louis. blogs are going to washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture exxon mobil is the largest and most powerful private corporation in the united states and yet very little is actually known about how the company operates how does this corporate giant really function and how much control does it have over lawmakers in washington both of those questions and more to steve coll and it's conversations with great minds also according to a new report by the u.s. bureau of labor statistics wisconsin was more than six thousand private sector jobs in april it was gov will scott walker really deserve to stay in office that question and more into night's big picture rumble and the big banks and their shady

practices have struck again this time helping to take the life of a struggling american homeowner and we stop america's corporate psychopaths and build an economy that works for everyone. but times conversations with great minds i'm joined by steve call steve is president of the new american foundation new america foundation and a staff writer for the new york mick new yorker magazine previously he spent twenty years of foreign correspondent and senior editor at the washington post and was that paper's managing editor from one thousand nine hundred to two thousand and four two thousand and five steve received a pulitzer prize for his book ghost wars which was also awarded the council on foreign relations are at the ross award and the overseas press club award steve is the author of seven books in total including the critically acclaimed bestseller.

empire exxon mobil and american powers he joins me now from new york city steve welcome. back for having me thanks for joining us tonight i'm curious before we get to the exxon mobile the topic of your your most recent book. tell us about the new america foundation and how you became the president of it what you're all about there. not the think tank it's been around for about ten or fifteen years about sixty percent of the funding comes from philanthropic foundations like the ford foundation macarthur foundation open society institute about thirty percent comes from individuals the chairman of the board is a guy named eric schmidt two is the chairman of google and a bunch of journalists jim fallows freed's of caria are on the board academics in various water and the second president had left the post that was floating around not looking to run anything else after writing the news room and was recruited to do it quote i did a lot of smart people there because the journalists academics policy wonks sounds

it sounds actually fun i'm also curious about your thoughts on the since since you wrote a book about al qaeda and bin laden what belonged before bin laden was killed by president obama or his you know by by our military what are your thoughts on the current state of al qaeda since the death of bin laden you know i think there are much diminished you know obviously there's still a bunch of guys hanging around the pakistan afghan border who are capable of blowing things up but as a strategic organization that had ambitions to really rattle the world i think it's . you know it's much diminished there are groups around the world that call themselves al qaeda that have some loose organizational affiliation with the with the old central leadership the one in yemen obviously is the one making the most noise right now but there are others and i think al qaida is on the verge of being defeated essentially and becoming more and more irrelevant as each month goes along

does that mean that we should reconsider the national security state that we have erected since nine eleven or at least something i think it does it please extend it i think it does. well i think the national security state that we inherited from the cold war wasn't really restructured very much in the decade that led to nine eleven but since nine eleven it's grown again enormously and it's way overbuilt and way too much directed at al qaeda. you know the in any way that in proportion to what threat al qaeda actually represents anymore so not only do i think that the national security state should be reduced in size but i also think it should be redirected to the actual challenges to american security that are out there in the world and one of those. the environment global

warming stability the question of what china's role of the world will be over the next twenty or thirty years and how to protect. neighbors and free societies from. chinese ambition if it emerges which i'm not sure that it will. europe which is about to implode poses another threat to the global economy that it can ill afford given the instability of the last several years and you know we could go on for a while but we saw two world wars arguably come out of economic instabilities in europe. strongly you could argue the second world war. do you think that this economic stability right now i mean if this is a great depression like event spain actually has an unemployment rate right now that's a full point half higher than it was at the peak of the last great depression that this could bring about something like world war one world war two or just the the

the scenarios that precipitated one though. i think what worries me the most is the structure a lot of employment in in countries like spain and greece youth unemployment in spain now is about fifty percent that's a real number same in greece and the emergence of extremist political thought cross the continent both on the left in the right in reaction to understandable reaction to the failure of mainstream political parties that you know does feel a little bit like the one nine hundred thirty s. on not saying that you know naziism is on the march but i am saying that you're getting dislocations and. extremism zina phobia. and just a general disorder in european democracies that that's worrying in greece in particular this last election and the failure to produce you know a sort of

a result the anger understandable. on behalf of a greek people who have been force fed austerity over the last couple of years it really raises some basic questions about the future of western europe will see there's going to be a new election in june and perhaps having frightened. berlin for the greeks will go back to the kind of negotiating posture they were in before kind of reluctant accommodation of the rest of europe but that's not by any means certain at this hour yeah do you do you think that it's possible that the same i mean a mini version of that austerity has been preached and pushed really aggressively by republicans in particular in the united states and president obama push back on that with his austerity program but he's been blocked in any attempts to to go beyond that over the last two years do you think do you see those same kinds of cracks appearing in our body politic. you know it's very interesting because we

avoided the real sort of draconian ideological austerity drives that were imposed by european governments on southern europe and to some extent by the british government on its own people there was this really kind of odd theory that by. acting counter to the advice of most mainstream economists and pursuing austerity at a time when economics normally argues for at least short term expansion that somehow they would. bring business confidence back and create jobs and all sorts of things that economists said wouldn't happen they haven't happened while the united states we avoided that we had a stimulus it wasn't large enough but we didn't go on a crazy austerity drive the problem is that at the end of this year the way our fiscal politics are setting up we could have a kind of forced austerity as

a result of either a bad grand bargain of some sort or the failure of politicians to do anything which would trigger a whole series of events that could damage the u.s. economy so you know it's complicated but basically the the anger that's already out there in the country even a festive in the tea party and the occupy movement. could actually be exacerbated by what's what lies ahead over the next two or three years if our political leaders don't get it right which they basically have a record so far that that doesn't create a lot of confidence in them you know we live in interesting times as the old person goes exxon mobil do you we were talking about state the security state talking about a state you write about exxon mobil as basically a state within a state as a sovereign within the sovereign of the united states you want to explain what that means yeah. well it's a very large a multinational corporation four hundred fifty billion dollars in revenue north of

that last year that's more than the economic activity in most countries in the world it's about the size of the g.d.p. of norway distributed in more than one hundred fifty different countries and with its own foreign policies its own security policies its own economic policies and when i started to research it i looked at all of that and i thought this looks like a state to me and what i was i was sort of surprised to discover as i as i went further that that's in effect how they see themselves they're quite self conscious about their independent sovereignty and almost conceive of themselves the way corporations of say the eighteenth century did out of european empires so i think it's both. i think it's both an accurate way to describe them but it's perhaps even more interesting that it's the way they see themselves are they this generation's british east india company so even you know that that came to my mind more than once or twice as i was working on this trying to think of what the right analogy is

of course there are a lot of multinationals in the world that have these characteristics and not many of them as large as exxon mobil but where the east india analogy comes in is that exxon mobil's. business model essentially involves drilling holes on the ground all over the world and the way the oil economy works now that means they're often doing this in rough places where american military power sometimes has to follow them in the way the british followed the east india company into india and and to some extent the exxon mobile as they are dealing with conflict small wars instability before the u.s. government rives to sort of reinforce them and and in that sense you know there's at least a loose analogy or comparison to the east india that i think is valid yeah the british polity east india here i mean jamestown was an east india colony. the.

the exxon mobil i understand actually i want to talk a little bit about lee raymond we have just just a minute until the break and then we'll have a nice thirty minute chunk to talk afterwards but can you just very quickly tell us who really raymond was or is but when he was released lee raymond was running the company he was the chief chief executive from one thousand nine hundred three to two thousand and five and he was the most powerful and sort of successful by the numbers but also politicised the chief executive in the oil industry during his era you know one of his convictions was that global warming was a hoax and he oversaw. sarap tish's funding that exxon mobil carried out in a fairly rather. a way to try to pollute public understanding of mainstream climate science up to the kyoto accords right through his retirement in two thousand and five and i'd like to get into the whole political thing and how that's working and how in the foreign policy also that's on the right after this more conversations

with great minds of steve coll coming up right after this. the official ante up location. i pod touch from the top story. on the good. video on demand. an r.s.s. feeds now in the palm of your. machine on the dot com.

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well back to conversations of great minds with steve coll steve is president of the new american foundation and a staff writer for the new yorker magazine he's the author of seven books including the critically acclaimed bestseller empire exxon mobil and american power let's get back to it steve we were talking about lee raymond and his decision when he was the c.e.o. of exxon mobil to. jump into the political and and scientific. battle as it were. to the it didn't didn't he basically position exxon mobil the same way

the philip morris and r.j. are positioned themselves a generation earlier with regard to the dangers of tobacco. well i certainly want to after the science in a similar way out of personal conviction that he knew better than than what the climate scientists at the. united nations and elsewhere were were beginning to conclude by the time of the late one nine hundred ninety s. and the fundamental strategy was was the same because it basically involved exploiting the fact that science is uncertain and ever especially science about complex systems like whether it's just inherently uncertain of course great scientists are constantly questioning their assumptions and hypotheses and and great science arises from doubt so it's vulnerable to this kind of a pollution campaign where you basically interfere with the natural questioning and uncertainty that's embedded in science especially again science about complex

systems and you use that to do it to mislead the public and that's what they did if you look at this campaign at least in my judgment it was radical even by the standards of american corporations that opposed climate change legislation and it was dishonest in the sense that the funding wasn't always disclosed wasn't made transparent even though today exxon mobil's everything they do is transparent certainly this campaign was not and then third it funded a bunch of non scientists to argue in public to influence the media to influence decision makers on capitol hill in the white house in washington d.c. about issues that the campaign or is being funded by exxon mobil were actually not qualified to communicate about so i think it's a pretty shameful chapter in american corporate history even history that's littered with with some pretty shameful episodes the tobacco industry probably

worse because they knew exactly the evidence that smoking killed people people living. around them including the road employees and they suppress that evidence and misled the public about the dangers global warming is a threat to all of human civilization but probably you know in the annals of great corporate crimes i'd still put the back of industry in the chair first and then lee raymond left in two thousand and five and exxon mobil change their policies yet many of these organizations and many of these climate deniers who got their start with exxon mobil have now gotten funding from other other you know the coal industry the natural gas rights to the koch brothers whatever and they're still going merrily along but exxon mobil has has done what. well they distance themselves and they were the first of all their funding campaign was exposed and they were embarrassed there are after all the largest corporation headquartered in the united states they're owned by millions of americans including

the pension funds of public schoolteachers in the york and government workers and california and some of the shareholders started turning up at their meetings and embarrassing the company by exposing this they say anti science campaigning so in two thousand and five when raymond retired they undertook a sort of a a new communication strategy at first they were very worried about being sued the way the tobacco industry was jaffer all essentially cost the industry its legitimacy and many many billions of dollars the united states they were very worried about liability so at first they said we were never wrong we were only misunderstood and then a few years later they did come out in favor of a carbon tax it was not a plausible proposal politically but it is important at least. to put on record that the largest oil corporation the united states agrees that global warming is a serious enough risk to impose a tax to incentives to move away from oil and gas but as you point out the damage

has been done i mean the seed campaigning that they did in the earlier phase in the fact is continued by others including the koch brothers. has left us with perhaps the largest gap between scientific understanding and public understanding about a about an issue critical to the nation and the world that i can think of i can't think of another scientific area where. what scientists believe in what the public believes is so far apart and that especially one so relevant to to our collective health so i think basically you have to observe a kind of big they achieved their objective. and and they haven't achieved the objective of getting a carbon tax was that just a gratuitous throwaway line basically or a and they actually lobbied for that and and to what extent are they lobbying what's their political presence like here in washington d.c. . they were lobbying very heavily they spent i think one hundred sixty one million

dollars between in the ten years after the merger with mobil where they became the largest oil co privately owned or oil corporation of the world hundred sixty one million dollars on disclosed lobbying required disclosures and the more than that that isn't officially required to disclose that that's a very large number even by the lights of american corporations you know on the carbon tax you'll get a debate about how sincere how cynical they were i think with the record shows is that they undermined the only bill that was plausible in two thousand and nine when they made this announcement which was an attempt to impose a price on carbon fuels by another mechanism the so-called cap and trade mechanism a lot of corporations and political actors had organized themselves around this alternative cap and trade approach and exxon mobil said we don't like that we think it's too bureaucratic it hasn't worked very well in europe but we are willing to admit that a price on carbon somehow is necessary to address the risk of global warming so we

favor a carbon tax out there that had the advantage of not being politically plausible and allowing them to lobby against cap and trade from a you know a better public relations perspective i think the only thing i would say on the other side in fairness to them is that they do have a record of kind of being consistent over decades on these kinds of things and the fact that they've come out now in favor of a carbon tax i think boxes of the middle little bit will see it's going to be a long time of afraid because of the damage they've done before we get another real debate about this in this country we have a graphic that shows the profitability of exxon mobil over time and their increasing participation and pull in politics political contributions from two thousand six hundred sixty thousand dollars. and then up to one point two million in two thousand and ten and we're not sure where it's at two thousand and twelve. it seems that a. a lot of corporations in america right now are making one of their major

investments in politicians that if they can invest a few million dollars in a couple of politicians or a wide variety of politicians actually with a few million dollars they can get laws changed in ways regulations or tax laws in ways that return them hundreds of millions of dollars or even billions of dollars is exxon mobil playing that game as well. absolutely i looked at their political action committee giving which i think is probably the best proxy for corporate strategy that's directed from the top and i found among large corporations headquartered in the united states that are politically active they are the most skewed toward the republican party first of all about ninety percent of their political action committee giving in the two thousand and ten cycle went to republicans and even more so far in the two thousand and twelve cycle as a percentage and it was interesting that a lot of other large corporations that you might think of as being aligned with the republican party wal-mart and dow chemical for example

a split their contributions much more fifty fifty and even other oil companies tend to give democrats at about twice the rate that exxon mobil does now what are they looking for and in out my analysis of their giving show that the top ten recipients of exxon mobile political action committee giving in the ten years after the mobile merger are all house republicans and when i talk to lobbyists and both you know around the corporation and occasionally inside the corporation when i could get someone to talk to me. i came to understand that's basically a blocking strategy in which they live they look at the house republican party as the most aligned and and the and the most effective at pursuing their interests and at a minimum what they guarantee with these investments in particular politicians is that nothing they don't like will get through that's their their kind of blocking strategy and you know it's a little bit harder when you're as unpopular as they are to offer originally some

self-serving piece of legislation in the congress but in the executive branch i think they're much more effective at just hammering on on regulatory issues capturing agencies and you know serving their interests that way and in speaking of the executive branch in the two minutes we have left here steve. you write a chap you have a chapter in your book and my recollection is the title is something like do you really want to be our enemies or a phrase to that effect about what happened in indonesian province can you give us a brief summary of that. yes so when exxon bought mobil they bought a series of small wars in that kind of east india company where we were talking about earlier one of them was a separate a struggling with many decades of history behind it but which it was in a particularly violent phase when exxon took over the prize in that war was a gas field the gas field was protected by indonesian forces who detained and tortured. young men who were suspected of being guerrillas finally the bush

administration intervened went to the guerilla group group and said you know we have terrorism lists if you don't stop attacking exxon mobile we're going to put you on it even though you're just a local separatist organization and literally the american bush administration diplomat said to the guerrilla leader do you really want us as your enemy in specific reference to stop targeting exxon mobil so that shows that even though they are very independent when they want the u.s. government to help them they know they know how to make it effective yeah it's truly remarkable in just a little snapshot in the last thirty seconds here what's the biggest takeaway for you in writing this book. the corporate power in america is outsized it's greater than it's ever been since the gilded age in comparison to say household income or small business income and it's a real problem these corporations are not scrutinized enough was my main takeaway as a journalist i was very glad to have given four years to this subject but it was hard

and i was by myself and large we need to pay more attention to corporate power remarkable thank you steve thanks so much for being with us. thanks robert to see this or other conversations of great minds go to our website of conversations of great minds dot com. coming up after the break republican strategist and billionaire investors plan to unleash a vicious attack on president obama just in time for the democratic national convention in september the media caught wind of the plan for now it's dead the republicans revive it and will democrats fire back at us akhil romney for is family's history of polygamy all that and more in tonight's big picture rumble.

it's friday are you ready to rumble joining me for tonight's big picture rumble or judson phillips associate director of the tea party dot net erica democratic strategist.