DANNY SCHECHTER, "The News Dissector" has spent decades as a truth teller in the media, with leading media companies and as an independent filmmaker with the award-winning independent company Globalvision. A graduate of Cornell and the London School of Economics, Schechter was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard and a multiple Emmy Award winner at ABC News, where he was among the first to cover the S&L crisis. In 2007, his film IN DEBT WE TRUST was the first to expose Wall Street's connection to subprime loans, predicting the economic crisis that this book investigates. Schechter is a blogger, editor of Mediachannel.org, and author of nine books. He has reported from 53 countries, and lives in Gotham. He owns no derivatives or tranches.

As modern-day muckraker Danny Schechter writes in his new introduction, exclusive to this Cosimo Classics edition: "In this era of financial crisis compounded, and even perhaps enabled, by a dearth of investigative reporting, it is valuable to go back in time to learn from the work of great journalists with the courage to have taken on avaricious corporations and irresponsible business practices."Perhaps no book demands our attention and respect as much as the one now in your hands. The unabridged edition, long out of print, of Ida Tarbell's study/expose of the history of the Standard Oil Company is an American classic, a model of careful research, detailed analysis, clear expository writing, and social mission. It has been hailed as one of the top ten of journalism's greatest hits."In this book, offering Volumes I&II, Tarbell explores: the birth of the oil industry the rise of the Standard Oil Company the "oil war" of 1872 the beginnings of the oil trust the first interstate commerce bill battles over oil pipelines the marketing of oil the political response to Standard's domination breaking up the oil trust competition in the oil industry and more.IDA MINERVA TARBELL (1857-1944) is remembered today as a muckraking journalist, thanks to this 1904 blockbuster expose. Originally published as a series of articles in McClure's magazine, this groundbreaking work highlighted the dangers of business monopolies and contributed to the eventual breakup of Standard Oil.Investigative journalist DANNY SCHECHTER is editor of Mediachannel.org and author of numerous books on the media, including Plunder: Investigating Our Economic Calamity and the Subprime Scandal (Cosimo). For more, see www.newsdissector.com/plunder.

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This autobiography of the great female journalist and muckraker Ida M. Tarbell includes the following chapters: 1. My Start in Life 2. I Decide to Be a Biologist 3. A Coeducational College of the Eighties 4. A Start and a Retreat 5. A Fresh Start—A Second Retreat 6. I Fall in Love 7. A First Book—On Nothing Certain a Year 8. The Napoleon Movement of the Nineties 9. Good-Bye to France 10. Rediscovering My Country 11. A Captain of Industry Seeks My Acquaintance 12. Muckraker or Historian? 13. Off With the Old—On With the New 14. The Golden Rule in Industry 15. A New Profession 16. Women and War 17. After the Armistice 18. Gambling With Security 19. Looking Over the Country 20. Nothing New Under the Sun

The Standard Oil Company emerged out of obscurity in the 1860s to capture 90 percent of the petroleum refining industry in the United States during the Gilded Age. John D. Rockefeller, the company’s founder, organized the company around an almost religious dedication to principles of efficiency. Economic success masked the dark side of efficiency as Standard Oil dumped oil waste into public waterways, filled the urban atmosphere with acrid smoke, and created a consumer safety crisis by selling kerosene below congressional standards. Local governments, guided by a desire to favor the interests of business, deployed elaborate engineering solutions to tackle petroleum pollution at taxpayer expense rather than heed public calls to abate waste streams at their source. Only when refinery pollutants threatened the health of the Great Lakes in the twentieth century did the federal government respond to a nascent environmental movement. Organized around the four classical elements at the core of Standard Oil’s success (earth, air, fire, and water), Refining Nature provides an ecological context for the rise of one of the most important corporations in American history.