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Title: Private Empire
Subtitle: ExxonMobil and American Power
Author: Steve Coll
Narrator: Malcolm Hillgartner
Format: Unabridged
Length: 24 hrs and 16 mins
Language: English
Release date: 05-01-12
Publisher: Penguin Audio
Ratings: 4.5 of 5 out of 471 votes
Genres: Business, Commerce & Economy
Publisher's Summary:
Steve Coll investigates the largest and most powerful private corporation in the United States, revealing the true extent of its power. ExxonMobils annual revenues are larger than the economic activity in the great majority of countries. In many of the countries where it conducts business, ExxonMobils 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 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, 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 ExxonMobils 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, ExxonMobils chief executive until 2005. A close friend of Dick Cheneys, Raymond was both the most successful and effective oil executive of his era and an unabashed skeptic about climate change and government regulation. This position proved difficult to maintain in the face of new science and political change, and Raymonds successor, current ExxonMobil chief executive Rex Tillerson, broke with Raymonds programs in an effort to reset ExxonMobils public image. The larger cast includes countless world leaders, plutocrats, dictators, guerrillas, and corporate scientists who are part of ExxonMobils colossal story.
The first hard-hitting examination of ExxonMobil, Private Empire is the masterful result of Colls indefatigable reporting. He draws here on more than 400 interviews, field reporting from the halls of Congress to the oil-laden swamps of the Niger Delta, more than 1,000 pages of previously classified U.S. documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, heretofore unexamined court records, and many other sources. A penetrating, newsbreaking study, Private Empire is a defining portrait of ExxonMobil and the place of Big Oil in American politics and foreign policy.