Palast takes us on a fast paced, kick ass narrative that globe trots from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, to the coast of Alaska, to New Orleans, to Liberia, to Azerbaijan, to Fukushima, Japan. It’s the real-deal investigative reporting of corporate irresponsibility. As Greg Palast said himself in an interview,” This book is a story of the 1%. It’s why we occupy.”

So there I was, surfing around the intertoobz this morning when I came across this headline at CNN: “Stop vilifying venture capitalists.”

I have to admit, I was a bit taken aback at the headline as it surely did not reflect anything I had read.

Outside of the fact that they both wear nice Italian suits, the only difference between your street benefactors and Bain Capital is the extra two or three zeros added to the end of the debt amount and the guys at Bain (Biff and Skippy and Mitt) all have last names that don’t end with an ‘i’ or an ‘o’.

On Wednesday, Boeing dropped a bombshell on the state of Kansas, announcing that they were closing their plant in Wichita, sending ripples throughout the region.

What makes this plant closure announcement different from others, however, is that in the battle to win back the military tanker contract, Boeing’s CEO promised Kansas Senator Pat Roberts, then-Senator (and now governor) Sam Brownback, and other members of the Kansas Congressional delegation that Boeing would build the tanker in Wichita if the Kansas delegation could prevail on their colleagues to award them the contract.

Roberts and the rest of the GOP is not pleased that after winning the contract, Boeing decided to build elsewhere and close the plant.

Imagine that. A corporation would deceive members of Congress when it suits them. Awwwww . . .

It’s almost as if the wealthy were running the government.

Hey, all you naysayers who claim Occupy did nada–yeah Limbaugh, you lima bean, I mean you–check this out.

The horrors of the Penn State rape scandal should remind us of a truth too easily lost in this era of corporate personhood: institutions of all kinds and sizes are by their nature morally empty.

I suppose our culture’s general sexual ineptitude is one reason this fact is easier to see in instances of violent brutality involving organs of sex. But ugly institutional moral failures of many kinds happen all around us every hour, every day.

Phoenix police alleged protesters assaulted them with nail-filled sticks. That is basically police speak for when we were doing “crowd control” we were touched by the sticks holding up protesters’ signs. The Fire Department was on the scene to wash out the eyes of those pepper sprayed.

I’m thinking of Braniff tonight because one of the people who brought it down, Scot Spencer, is currently, erm, unavailable for questioning by the authorities (i.e., he skipped town), a status that is probably related to his latest brush with fame, the Berdoo Boondoggle (aka the “Airport to Nowhere”).

Just because businesses are made of people, doesn’t mean they are people.