From Foreign Policy's The Oil and the Glory blog:
Since its
birth as Standard Oil in the 19th century, ExxonMobil has been at
once the most profitable, demonized, secretive and uncompromising corporation
on the planet, a black box that muckraker Ida Tarbell famously penetrated in
the early 1900s, and no one since has managed. After books on the CIA in
Afghanistan and the family of Osama bin Ladin, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner
Steve Coll describes Exxon as the most-resistent of all to inquiry. His new book, Private
Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power
goes on sale Tuesday. Below, Coll replies to questions from the Oil and the
Glory.
O&G:
Of all the oil companies targeted for
grievances, Exxon seems unusually stigmatized. Is it deserving of such
criticism?
Coll: Yes and no.
On the yes side, they are unusually, fiercely partisan; for example, their
Political Action Committee effectively acts as a finance arm of the Republican
Party in the United States, and until about 2006 they made aggressive
investments in free market groups trying to combat mainstream climate science
that I personally think will look pretty embarrassing for years to come. These
are not the kinds of aggressive, one-sided interventions in American politics
that you would expect from the country's largest or near-largest corporation
(depending on the year and the method of measure), a corporation that has
diverse employees and is very broadly owned by individual shareholders,
government pension funds, mutual funds, and so on. Also, they are their own
worst enemy in public relations -- remorselessly aggressive, arrogant, and often
self-defeating. So in that self-inflicted sense, they also deserve their
reputation.
On
the no side, they have a pretty impressive operating record since the [1989] Valdez [tanker] spill, if not as perfect
as they sometimes seem to claim for themselves, and their internal discipline
has produced a better environmental and worker safety record than their peers. They
deserve more credit for that than they get. They've taken human rights where
they work in conflict zones more seriously, too, and although they were late,
they have adopted some of the better corporate responsibility standards in that
area, although they are nowhere near the leaders that they might be. Also, they
are stigmatized just for being huge, and I am sympathetic to their arguments
that a) while they make large profits in number terms, their profit-margins are
not especially high; and b) they get blamed by the public for a lot of things
they really can't control, like retail gasoline prices.
Former CEO
Lee Raymond seems the most interesting character in the book. What is your take
on him? And is he responsible for Mikhail
Khodorkovsky's imprisonment in Russia?
He's
a fascinating character, larger than life. As a writer, you love anyone who is
truly comfortable in his own skin -- not trying to shade or hide himself from
the world, and that is certainly Lee Raymond. He was ruthless, effective,
difficult, sentimental, loyal and enormously successful as chairman and chief
executive, certainly on the operating and profit-making side of the business,
although he is criticized by some for not doing enough to position ExxonMobil
for the future in the upstream, and on reserve replacement, an issue on which
he struggled. Given my main interests in the corporation as a kind of
independent sovereign, Raymond is fascinating because that is really how he
carried out his role, how he acted in the world -- as a kind of head of state.
You
mention the Khodorkovsky case, which is an example. Of course, [Russian leader]
Vladimir Putin and his henchmen are responsible for Khodorkovsky's
imprisonment, and Khodorkovsky himself miscalculated in the game of political
chicken he played with Putin prior to his arrest. But Raymond figures in the
story in a fascinating way. I don't want to give away too much of the fun stuff
in the book. But in short, Raymond was negotiating to acquire a stake in
Khodorkovsky's company, Yukos, in the weeks prior to his arrest. Raymond and
Putin had a fascinating one-on-one at the New York Stock Exchange, which I
recount, and which reads basically as an encounter between two very powerful
men who see themselves as sovereigns.
Just how
powerful is Exxon?
I
think it depends on the setting. In some of the weak, poor countries where they
produce oil -- a place like Chad, for example -- they are immensely powerful,
almost comparable to the colonial powers of yore. Chad is one of the world's
poorest countries -- Fourth World, really. The United States gives just a few
million dollars a year in aid; ExxonMobil's tax and royalty checks in good
years recently were higher than five hundred million dollars. If you're the
president of Chad, whom do you care about, and whom are you going to listen to?
In fact, ExxonMobil allowed Chad's authoritarian president, Idris Deby, to defy
the Bush Administration and the World Bank during 2006 because of the sheer size
of the cash flow the corporation delivered to Deby, and the way it collaborated
with him at the Bush Administration's expense -- I found that an amazing story....MORE
