a bruising antitrust campaign led by economic reformers and populist politicians. The visceral hostility toward Washington sometimes eschewed by Exxon executives eight decades later suggested some of them had still not gotten over it. Exxon's size and the nature of its business model meant that it functioned as a corporate state within the American state. Like its forebearer, Standard, Exxon proved across decades that it was one of the most powerful businesses ever produced by American capitalism. From the 1950s through the end of the cold war, Exxon ranked year after year as one of the country's very largest and most profitable corporations, always in the top five of the annual Fortune 500 lists. Its profit performance proved far more consistent and durable than that of other great corporate behemoths of America's postwar boom, such as General Motors, United States Steel, and I.B.M. In 1959, Exxon ranked as the second-largest American corporation by revenue and profit; four decades later it was third. And more than any of its corporate peers, Exxon's trajectory now pointed straight up. The corporation's revenues would grow fourfold during the two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and its profits would smash all American records. As it expanded, Exxon refined its own foreign, security, and economic policies. In some of the faraway countries where it did business, because of the scale of its investments, Exxon's sway over local politics and security was greater than that of the United States embassy. In impoverished African countries increasingly important to Exxon's strategy, such as Chad, the weight of the corporation's investments and the cash flow it shared with local governments overwhelmed the economy and became the central prize in violent local contests for power. In Moscow and Beijing, Exxon's independent power and negotiating agenda competed with and sometimes attracted more attention than the démarches issued by American secretaries of state. Yet the corporation could also be insular and even passive in the faraway places where it acquired and produced oil and gas. It fenced off local operations and separated its workforce from upheaval outside its gates. If its oil fl owed and its contract terms remained intact, then Exxon often followed a directive of minimal interference in local politics, especially if those politics were controversial, as in the case of the African dictatorships with which the corporation partnered, or the countries, such as Indonesia and Venezuela, where civil conflict swirled around Exxon properties. In Washington, Exxon was a more confident and explicit political actor. The corporation's lobbyists bent and shaped American foreign policy, as well as economic, climate, chemical, and environmental regulation. Exxon maintained all-weather alliances with sympathetic American politicians while calling as little attention to its influence as possible. The cold war's end signaled a coming era when nongovernmental actors--corporations, philanthropies, terrorist cells, and media networks-- all gained relative power. Exxon's size, insularity, and ideology made its position distinct. Unlike Walmart or Google (to name two other multinational corporations that would rise after 1989 to global influence), the object of Exxon's business model lay buried beneath the earth. Exxon drilled holes in the ground and then operated its oil and gas wells for many years, and so its business imperatives were linked to the control of physical territory. Increasingly, the oil and gas Exxon produced was located in poor or unstable countries. Its treasure was subject to capture or political theft by coup makers or guerrilla movements, and so the corporation became involved in small wars and kidnapping rackets that many other international companies could gratefully avoid. The time horizons for Exxon's investments stretched out longer than those of almost any government it lobbied. "We see governments come and go," Lee Raymond once remarked, an observation that was particularly true of Washington, with its constitutionally term-limited presidency. Exxon's investments in a particular oil and gas field could be premised on a production life span of forty or more years. During that time, the United States might change its president and its foreign and energy policies at least half a dozen times. Overseas, a project's host country might pass through multiple coups and political upheavals during the same four decades. It behooved Exxon to develop influence and lobbying strategies to manage or evade political volatility. American spies and diplomats who occasionally migrated to work at Exxon discovered a corporate system of secrecy, nondisclosure agreements, and internal security that matched some of the most compartmented black boxes of the world's intelligence agencies. The corporation's information control systems guarded proprietary industrial data but also sought to protect its long-term strategic position by minimizing its visibility. Exxon's executives deflected press coverage; they withheld cooperation from congressional investigators, if the letter of the law allowed; and they typically spoke in public by reading out sanitized, carefully edited speeches or PowerPoint slides. Their strategy worked: Exxon made a fetish of rules, but it rarely had to justify or explain publicly how it operated when the rules were gray. As the Valdez wreck made obvious, Exxon's massive daily operations--soon to produce 1.5 billion barrels of oil and gas pumped from the ground each year, and 50 billion gallons of gasoline sold worldwide--posed huge environmental risks. After the Valdez , Exxon would become again, as it had been in the first decades of Standard Oil's existence, the most hated oil company in America. When gasoline prices soared, American commuters felt powerless before its influence. In effect, Exxon was America's energy policy. Certainly there was no governmental policy of comparable coherence. After fitful, failed efforts to wean itself from imported oil during the 1970s, the United States had evolved no effective government-led energy strategy. Its de facto policy was the operation of free markets amid a jumble of patchwork subsidies, contradictory rules, and weak regulatory agencies. The very weakness of policy favored Exxon. As the public's frustration grew over rising pump prices and dependence on oil imports that transferred billions of dollars to hostile regimes overseas, Exxon became a natural lightning rod. The corporation managed this criticism with the same coolheaded patience and indifference that it employed to endure political risk in tinpot African dictatorships. Compromise was not the Exxon way. Excerpted from Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power by Steve Coll All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.