Ida Tarbell (1857 – 1944) pertained to the generation of journalists called muckrackers, who investigated and denounced corruption and unethical practices perpetrated by businesses and government officials during the Progressive Era (late 19th century and early 20th century) in the US.
She published <em>"The History of the Standard Oil Company</em>" in 1904 through which she set a precedent, and many others subsequently started to gather information and to denounce the abuses committed by companies with absolute market power (monopolies) or by trusts operating in olipolistic markets. The Sherman Antitrust Act had been recently passed in 1890 but firms had been able to freely limit competitiveness during the whole 19th century. Tarbell denounced the manner in which certain corporations gathered enormous fortunes by using anti-competitive practices, possible due to their dominant position in the markets, and also impeding others to participate on the profits of the industry.
Such monopolistic practices enlarged the inequality within the industry and also in the whole society where large fortunes started to appear while most people were humble factory workers who earned very modest salaries.
I believe that the rights of all people can not be protected due to the large amounts of people on the planet, and the fact that this number is steadily increasing. There is no known way to ensure the rights of every single person, and in my humble opinion not all people deserve rights. For instance, a mother that kills her child or children in cold blood would not deserve the rights offered to other mothers. This is not always the case and in an idealistic universe, the rights of every human would be protected and cherished, not because they "should" per se, but rather because every human lovingly gave them and deserved them. Seeing as this is not the case, I would say the rights of all people can not be protected, as unfortunate as that is...
The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were times of crisis for Russia. Not only did technology and industry continue to develop more rapidly in the West, but also new, dynamic, competitive great powers appeared on the world scene: Otto von Bismarck united Germany in the 1860s, the post-Civil War United States grew in size and strength, and a modernized Japan emerged from the Meiji Restoration of 1868. Although Russia was an expanding regional giant in Central Asia, bordering the Ottoman, Persian, British Indian, and Chinese empires, it could not generate enough capital to support rapid industrial development or to compete with advanced countries on a commercial basis. Russia's fundamental dilemma was that accelerated domestic development risked upheaval at home, but slower progress risked full economic dependency on the faster-advancing countries to the east and west. In fact, political ferment, particularly among the intelligentsia, accompanied the transformation of Russia's economic and social structure, but so did impressive developments in literature, music, the fine arts, and the natural sciences.
