The Europeans brought shame to the tropics, and from the conflict between the refusal and acceptance of imposed traditions, a society was born
whose biggest feast is that one which celebrates bodies in ecstasy: the carnival with its contradictions, catharsis, irrationality, radiance and libido; a carnival that somehow rules the country and underlies the recent paintings of Lannes.
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.