What's The Dope Reading?

The answer to that question (which nobody asked) is:

Eats, Shoots, and Leaves -- Lynne Truss
A very witty and interesting account of the history and correct usage of punctuation. (no guarantee I learned anything however.)

Confessions of an Economic Hit Man -- John Perkins
A chilling and rather alarming account of a person who was in the midst of the empire building apparatus of the corporatacracy and world financial institutions which dominates the world through their Mafia-like tactics.

Perkins details how the intersection between global banking, corporations, and government set out to create a global empire by the use of enormous loans to developing countries from the World Bank and others, in exchange for U.S. engineering and construction companies such as Brown & Root, Bechtel, and Haliburton getting literally billions of dollars of profit from building electrical grids, port facilities, roads and other infrastructure. The country can never repay these enormous loans, but no one cares, as the elite of the poor countries get enormously wealthy, as do the U.S. contractors. And when the countries default, the World Bank and others step in to dictate how they must run their economies.

It amounts to Mafia loan sharks lending money to a strapped business owner, and then taking the business from them when they can't pay back the loan. The result is that the indiginous people of these areas suffer incredibly and the destruction of the environment and the wholesale plunder of their resources is relentless and total.

A highly recommended read for an insight into how rampant greed by a handful of powerful figures is shaping the modern world and spreading intense hatred for the US around the globe.

Perkins explains the dealings behind propping up the Saudis, the root of Bush's obsession with invading Iraq, and the role of the Bush family in this empire building for decades, the completely illegal and immoral invasion of Panama, the CIA assasinations of Omar Trujillo in Panama and several other Latin and South American democratically elected leaders who threated to stand up to the oil, mining, and banking industries, and much more.

A cautionary plea for us to change this system of destruction and conquest before it's too late.

Bushworld -- Maureen Dowd
A collection of Dowd columns from the New York Times focusing on the bizzaro world of the Bush era.

How America Lost Iraq -- Aaron Glantz

Outfoxed: Rupert Murdock's War on Journalism -- Alexandra Kitty

The Bush Betrayal -- James Bovard

Larceny and Old Leather: The Mischievious Legacy of Major League Baseball -- Eldon Ham

Boss Tweed : The Rise and Fall of the Corrupt Pol Who Conceived the Soul of Modern New York -- Kenneth D. Ackerman
A fascinating account of probably one of the most corrupt, yet effective, politicians of our time and his ultimate destruction.