His biography contains elements of an epic novel: growing up the son of a jailed Trotskyist labor leader in whose Chicago home he met Rosa Luxembourg's and Karl Liebknecht's colleagues; serving as a young balance of payments analyst for David Rockefeller whose Chase Manhattan Bank was calculating how much interest the bank could extract
on loans to South American countries;
touring America
on Vatican - sponsored economics lectures; turning after a riot at a UN Third World debt meeting in Mexico to the study of ancient debt cancellation practices through Harvard's Babylonian Archeology department; authoring many
books about finance from Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire [1972] to J is For Junk Economics: A Guide to Reality in an Age of Deception [2017]; and
lately, among many other ventures, commuting from his Queens home to lecture at Peking University in Beijing where he hopes to convince the Chinese to avoid the debt - fuelled economic model off which Western big bankers feast and apply lessons he and his colleagues have learned about the debt relief practices of the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia.