You have to read

Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine.

It connects all the dots of the current financial meltdown. And the impact of global capitalism / corporatism over the last 50 years. It tells you how free-market fundamentalism:

- drives political crises,
- instigates massacres of democracy,
- engineers economic collapse, and
- demands authoritarian state terror

from Israel to South Africa to Poland.

What I love about Klein is her commitment as an activist to sharing the rigor of her scholarship. How many authors invest the time and resources to make their primary sources available online?

This book is giving me nightmares. Especially Chapter 1 on the CIA's torture lab, and Chapter 3 on the mass atrocities committed by the US-backed Pinochet regime in Chile. Yet it makes my brain sing with the peculiar happiness of multiple aha! moments.