Private empire
In Private Empire Steve Coll investigates the largest and most powerful private corporation in the United States, revealing the true extent of its power. ExxonMobil's annual revenues are larger than the economic activity in the great majority of countries. In many of the countries where it conducts business, ExxonMobil's sway over politics and security is greater than that of the United States embassy. In Washington, ExxonMobil spends more money lobbying Congress and the White House than almost any other corporation. Yet despite its outsized influence, it is a black box. Private Empirepulls back the curtain, tracking the corporation's recent history and its central role on the world stage, beginning with the Exxon Valdez accident in 1989 and leading to the Deepwater Horizonoil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. The action spans the globe, moving from Moscow, to impoverished African capitals, Indonesia, and elsewhere in heart-stopping scenes that feature kidnapping cases, civil wars, and high-stakes struggles at the Kremlin. At home, Coll goes inside ExxonMobil's K Street office and corporation headquarters in Irving, Texas, where top executives in the "God Pod" (as employees call it) oversee an extraordinary corporate culture of discipline and secrecy. The narrative is driven by larger than life characters, including corporate legend Lee "Iron Ass" Raymond, ExxonMobil's chief executive until 2005.
Stats for nerds
3recommend
9mentions
5people
2014–2024years
44% recommend56% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I'd expect a political hit piece to dive into Exxon's record in Russia given the current geopolitical tensions. Those include, for example, ex-CEO Rex Tillerson's meetings with Russia's fossil fuel czar, Igor Sechin, Exxon's role in building the technologically advanced Sakhalin natural gas project and its LNG export system, etc. For anyone interested in that history, Steve Coll's "Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power" has a whole chapter on it:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13372977-private-empire
See also stories like this (2011)
> "Where BP had planned to swap stock, Exxon, which is based in Texas, agreed to give Rosneft assets elsewhere in the world, including some that Exxon owns in the deepwater zones of the Gulf of Mexico and on land in Texas. In announcing the arrangement at a surprise signing in the Russian resort town of Sochi, Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin described a sweeping global alliance — and a potentially vast investment by Exxon in the Russian Arctic."
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/31/business/global/exxon-and...
As far as work culture, I can't imagine Chevron being any worse that Exxon, and descriptions of Facebook's internal pressures on employees don't seem all that different from Exxon's.
- The book "Private Empire" by Steve Coll is excellent on this. Unbearably frustrating at points, because it seems that Exxon were well aware of the issue and there were some suggestions rolling around that would have made them trailblazers in renewables, but they were just too risk-averse.
- Follow that up with Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power by Steve Coll and you've got a fascinating and compelling look at the last ~120 years of oil and American history.
- The technology has spread but to date no other shale formation has been identified that has the same advantages of those in the US, namely a government friendly to drilling. France has some promising formations but they've banned the tech. There are other possibilities in Poland and Ukraine but there have been difficulties bringing them online.
It's not just about the technology, above-ground risk is in many ways the bigger problem.
But sure, it's a risk inherent in this sort of project. Cheniere Energy was building its Sabine Pass LNG facility in Louisiana to import gas until advances in fracking and horizontal drilling led to a glut of gas in the US market and importing ceased to make sense. Cheniere had to pull off a multi-billion dollar pivot to export instead, scrambling to raise billions and get approval to build the liquefaction trains required to export gas.
(OT: if anyone in Silicon Valley thinks theirs is the only industry ripe with crazy schemes, insane pivots and huge disruptions, read up on energy. The Prize by Daniel Yergin, Private Empire by Steve Coll and The Frackers by Gregory Zuckerman are the places to start)
- Israel has long served a kind of cut-out role for delivering weapons to states with atrocious 'Western values' records but which are compliant with US corporate interests. Equatorial Guinea was one such example, with dictator Obiang and his ExxonMobil contract. Steve Coll mentions this in "Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power" (2012):
> "Fortunately for Obiang, coup-prone African governments rolling in oil but lacking in arms and intelligence to defend their bounty had a discrete alternative to the Pentagon and C.I.A. for defense support: Israel. Quietly, the Bush Administration encouraged Obiang to enter into security and commercial ties with Tel Aviv."
Azerbaijan is a similar example as US weapons sales were banned for human rights abuse reasons. A Wikileaked US State Dept cable stated (2009) "Through its close relations with Israel, Azerbaijan gets a level of access to the quality weapon systems it needs to develop its army that it can not obtain from the U.S. and Europe due to various legal limitations..."
If the dictatorial government funnels the oil money into the Western banking system, then the US turns a blind eye to this kind of thing (e.g. Saudi and UAE use of Pegasus to persecute pro-democracy activists) and if not, it's sanctions and regime change time.
- This article has a huge blind spot, one that seems very common among the foreign policy / international relations academic-media crowd - namely, there's zero discussion of the economic conflict and the failure of the 'economic integration program' that the US and Britain were pushing in Russia in the 1990s and which broke down around 2003. (Some authors have discussed the economic relationship between business and government in the context of international relations more broadly, see William Manchester's "Arms of Krupp" (1968), Daniel Yergin's "The Prize" (1990) and Steve Coll's "Private Empire" (2012)).
This economic-centric timeline looks a lot different from that in the article:
2003 Putin rejects the ExxonMobil bid for >50% ownership take in Yukos, and imprisons the Russian oligarch Khodorkovsky who was most closely affiliated with the deal. This really seems like the beginning of a major split:
https://carnegieendowment.org/2005/07/12/what-does-yukos-aff...
2008 The Russia-Georgia conflict takes off, in a kind of preview of the current Russia-Ukraine conflict, at least partially related to a pipeline dispute but also a demonstration of the continuing major rift between the US and Russia:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/aug/11/georgia.russia...
2010 The roots of the conflict in Syria seems to come from around this date, with the US trying to get Assad to cut ties with Iran and Russia and agree to gas pipelines for transporting Qatar/Saudi gas towards Europe:
https://www.news.com.au/world/middle-east/is-the-fight-over-...
This leads onto the setup for the Ukraine war, linked to the fracking boom in the USA, which has the potential to replace Russian gas in Europe (above source):
> "Last year US President Barack Obama spoke openly about the need for Europe to reduce its reliance on Russian gas following the conflict in Ukraine. The US also wants to use its own natural gas supply, recently developed through fracking, to undercut Russian supply. But it will be years before the US will be in a position to ship this overseas."
This sets the stage for the 2014 'governmental transition' in Ukraine, the split of Crimea to Russia, and the armed conflict in eastern Ukraine's Donbas region, which eventually escalates into today's war.
This economic perspective is perhaps unpopular because it does look a bit like two organized drug cartels fighting over who gets to profit from selling cocaine (natural gas) to Europe, and is pretty banal (no good guys to cheer on). However, it's a very plausible argument and the destruction of the Nordstream pipeline (probably US-orchestrated) and the implementation of (attempted) global sanctions on Russian gas exports all fit this narrative rather well.
The other part of the economic argument is that wars are profitable for the global military-industrial sector, which is closely linked to governments in both Russia and the USA, and any prolonged period of peace drastically reduces demand for their products. Again, this is not a good look for governments who claim to be defending human rights and democracy and looking out for the interests of their people.
TLDR: it's all about money, guns and oil, and it always has been, from the early 20th century onwards.
