Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power by Steve Coll (English) Paperback

Description: Private Empire by Steve Coll An "extraordinary" and "monumental" expos of Big Oil from two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Coll ("The Washington Post"). In this, the first hard-hitting examination of ExxonMobilNthe largest and most powerful private corporation in the United States--he reveals the true extent of its power. FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Publisher Description "ExxonMobil has met its match in Coll, an elegant writer and dogged reporter . . . extraordinary . . . monumental." —The Washington Post"Fascinating . . . Private Empire is a book meticulously prepared as if for trial . . . a compelling and elucidatory work." —BloombergFrom the Pulitzer Prize-winning and bestselling author of Ghost Wars and The Achilles Trap, an extraordinary exposé of Big Oil. Includes a profile of current Secretary of State and former chairman and chief executive of ExxonMobil, Rex TillersonIn this, the first hard-hitting examination of ExxonMobil—the largest and most powerful private corporation in the United States—Steve Coll reveals the true extent of its power. Private Empire pulls back the curtain, tracking the corporations recent history and its central role on the world stage, beginning with the Exxon Valdez accident in 1989 and leading to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. The action spans the globe—featuring kidnapping cases, civil wars, and high-stakes struggles at the Kremlin—and the narrative is driven by larger-than-life characters, including corporate legend Lee "Iron Ass" Raymond, ExxonMobils chief executive until 2005, and current chairman and chief executive Rex Tillerson, President-elect Donald Trumps nomination for Secretary of State. A penetrating, news-breaking study, Private Empire is a defining portrait of Big Oil in American politics and foreign policy. Author Biography Steve Coll is the author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Ghost Wars and a professor and dean emeritus of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, and from 2007 to 2013 was president of the New America Foundation, a public policy institute in Washington, D.C. He is a staff writer for The New Yorker and previously worked for twenty years at The Washington Post, where he received a Pulitzer Prize for explanatory journalism in 1990. He is the author of nine books, including On the Grand Trunk Road, The Bin Ladens, Private Empire, Directorate S., and The Achilles Trap. Review "ExxonMobil has met its match in Coll, an elegant writer and dogged reporter . . . extraordinary . . . monumental." —The Washington Post"Fascinating . . . Private Empire is a book meticulously prepared as if for trial, a lawyerly accumulation of information that lets the facts speak for themselves . . . a compelling and elucidatory work." —Bloomberg"Private Empire is meticulous, multi-angled and valuable . . . Mr. Colls prose sweeps the earth like an Imax camera." —Dwight Garner, The New York Times"ExxonMobil has cut a ruthless path through the Age of Oil. Yet intense secrecy has kept one of the worlds largest companies a mystery, until now. Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power is a masterful study of Big Oils biggest player . . . Colls in-depth reporting, buttressed by his anecdotal prose, make Private Empire a must-read. Consider Private Empire a sequel of sorts to The Prize, Daniel Yergins Pulitzer-winning history of the oil industry . . . Colls portrait of ExxonMobil is both riveting and appalling . . . Yet Private Empire is not so much an indictment as a fascinating look into American business and politics. With each chapter as forceful as a New Yorker article, the book abounds in Dickensian characters." —San Francisco Chronicle"Coll makes clear in his magisterial account that Exxon is mighty almost beyond imagining, producing more profit than any American company in the history of profit, the ultimate corporation in an era of corporate ascendancy. This history of its last two decades is therefore a revealing history of our time, a chronicle of the intersection between energy and politics." —Bill McKibben, New York Review of Books"Groundbreaking . . . Masterful as a corporate portrait, Private Empire gushes with narrative." —American Prospect Excerpt from Book 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 Hungarys pre-Communist era and demanded the withdrawal of Soviet military forces. "Ivan, Arent 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 Americas 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 Exxons 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 Americas 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 communisms fall and global capitalisms revival. The United States now stood unchallenged as a worldwide military power. Exxons empire would increasingly overlap with Americas, but the two were hardly contiguous. Pentagon policy, after the Soviet Unions 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 corporations activity also complicated American foreign policy; Exxons far-flung interests were at times distinct from Washingtons. Lee Raymond would manage Exxons global position after 1989 as a confident sovereign, a peer of the White Houses 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. Exxons power within the United States derived from an independent, even rebellious lineage. The corporation had been hived off from John D. Rockefellers 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. Exxons 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 countrys 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 Americas 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, Exxons trajectory now pointed straight up. The corporations 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, Exxons sway over local politics and security was greater than that of the United States embassy. In impoverished African countries increasingly important to Exxons strategy, such as Chad, the weight of the corporations 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, Exxons independent power and negotiating agenda competed with and sometimes attracted more attention than the d Details ISBN0143123548 Author Steve Coll Pages 704 Language English Year 2013 ISBN-10 0143123548 ISBN-13 9780143123545 Format Paperback Publication Date 2013-05-28 Short Title PRIVATE EMPIRE Media Book Residence MD, US Subtitle ExxonMobil and American Power Place of Publication New York, NY Country of Publication United States AU Release Date 2013-05-28 NZ Release Date 2013-05-28 US Release Date 2013-05-28 Publisher Penguin Putnam Inc Imprint Penguin USA Audience General DEWEY 338.76223380 UK Release Date 2013-05-28 We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. 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