Blood and oil

摘要

Flagellating the oil business is one of America's proudest traditions. Ida Tarbell, the greatest of the muckraking journalists, accused Standard Oil of building its empire on "fraud, deceit, special privilege, gross illegality, bribery, coercion, corruption, intimidation, espionage or outright terror". Upton Sinclair demonised the oil barons in his 1927 novel "Oil!". Today bookshop shelves are crammed with tomes denouncing the Bush oil dynasty, or predicting that America's dependence on oil will bring environmental Armageddon.