Volume 20 of Research in Political Economy, edited by Paul Zarembka, titled ‘Confronting 9-11, Ideologies of Race, and Eminent Economists,’ (JAI/Elsevier Science, Amsterdam, New York, Oxford, 2002) contains important essays on the current US administration’s foreign policy by Peter Dale Scott and David MacGregor. The abstract to Scott’s essay is :
‘The United States since World War Two, inheriting the patterns of European colonial systems before it, had 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 reently, in 2001, the U.S. armed forces has helped restore the drug traffic in Afghanistan, where opium production had been initially curtailed by the Taliban.’
David MacGregor’s abstract states:
‘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 pro-cesses. The deep politics of September 11 and intervention in Afghanistan points to covert U.S. reliance on warlords, holy wariors and drug traffickers to secure American interests, including Caspian Sea oil resources and the limitation of Russian influence over its former republics and satellites.’
The table of contents and information on obtaining this is at < http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/PZarembka/volume20.htm >
Gary Webb, the American journalist whose series on the CIA-cocaine links kicked off a major political storm (and got him fired), has placed his original articles at < http://home.attbi.com/~gary.webb/wsb/ index.html >
www.nthposition.com is ‘An on-line magazine with politics and opinion, travel writing, fiction and poetry and some high weirdness’. This is an interesting site run by Val Stephenson of the Fortean Times, a mixture of radical – left radical – politics, some of that old Fortean ‘high weirdness’ and decent writing. Not unlike Lobster, come to think of it!