Stephen's guest has more potential. Steve Coll is the author of Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power (also Pulitzer Prize-winner & president/CEO of the New America Foundation). Google's still being annoying, but apparently looking for a high-profile book by title works better. Plenty of links here.
Here's the starred 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.
I only took a look at a few of the obvious (and some less obvious) places. Here's a bit from Businessweek:
There’s a startling scene early in Steve Coll’s Private Empire in which Lee Raymond, then the chief executive of ExxonMobil, speaks with offhanded candor about where his loyalties lie. Asked by an industry colleague if his company might consider building more refineries domestically, the better to protect the U.S. from potential gasoline shortages and security crises, Raymond shrugs off the question. “I’m not a U.S. company,” Raymond says, “and I don’t make decisions based on what’s good for the U.S.”
As objectivist statements of rational self-interest go, that one’s a lulu—up there with Margaret Thatcher’s “There is no such thing as society.” You’d expect a Big Oil chieftan to be ruthlessly profit-minded, but to the point of putting profits ahead of country? Nevertheless, Coll writes, Raymond “saw no contradiction” in this stance: “He did indeed regard himself as a very patriotic American and a political conservative, but he was also fully prepared to state publicly that he had fiduciary responsibilities.”
This is one of many fascinating glimpses that Coll provides into the curious world of ExxonMobil, which, though it was surpassed recently by Apple as the globe’s largest nonstate-owned corporation in terms of market capitalization, remains unsurpassed as the globe’s most secretive...
A bit from an article I found at ThinkProgress (originally from OneEarth -- I added the link):
...In Steve Coll's new book Private Empire, a history of ExxonMobil in the years since the March 24, 1989, Valdez spill in Alaska, CEO Lee Raymond doesn't quite reach Minderbinderian levels of amorality, but he gets mighty close. His company pays the torture-happy Singaporean military to protect its oil fields from rebel forces. He hires a team of scientists to browbeat researchers attempting to assess the damage from Valdez. He publicly dismisses the very notion of climate change, even as his company explores how global warming might offer new opportunities for oil exploration and profit. "Don't believe for a minute that ExxonMobil doesn't think climate change is real," Coll quotes a manager as saying...
It is to Coll's credit that Raymond never comes across as a moustache-twirling supervillain. He is merely the master of a proudly cloistered society, one that values loyalty and rule-following over free thinking and flexibility...
Raymond takes a similarly uncompromising attitude toward his many critics. Alternative-energy proponents are dismissed as soft-headed idealists. SEC regulations that conflict with Exxon's own accounting practices are glibly disregarded in its public statements. Human-rights compacts are refused, not because Exxon doesn't agree with the ideals behind them but because, in the words of one executive, "We don't sign on to other people's principles." Raymond, in other words, was well suited for the early 21st century Age of American Imperiousness, an attitude best personified by his close friend, Dick Cheney.
And woe to scientists who reach conclusions that Exxon finds distasteful. Government researchers studying how much oil still lurked beneath the beaches of Prince William Sound 12 years after the Valdez spill dug 7,000 holes on 91 beach segments -- all while being trailed by Exxon-funded scientists on cruise ships and helicopters, who mapped their movements and double-checked their work. When the government’s team leader, Jeffrey Short, published his findings, Exxon rushed out a response, all but accusing the researchers of fraud. "We saw no evidence that Short dug 7,000 pits," the paper stated. "Had thousands been dug, we would have located many more." Exxon filed dozens of Freedom of Information Act requests, burying the scientists in paperwork, and representatives showed up at every public presentation to attack their work. Eventually, Short retired from his government post, in part because he was fed up with the harassment...
And some bits from the NYtimes:
...“Private Empire” details Exxon Mobil’s harassment of environmental scientists, its messy entanglements in small wars in far-flung countries, its withholding of information from Congress, its dissembling about global warming, its arrogant culture, its obscene stockpiles of cash...
...The company is a near-perfect and ready-made villain. When Greenpeace activists climbed to the roof of the Death Star in 2003, its members unfurled a banner that declared the site a global-warming crime scene. Exxon Mobil is not easily pushed around. As President George W. Bush said to the prime minister of India in 2001, “Nobody tells those guys what to do.”..
...Part of what keeps you reading is Mr. Coll’s sly and revealing portrait of Mr. Raymond, who became Exxon’s chief executive a few years after the Valdez spill and ran the company until 2006. He changed it in profound ways, moving its headquarters to Texas from Manhattan and making safety, efficiency and sheer profitability his hardboiled goals...
With Mr. Raymond’s retirement, Exxon Mobil has become, if only slightly, a kinder and more gentle place. It has acknowledged global warming; it has advocated for a carbon tax. It is closely monitoring environmentally friendly alternative energies and, less popularly, has begun to get involved in risky drilling techniques like hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.
It’s a company that’s begun to care what we think of it. It seems to now want a good response to the following question, posed by a corporate-responsibility specialist to an Exxon Mobil executive, albeit in more graphic language than can be printed here:
What are you going to say to your grandkids when they say, Grandpa, why did you screw up the planet?
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