This book review was originally published in the American Prospect, and is republished here with permission.

Even granting that testifying to congressional committees is not on the list of an oil CEO’s favorite things to do, when ExxonMobil CEO Lee Raymond, known to his employees as “Iron Ass,” arrived at the Dirksen Senate Office building one morning in November 2005, he was in an especially reticent mood. Among other things, the Senate Energy Committee wanted to know about the corporation’s role in formulating policy with Vice President Dick Cheney’s energy task force. Raymond – who was chummy with Cheney and seven weeks away from his retirement, after 12 spectacularly profitable years at the helm first of Exxon and then Exxon-Mobil – did not think the committee needed to know. Thus when New Jersey Senator Frank Lautenberg asked Raymond whether he or any ExxonMobil executives participated in a 2001 meeting with Cheney, Raymond responded with a single syllable: “No.”

The truth of that statement was something only a lawyer or a comedian could love, but it was consistent with how the company prefers to be seen: independent, apolitical, above the muck of any particular political fight. Yet as Steve Coll documents in his groundbreaking investigation, Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power, sometimes even the aloof need a little assistance. Just days before the hearing, the company had found itself frustrated with the government of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which seemed to be stalling on giving ExxonMobil its slice of a hugely valuable 50-billion-barrel oil field. The State Department did not seem to be pressing ExxonMobil’s case as hard as Raymond wanted, so he called Cheney and asked, according to Coll’s paraphrase, “What in the hell is with this country?” Cheney called the UAE government himself, and ExxonMobil got what it wanted.

Coll gained a unique perspective on the history of ExxonMobil’s power from his two-plus decades covering business and the Securities and Exchange Commission, Middle East politics, and national security – early on for The Washington Post, in recent years for The New Yorker, and most notably in Ghost Wars, his book on Afghanistan and the CIA. He approaches the company almost as if reporting on the State Department, finding a sprawling global network led by insular executives often unaware of what is being carried out in their name. At the heart lies a contradiction best illustrated by Raymond’s duplicity. The corporation long ago decided it was best to flex its immense muscle as discreetly as possible, because almost all publicity – whether it’s news of gas prices, climate change, or congressional fights over industry subsidies – is bad.

Indeed, ExxonMobil may have reached the point of being more powerful and entangled than any government. The company’s leaders look at an untapped oil or gas field as a relationship that might last a half-century or more; during that time, politicians and policies will come and go even in settled democracies. Its perspective is so geological, so Olympian, that it has been willing to anger sitting American governments – as in 1997, when Raymond, a Republican, challenged the Democratic administration’s policy with a speech in Beijing urging China’s communist rulers not to sign the Kyoto Protocol climate agreement. At the same time, because so much oil and natural gas is locked up in places with unstable regimes or unsavory leaders – from Equatorial Guinea to Indonesia to Russia – ExxonMobil often finds itself with more power to affect the local society than the best-intentioned State Department functionaries. In a nail-biting chapter on a showdown between the World Bank and the besieged government of Chad, Coll writes that “Exxon-Mobil had made its own choice clear: It was more interested in the survival of Chad’s oil production than it was in the World Bank’s experiment in nation building.”

Private Empire jumps around the globe to illustrate such conflicts, drawing on an impressive array of lawsuits, State Department cables, Freedom of Information Act documents, and interviews with 400 or so subjects, from former executives to tribal leaders who have sued the company. The image that emerges is of some kind of metabolically challenged creature unable to eat enough to sustain its weight. Because its production is so vast, the company is constantly depleting its existing energy supply. It is therefore under intense pressure to appear to book new reserves, to a degree that has encouraged some fudging on the math: For many years, the company would report actual figures to the Securities and Exchange Commission, then issue a press release announcing a bigger amount – a gambit that was technically illegal, though the company doesn’t seem to have ever paid a price (nor is it clear if anyone who matters was fooled).

The company’s culture is almost as strange as the places its engineers now have to go to find oil and gas. Exxon was so shaken by the fallout from the Valdez spill that it adopted safety procedures that sound like the handbook of a paranoid cult. Employees had to back their cars into garage parking spaces, minimizing difficulty if they needed to leave in a hurry. Executives were prohibited from pursuing dangerous behavior even outside the workplace and urged to confess publicly “near misses” they had, from shaky ladders to stones flying out of lawnmowers. Yet all these rituals didn’t keep 24,000 gallons of gas from leaking into the ground in Maryland in 2006, in an area where residents relied on well water, or any of the other countless mishaps that have occurred as part of ExxonMobil’s sprawling operations.

If you talk very long with soldiers who’ve seen combat, they’ll offer that death is a joke. Not a very funny joke, but one that never gets old. With every new war, with every new brigade of recruits, soldiers rediscover the death joke and retell it by taking battlefield trophies of enemy equipment, enemy personal effects and even staged photos with enemy body parts, as the Los Angeles Times reports today.

The Times obtained a series of 18 photos of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan posing with enemy corpses and published two of them in a story that began on page one. The living posers are all grins and chuckles, indicating the high mirth that battlefield death brings. In one of the published photos, amused U.S. soldiers hoist two severed legs of a suicide bomber and mug for the camera.

The Times describes other photos it did not run:

Two soldiers posed holding a dead man’s hand with the middle finger raised. A soldier leaned over the bearded corpse while clutching the man’s hand. Someone placed an unofficial platoon patch reading “Zombie Hunter” next to other remains and took a picture.

The publication of the photos elicited the standard response from the Pentagon. Marine General John R. Allen, commander of Western troops in Afghanistan, called the photos “entirely inconsistent” with U.S. values and promised a full investigation. The Pentagon also asked the Times not to publish the two-year-old images because, as its spokesman put it, they do not “represent the character and the professionalism of the great majority of our troops in Afghanistan” and they have “the potential to indict them all in the minds of local Afghans, inciting violence and perhaps causing needless casualties.” The Times correctly waved away those objections, stating its duty to report “vigorously and impartially” on the U.S. intervention, “including the allegation that the images reflect a breakdown in unit discipline that was endangering U.S. troops.”

The outrage the military is expressing over these ghoulish images ignores the fact that the taking of battlefield trophies, photographic or otherwise, is as old as war itself, as are military commanders’ bans on the collection of such ghoulish souvenirs, as Simon Harrison explains in his 2006 paper, “Skull Trophies of the Pacific War: Transgressive Objects of Remembrance” (abstract). Harrison differentiates between “near enemies” and “distant enemies,” with near enemies remaining safe from mutilation and scalp-taking but far enemies being fair game. During World War Two, he observes, the Japanese were the far enemy, and their body parts, including ears, teeth and especially skulls, were routinely gathered as keepsakes. Germans and Italians, the near enemy, remained largely safe from mutilation and desecration.

The desecration of the bodies of Japanese soldiers was so common that in 1944, Life magazine published a light-headed photo of a young woman posing with a Japanese soldier’s skull sent to her from New Guinea by her Navy boyfriend. That same year, columnist Drew Pearson reported (pdf) that Representative Francis E. Walter (D-Penn.) had presented President Franklin D. Roosevelt with a letter opener made from the forearm of a Japanese soldier. “This is the sort of gift I like to get,” Pearson quotes FDR saying, although the president did not touch it.

Barely a day goes by without some expert publicly worrying whether or not the U.S. economy will fall into a “double-dip” recession. In a CNBC interview last September, investor George Soros said he thought the U.S. was already in one. Earlier this month, the former chief global strategist for Morgan Stanley cited an academic study to argue that “after every financial crisis there’s a long period of much slower growth and in almost every case you get a double dip.” Granted, this is a minority view; most economists are predicting sustained modest growth for the near future. Which makes sense, because while few are thrilled with the pace of comeback, the U.S. economy has grown for 11 consecutive quarters, beginning in mid-2009.

But given that the recovery is approaching its third birthday, how far away from the Great Recession do we need to get before another downturn would be considered not a “second dip” but simply a separate recession instead?

For all its ubiquity, there is no uniform definition of what a “double-dip” recession is; even the origins of the term are hazy. One analyst wrote in a 2010 research note that the term dates from about 1994, when there was concern about sliding back into the 1991 recession. But Safire’s Political Dictionary traces the term to a 1975 BusinessWeek article, attributing it to an unidentified economist in the Ford administration. (Tellingly, the “double dip” the government feared back then did not actually materialize.)

Much of what is meant by “double-dip” recession is intuitively clear: It’s what happens when a recovery is so feeble that, soon enough, an economy sinks back into contraction. It’s the “soon enough” part that no one can agree on. Investopedia defines double dip as “when gross domestic product growth slides back to negative after a quarter or two of positive growth.” If that were the case, fear of a double dip would long ago have subsided.

Of course, an imprecise term need not be useless. There can be good conceptual and historical reasons for associating an economic downturn with one that preceded it. Many Americans naturally think of the Great Depression as a single, sustained economic horror that began with the stock crash of 1929 and didn’t end until the U.S. entered World War Two at the end of 1941. Technically, that’s not true; the U.S. economy actually began growing in 1933 and continued to grow until 1937, when a second dip hit. But the economy had shrunk so severely in the first dip that it never got back to its pre-’29 level by the time it began contracting again – which redeems the popular fusion of two recessions separated by a weak recovery into one Great Depression. Some economists have claimed, more contentiously, that nearly back-to-back recessions in 1980 and 1981-82 qualified as first and second dips.

But that’s not what’s happened this time around. According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), the American economy bottomed out in the Great Recession in the second quarter of 2009, when GDP sank to $13.85 trillion, a shrinkage of about 3.9 percent from the then-all-time high a year before of $14.42 trillion. Since then, we’ve far surpassed that previous high-water mark, with current GDP at $15.32 trillion. One way to think about this: The distance between where we are now and the previous high of 2008 is greater than the distance between that 2008 peak and the 2009 trough. Even using what BEA calls “chained 2005 dollars” (in other words, accounting for inflation), current GDP is higher now than it has ever been.

Why, then, do we keep hearing about a double dip, instead of a new recession? Part of the reason seems to be psychological, a sense that weaknesses that were manifest in the Great Recession – slow job growth, too much reliance on Federal Reserve activity – have not been fully addressed. As Alan Levenson, chief economist for T. Rowe Price, told me: “A turnaround always looks like a struggle. Each time we live through a slowdown, we feel like the economy can never grow again.”

In a video produced by The Wall Street Journal, Lucy Marcus explains what she looks for in a new startup and what makes some succeed where others fail.

This is an example page. It’s different from a blog post because it will stay in one place and will show up in your site navigation (in most themes). Most people start with an About page that introduces them to potential site visitors. It might say something like this:

Hi there! I’m a bike messenger by day, aspiring actor by night, and this is my blog. I live in Los Angeles, have a great dog named Jack, and I like piña coladas. (And gettin’ caught in the rain.)

…or something like this:

The XYZ Doohickey Company was founded in 1971, and has been providing quality doohickies to the public ever since. Located in Gotham City, XYZ employs over 2,000 people and does all kinds of awesome things for the Gotham community.

As a new WordPress user, you should go to your dashboard to delete this page and create new pages for your content. Have fun!

Welcome to blogs.reuters.com. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney, although they spend a lot of time these days at one another’s throat, appeared on the night of the South Carolina primary to agree on at least one thing: Each believes in “American exceptionalism,” and, they say, Barack Obama does not. Gingrich has already devoted an entire book to the topic, and in an interview with my colleague David Rohde, a top foreign policy adviser to Romney made it clear that American exceptionalism is a theme that Romney intends to stress throughout the campaign.

It’s easy to see that these candidates view their own ideas about American exceptionalism as a strong opportunity to contrast themselves with the incumbent. It’s harder, though, after sifting through the various ways the term is used, to establish what it actually means. Far from being a simple concept that one can easily endorse or reject, American exceptionalism is a loose skein that uneasily unites many different strands of thought, faith and ideology.

Like so much in the discussion of American history, the phrase is often traced to Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. But that doesn’t explain much, because when de Tocqueville wrote that “the position of the Americans is therefore quite exceptional,” he was referring primarily to the development of a practical — as opposed to literary or artistic — worldview, stemming from the American landscape and the lack of an aristocracy. More to the point, Gingrich seeks to ground the term in the American Revolution: “The ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence, and the unique American identity that arose from an American civilization that honored them, form what we call today ‘American Exceptionalism’,” he wrote in A Nation Like No Other, published last year. But that explanation, too, is inadequate; after all, the authors of the Declaration of Independence went out of their way to universalize the values underpinning the American experience (“when, in the course of human events…”), not to cleave that experience off from the rest of the world.

Rather, the faith in the uniqueness of the American experience is best found in its Puritan heritage, the belief that God made a covenant with the founders of America and intended to use American civilization as an example for the rest of the world. In a much-cited speech, Massachusetts Governor John Winthrop referred in 1630 to his colony as “a city on a hill” that could serve as a beacon to the world. But grounding American exceptionalism in religion creates multiple conceptual minefields. For one, the early colonies were not really bastions of liberty; in addition to their slaveholdings, they were, as Gingrich acknowledges, governed like “a theocratic dictatorship.” For another, an appeal to the supernatural puts the idea of American exceptionalism on a similar plane with, say, the Jewish concept of being the Chosen People or the ancient Chinese idea that their country is at the center of the universe — which is to say, there is nothing exceptional about thinking that your civilization is exceptional. Nonetheless, the idea that the United States occupies a privileged and arguably unique place in history is critical to understanding the phrase “American exceptionalism,” from the Manifest Destiny period to the present day.

In the 20th century, American exceptionalism took on a particular meaning in political theory. Typically, it was used to explain why the United States — unlike nearly all developed nations — had never developed a significant working-class political movement. Curiously, although Gingrich and Romney are principally using it in the context of American foreign policy, that usage is of fairly recent vintage. It is also where the meaning of the term is probably the muddiest and does not make as neat a litmus test as Gingrich and Romney seem to want. One can believe that the foundation of America in ideas of liberty and self-governance — rather than in ethnicity or royal domain — makes the United States “exceptional” and yet still be deeply skeptical about America’s use of force abroad. Instead, what Gingrich and Romney appear to be advocating under the name of exceptionalism is either American unilateralism — the idea that the United States has a right and/or obligation to act in the international sphere even if all other countries and multinational institutions don’t join in — or American infallibility — the idea that nothing the United States does in the international arena is ever morally unjustified.

On such subtopics there is robust debate, particularly since 9/11. The Canadian scholar and politician Michael Ignatieff has identified three problematic areas of American exceptionalism in the international realm. These include American exemptionalism, the idea that prevailing international standards don’t apply to the U.S., particularly in the ratification of human rights conventions; double standards, the idea that rules will be ignored or enforced depending on the U.S. perception of its interests; and legal isolationism, the notion that legal findings outside the U.S. should have no bearing on how American judges rule and think.

Here is where Gingrich and Romney probably see a place they can sink their teeth into. It is nearly certain that current or former members of the Obama administration have publicly taken positions against “American exceptionalism” if it’s defined as unilateralism, infallibility, exemptionalism, etc. The political hope is that such parts can be made to stand for the whole and thus used as one more way to call out Obama’s supposed patriotism vacuum.

Ah, Tim Pawlenty.

The onetime Minnesota governor seemed for a little while like a promising candidate for the Republican presidential nomination. And then came the deadly Iowa straw poll last August, a contest whose meaninglessness has been confirmed by the fact that Michelle Bachmann won it, only to come in basically last–in her home state!–yesterday when the votes actually mattered (as much as they ever do in Iowa).

It’s safe to say that, while CNN sought the wisdom of departed candidate Herman Cain, and Fox the wisdom of not-quite-candidate Sarah Palin, T-Paw was not exactly overexposed on TV during the voting and counting.

So what exactly did Tim Pawlenty do yesterday? Reuters Opinion senior editor Chadwick Matlin has imagined the day, in this piece for nymag.com.

PHOTO: U.S. Republican presidential candidate and former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty speaks at the Iowa Straw Poll in Ames, Iowa, August 13, 2011. REUTERS/Jim Young

By James Ledbetter The opinions expressed are his own.

It seems entirely possible that Christopher Hitchens will be primarily remembered in America for his public atheism. I suspect Hitchens himself was surprised at how wildly popular God Is Not Great became, giving much-needed voice and ammunition to thousands of godless heathens in the land of the drive-through church.

Yet it’s an inadequate way to remember the man, and not because Hitchens did little more in that book than to lay some tracing paper on the Enlightenment’s best thinkers and draw giddily (though with acidic and often very funny ink), or because—this is not an exaggeration—the American public regards atheists on about the same level as rapists.

The problem is that splitting the atheism away from the body of Hitchens’s work debases it into a kind of rascally parlor trick—“Uncle Christopher, say the mean thing about Mother Teresa again!”—and distracts from the thorny paradox at the heart of Hitchens’s thinking. Which is: While certainly an enemy of superstition and an eager chronicler of the sins and idiocies of the world’s religions, Hitchens was actually a lifelong believer, if strictly in man-made gods. It is impossible to contemplate his prodigious and passionate writing without recognizing that it was always animated by crusades, holy men, and devils.

Indeed, the Hitchens universe was long populated by notions of absolute good and evil, stretching back to his days as a student Trotskyite. This tendency was tempered by a love of literature and the cocoon of irony that writers wrap around themselves. But Hitchens himself spoke of the struggle between the literal and ironic minds, and it is an aptly Hitchensian contradiction that the episode, I think, that created his own brand of fundamentalist was in defense of the ironic mind—in 1989, when the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa on Salman Rushdie for the supposed blasphemy of The Satanic Verses.

The importance of the Rushdie saga on Hitchens’s thinking cannot be overstated. “I felt at once that here was something that completely committed me,” he wrote in his splendid memoir, Hitch-22. “It was, if I can phrase it like this, a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved.” This is of course a functional definition of evil and good. And there were obviously implications for the future, once Hitchens learned that among the Western left, it is entirely possible for well-meaning people, in the name of multicultural “understanding” or “tolerance” of non-Western societies, to overlook and even excuse atrocities and barbarism that would never be acceptable if perpetrated, say, by the Republican Party and its allies.

Few today would find fault with Hitchens’s stance or actions on behalf of Rushdie. But he began to apply the moral purity he derived from it to situations where the good-versus-evil ledger was not so neatly visible. From the mid- to late-’90s on, when the books on Mother Teresa, Bill Clinton, and Henry Kissinger were published, the absolutism had pretty much taken over his work.

By James Ledbetter The views expressed are his own.

Which is stranger: the idea that on the campaign trail GOP presidential longshot Rick Santorum cites favorably a quotation from a quasi-Marxist social critic? Or that the quotation itself might be spurious?

For years, Rick Santorum has said that one of his favorite sayings is: “We all get up every day and tell ourselves lies so we can live.” He attributes it to the iconoclastic historian and social critic Christopher Lasch, best known as the author of The Culture of Narcissism, a hugely popular jeremiad against modern American capitalism published in 1979.

Santorum likes the quote enough to cite it in a variety of contexts. In 2004, he used it during a Senate debate to explain his opposition to same-sex marriage. In a Washington Post article this week, he appeared to use it to explain how he carries on a demanding, uphill campaign when he has a young daughter with a life-threatening disease whom he rarely gets to see.

The Santorum-Lasch nexis is odd  for at least two reasons. One is that Santorum typically positions himself as a pro-life, family-values conservative. By contrast, while it’s hard to quickly summarize Lasch’s views, he came out of the Marxist-influenced left and retained a strong distaste for American conservatism even as his own later views on some subjects–notably family, abortion, and various aspects of the women’s movement–alienated many former allies.

But more importantly, there is no easily available proof that Lasch said what Santorum attributes to him. A Google search for the specific quote shows a handful of references, but mainly from Santorum himself, and none with a specific citation to any Lasch book, article, or interview.  Popular online quotation aggregators, such as BrainyQuote, offer dozens of better-known Lasch observations–e.g., “Conservatives unwittingly side with the social forces that contribute to the destruction of traditional values”–but not Santorum’s favorite. My colleague Paul Smalera suggests that it sounds more like the first line of Joan Didion’s book The White Album: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”

The Santorum campaign isn’t much help. A Santorum staffer said in an e-mail “I know if you Google the quote it comes up,” but was not able over the course of several hours to provide a specific citation to any Lasch work.