Walt Byars wrote:> I am not implying that RPE is "just a conspiracy"
journal, but that it gives an easy out to those who employ "guilt by
association" fallacies to dismiss good articles from RPE. <
right. I wasn't seeing RPE as a "conspiracy theory journal," either.
On that note, I must apologize to Paul Zarembka. Because of the top
title of "CONFRONTING 9-11," followed only underneath by "IDEOLOGIES
OF RACE, AND EMINENT ECONOMISTS" -- and because Paul said something to
me in person along the lines of "you won't like this issue," I didn't
read the full table of contents. These are:
The Deep Politics of September 11: Political Economy of Concrete Evil
[by] David MacGregor, King's College, University of Western Ontario
U.S. Wars in the Light of the International Drug Trade [by] Peter Dale Scott,
University of California at Berkeley
Ideologies of Race and Racism [by] Babacar Camara, Miami University,
Middletown, Ohio
Estimating Gross Domestic Product with Surplus Value [by] Victor
Kasper, Jr., Buffalo State College
Collective and Individual Rationality: Maynard Keynes' Methodological
Standpoint and Policy Prescription [by] Andy Denis, City University,
London
On the Art of Innuendo: J.M. Keynes' Plagiarism of Silvio Gesell's
Monetary Economics [by] Guido Giacomo Preparata, University of
Washington, Tacoma
A Political Economy Critique of the Ricardian Comparative Advantage
Theory [by] Turan Subasat, University of Bath
The Market as Disciplinary Order: A Comparative Analysis of Hayek and
Bentham [by] Massimo De Angelis, University of East London<
Further, the abstract of the 9-11 article by David MacGregor reads:
This paper offers a deep political analysis of September 11 drawing
upon Peter Dale Scott's concept of deep politics and the
Hegelian-Marxist political economy of evil. Concrete evil concerns
outbreaks of malevolence in history and their connection with ruling
social groups; deep politics extends this by investigating hidden
forces lying beneath the surface of conventional political processes.
The deep politics of September 11 and intervention in Afghanistan
points to covert U.S. reliance on warlords, holy warriors and drug
traffickers to secure American interests, including Caspian oil
resources and the limitation of Russian influence over its former
republics and satellites.<
This may or may not involve the type of conspiracy theory that I find
so useless. I don't know exactly what "deep politics" means, while
"the Hegelian-Marxist political economy of evil" doesn't sound like
conspiracy theory at all.
The associated article by Peter Dale Scott has an abstract that reads:
The United States since World War Two, inheriting the patterns of
European colonial systems before it, has collaborated with local drug
lords ("drug proxies") to maintain its influence in the Third World,
particularly in areas of geostrategic importance because of their
proximity to petroleum resources. These alliances have cumulatively
strengthened the U.S. presence in the Third World. But they have also
progressively strengthened and consolidated the global drug traffic
throughout the world. Most recently, in 2001, U.S. armed force has
helped restore the drug traffic to Afghanistan, where opium production
had been radically curtailed by the Taliban.<
This doesn't sound like the conspiracy theory that I know and don't
love _at all_.
All the rest of the articles sound really good (and aren't related to
9-11 or conspiracy theory at all). Contrary to Paul's verbal
discouragement, it looks like an issue that I'd like.
--
Jim Devine / "In the Soviet Union, capitalism triumphed over
communism. In this country, capitalism triumphed over democracy." --
Fran Lebowitz
