>Rakesh Bhandari wrote: > >>Why is that when the question of oil economics came up, I seemed to >>be the only one who remembered Bina's work though Bina had been a >>co-editor (I believe) of RRPE with many of you? > >Hey, I had Bina on the radio. You're not the only one. > >Doug
Doug, this was weeks after discussion had gone on your list without any serious mention of the important works in oil economics (Massarat, Roncaglia, Bromley, Spiro, Adelman and Bina) and after I had posted about my surprise of the low level of discussion on LBO here (I believe) and about Bina's work publically (on the OPE-L) and to you privately a couple of weeks before you interviewed him, no? You hadn't mentioned his work before that right? Before that there was no mention of his work, no acquaintence with his argument against what came to be called the oilism thesis. I am not now defending Bina's argument though it's nice to know that he's a nice guy--never met him myself. But this is far from the point. I am merely saying that discussion of oil economics went on weeks without mention of his work even for the purposes of refutation. And I ask myself why does it seem that no one knows about critical political economic work by a colleague on the economics of oil and US foreign policy when the US has been pursuing a very destructive policy for the last ten years or so? Was no one concerned to read and think hard about Bina's work? Why did his work so easily slip out of memory? I had no interest in revisiting our arguments about trade. This arose out of Michael's insistence that my behavior and tone are just obstacles. It would be much too much for anyone on this list to express appreciation for the concerns that I raised. After all, I did help to stimulate a discussion which was culminated by a very informative post by Hari Kumar. There is much too much unjustified confidence implied in Michael's and Jim D's negative comments about my style that in the absence of sharp and impolite questioning--questioning which does not assume in the face of contrary evidence that the addressee is not ethnocentric and does not respect the desire to be free of the imposition of having to consider matters from the point of view of another oppressed group--there would be easy overcoming of ethnocentric fallacies by which I mean the inability to see matters from the point of view of another oppressed or exploited group with which good American progressives and populists do not identify here as a result of nationalist, ethnic or gender prejudices of which they are not even or at best dimly aware. That I have reached this conclusion about many of my interlocutors does make me ipso facto impolite. Rakesh
