On her program Fresh Air, Terry Gross conducted a fascinating interview with Pulitzer Prize winning author Steve Coll. He’s written a new book called
Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power which is about ExxonMobil & how they wield power in the world. Coll describes how corporations have come to wield the kind of political and economic power that we have not seen since the Gilded Age and the Robber Barons (Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, JP Morgan & so on).
Coll argues that ExxonMobil exists “as a company that now functions as a corporate state within the American State. To get access to oil it partners with African Dictatorships. In America, Coll says Exxon’s lobbyists have bent and shaped American foreign policy as well as economic, climate, chemical, and environmental regulation.”
When asked why he wrote the book Coll said, “I’d spent quite a lot of my life scrutinizing government power, but we actually live in a world where non-state power – corporate power, the power of networks, terrorist groups – is of greater significance than ever, and as journalists we don’t, I don’t think, spend enough time thinking about corporations in and of themselves as sources of influence in the world we live in.”
Far from being a doomsday alarmist railing about the evils of corporations, Coll simply helps to trace and understand the power ExxonMobil wields in the world today. Just as Cornelius Vanderbilt funded private armies to overthrow governments in Central America, ExxonMobil has their own private foreign policy which they carry out in partnership with some pretty unsavory dictators, armies, and warlords. Coll describes an ExxonMobil corporation which is ethically dubious at best, often protecting their own interests at the expense of human rights and the environment.
Coll describes ExxonMobil as a corporation which really functions more like an independent state – a sovereign power. EM exists as the most profitable business in American history, with about $450 billion in yearly revenue – 10-12% of that in pure profit. Their best year was in 2008 (while the rest of the country entered into a deep recession), during which they made over $40 billion in profits – a number which stands as the greatest one-year profit ever made by an American Corporation.
The fact that EM can stand as an independent sovereign power within the United States is made possible because so much of their corporation exists and subsists off-shore. They become a competing interest in foreign governments where EM’s interests may be diametrically opposed to US interests – at which point they do not support US policies, but actively undermine them.
For example in the country of Chad, rich in oil, the country is ruled by a warlord-type dictator. There is no democratic rule, Coll calls it really more like a 4th world country, we’re talking about extreme poverty and lack of human rights there. The US government gives them in total, around $10 million a year in aid. ExxonMobil cuts them a check every year for more than $700 million in cash. When the US government under the Bush administration was trying to help Chad out of poverty and address some of the human rights issues, ExxonMobil actively worked to undermine the US government efforts, in order to secure their oil interests in that country.
“When they bought Mobile they inherited a war, for example, in Aceh Indonesia where guerillas (the Free Aceh Movement), were attacking ExxonMobil’s gas fields and where the Indonesian army was under contract to ExxonMobil to defend the gas fields, and was running detention centers right on the edge of ExxonMobil’s property where young Acehnese men were being tortured. And ExxonMobil had to come to terms with the fact that it generated some of this violence by essentially representing the prize in the war. If you carried out a coup in Chad, or carried out a coup in Equatorial Guinea what did you win? You won ExxonMobil’s cash flow. So they had to develop their own defense policies, and as typical they were very slow to come to terms with their responsibilities. Eventually they adopted their sort of corporate responsibility pact urged upon them by groups like human rights watch…”
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