It is my opinion the following essays by Graeme Jones (Our Mayan World and Surrealism–A bridge Between Heaven and Earth) deserve review — especially for their prescience as well as creative insight.
I also suggest taking a good look at Erik Kaye’s views on the Environment in the category down below: it will get your head spinning.
Chris Arcus is also adding to the mix, commenting on the environment and things nuclear.
I also have written several commentaries involving health, economics and politics and the concerns of day to day life.
. If you have a moment, please feel free to comment on these and other posts. And query me in case your article might be of interest here on Eos! —–Bea Garth, editor.. PS–I am always looking for new well written articles/commentary on politics, art, society, the environment etc. If you have something you would like to share that is thoughtful and well written, send it on to me and I will seriously consider having it here. Please send to bgarthart@earthlink.net.
Eos: The Creative Context 
The following is an extract from an article by Dennis Kucinich’s economic advisor, Michael Hudson, writing on the Counterpunch website on 20th Oct.
He makes clear why the bailout cannot possibly rectify the American economy – because it is structured to favor creditors over debtors. In so doing debt deflation becomes widespread. This is essentially a capitalist error which has a long historical pedigree.
This phenomenon of debt deflation has occurred throughout history, not only over the modern business cycle but for centuries at a time. The most self-destructive example of financial short-termism is the decline and fall of the Roman Empire into debt bondage and ultimately into a Dark Age. The political turning point was the violent takeover of the Senate by oligarchic creditors who murdered the debtor-oriented reformers led by the Gracchi brothers in 133 BC, picking up benches and using them as rams to push the reformers over the cliff on which the political assembly was located. A similar violent overthrow occurred in Sparta a century earlier when its kings Agis and Cleomenes sought to annul debts so as to reverse the city-state’s economic polarization. The creditor oligarchy exiled and killed the kings, as Plutarch described in his Parallel Lives of the Illustrious Greeks and Romans. This used to be basic reading among educated people, but today these events have all but disappeared from most people’s historical memory. A knowledge of the evolution of economic structures has been replaced by a mere series of political personalities and military conquests.
The moral of ancient and modern history alike is that a critical point inevitably arrives at which economies either adopt hard creditor-oriented laws that impoverish the population and plunge downward socially and militarily, or save themselves by alleviating the debt burden. What is remarkable today is the almost total failure of political leaders to provide an alternative to Paulson’s bailout of Wall Street from the Bear Stearns bankruptcy down through the government takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to last week’s giveaway to the banks. Nobody is even warning where this destructive decision is leading.
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Eric; You are so passionate. I like it but sometimes it makes it difficult to discern your main point. You write of the rulers claiming incompetence. You are right about that. However I do not believe that they are using “incompetence” as a cover for total nihilsm. I believe they consistently use it as a cover to hide a consciously organized evil agenda. It is too organized to be just nihilsm. I don’t think they feel “nihilistic” about accruing increased money, dynastic power and total dominance. I think they feel very positive and self affirming about it. They are satisfyingly inflated about it. They believe in it For them it is so “America.” Free individuality, albeit totally defined by ego.
I see it as a form of highly advanced ego pathology. Their ego’s are driven to sacrifice the well being of the collective, for the glorification of their own private individuality. This feels good and affirming to them. They even hold it as a religious value. For them and their kind, it is the religion of American capitalism. It is their version of the sacred.
Carl Jung once said to Freud that the only standpoint from which one can critic a religion is from the perspective of another religion. Given that the sixties was a spiritual movement, the capitalists had to counter it with their own religious formulation. That was Reagan’s capitalist market fundamentalism. A satanic religion indeed, but now it has destroyed itself, right on schedule.
I believe that the positive reason evolution gave us Bush for 8 years was that America needs to be decoupled from its false consciousness that America is all about capitalism. Capitalism is America’s false religion. But the people have drunk the cool aid and actually believe in capitalism. But they don’t really know what it is. There is an ocean of difference between real “free enterprise” and “capitalism.” But exploring and clarifying that difference would be an enormous threat to the captialist ruling class. So evolution has to burn the American nation away from its attachment to capitalism. America resists this so suffering becomes the necessary path. So we needed a man like George Bush to rupture the social contract between capitalism and the American people.
There is another piece here. If American capitalism starts to do to the American people what it has been doing to the rest of the world for 60 years, then the American people will have a more balanced understanding of that system’s evil side. Then America can rediscover its true self in a world wide spiritual struggle against capitalism.
It seems we now need to discover a spiritual definition of America that can facilitate a glorification of the American conception of freedom in a manner that carries us beyond the limitations and evil of capitalism.
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I’ll say this; Don’t say that George W. Bush was the worst president of the United States because he was never the president of the United States. He’s a common criminal who was always two steps ahead of us, counting on it that we could never believe we would ever do something as stupid as electing someone like him. Now even the Republicans are starting to believe. (He’s like the Jack in Dylan’s song, “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts”– “Two doors down the boys finally made it through the wall/ And cleaned out the bank safe it’s said that they got off with quite a haul/ … But they couldn’t go no further without the Jack of Hearts.” ).
A man in office who was not voted in by the majority does not feel beholden to the majority. He apotheosized the Reagan psychopathology of wanting to destroy his own government/himself. I remember thinking that Ambassador-to-the-U.N. John Bolton was a microcosm of the Bush administration– his personal job mission was to take down the U.N. Now McCain wants to do follow through. Its so counter-intuitive that few people could follow it. Most of us are struggling to find jobs we like. The Bushies struggle to find jobs they hate. It’s hard to fathom.
I don’t believe the market collapsed by incompetence any more than I believe the levis in New Orleans broke down for incompetence, or that the intelligence proving that Iraq had WMDs turned out to be false was due to incompetence. These guys use incompetence as a disguise to cover total nihilism. Most of us desperately don’t want to be seen as incompetent. Someone who actually wants us to think they’re incompetent is too weird.
To paraphrase one of the Native-American Chieftains in Dee Brown’s masterpiece “Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee,” “They made many promises but they kept but one. They promised to destroy our government and they destroyed it.”
But I don’t see any body jumping out of windows like in 1929 just yet.
Erik Sutter-Kaye
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