As part of his research for the book, Roose managed to infiltrate a secret meeting of a Wall Street fraternity, known as Kappa Beta Phi. The fraternity’s membership rolls include high powered banking executives, CEO’s, Hedge Fund managers and other Wall Street tycoons. What Roose saw and heard during that event will make your blood boil.

In an except from the book, published online by New York Magazine, Roose describes a scene in which more than 200 of world’s wealthiest financial executives, performed songs and skits mocking the 99 percent and the financial crisis ... Read more »

There is an abandoned house in Alberta, Canada, where Alain Labrecque used to live. Tucked in the farming community of Peace River, it is a place brimming with personal history, rooted to his grandfather’s land where his parents and eight aunts and uncles grew up, and where Alain’s own children were born. Now, Alain’s property and the surrounding area are primarily home to large, black cylinders of oil.

The oil is from Alberta’s much-famed tar sands, a large area of land that contains clay, bitumen, and a good deal of sand. Inside the tanks, heavy crude from the sands is heated, until it becomes viscous enough to transport. Many of those tanks currently vent freely into the atmosphere.

As the third-largest proven crude oil reserve in the world and the key ingredient of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, and with production value that is expected to nearly triple by 2018, the Canadian tar sands have become an unseen symbol in America. For some, that symbol represe ... Read more »

The key to what is precisely wrong with corporate journalism is explained in this nutshell by the US commentator Michael Parenti:

‘Bias in favor of the orthodox is frequently mistaken for "objectivity”. Departures from this ideological orthodoxy are themselves dismissed as ideological.’

Examples of bias towards the orthodoxy of Western power are legion every day of the week. On January 30 this year, David Loyn reported for BBC News at Ten from Bagram airbase in Afghanistan as US troops prepared to withdraw from a ... Read more »

Billionaire Tom Steyer, of the environmental nonprofit NextGen Climate Action, is scaling up the role of climate change in the 2014 elections, with plans to spend as much as $100 million on attack ads against climate deniers and other anti-environment politicians.

Steyer’s already demonstrated his willingness and ability to help sway elections — last year, he spent millions helping Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe get elected as governor of Virginia on a climate change platform. But this is Koch brother-level political advocacy we’re talking about. ... Read more »