R.T. Naylor - Counterfeit Crime: Criminal Profits, Terror Dollars, and Nonsense

I want to extend warm thanks to many colleagues with whom I collaborated, argued, or shared fine wine (as well as some really bad stuff) over the years, particularly Peter Andreas, Margaret Beare, Alan Block, Jack Blum, the late Bill Chambliss, Michael Hudson, Mike Levi, Sam Noumoff, Dan OMeara, Nikos Passas, Francisco Thoumi, and Phil Williams. I learned to respect these individuals for their commitment to intellectual integrity rather than to career advancement. Not only is that choice increasingly difficult to make today, but it has become ever rarer to find those willing to try. I want to offer special thanks once more to Phil Cercone and his staff at McGill-Queens University Press (plus the ever tenacious but still patient Claude Lalumire) for facing the abnormal financial and political constraints normal in publishing today to take on this book as well as seven of its predecessors. My gratitude extends, too, to many people with whom I have had no formal academic or professional association for their encouraging responses to previous books, plus literally thousands of students who listened to me sound off about these issues during a forty-year (so far) university career.

For some time now I have made a bittersweet practice of dedicating my books to the memory of certain colleagues much my senior who were a source of inspiration and support during my formative years. Among the things they taught me was not to fear affronting the kind of disciplinary frontiers and professionally approved methodologies that academics, gathered into their usual self-referential cabals, reflexively defend. Whatever its original merits, today the intellectual, professional, and even financial security conferred on academics permits them to climb into their chosen box, lock it firmly behind them, then throw the key out the window before shuttering that window, too, from the inside. But, if they refuse to use those privileges to at least sniff the air outside that box from time to time, they dont deserve to have them.

This time my acknowledgments must be expanded to include someone both outside the ivory tower and inside my general age bracket who, in his columns over many years in The Village Voice, The Wall Street Journal, The Nation, and Counterpunch, was a major influence not just on my way of thinking but on how I chose to express the results. I recall fondly in 2007 our first phone conversation many more e-conversations followed. When, to my delight, he asked if Counterpunch could publish excerpts from my book Satanic Purses, I took the occasion to inform him that his fathers wise words Dont believe anything until its officially denied had for about two decades been posted on my office door to guide at least some of my students and annoy at least some of my colleagues. I vividly recall a feeling of profound unease in the summer of 2012 the first time I opened the weekend Counterpunch and found that his column, always a highlight of my week, was missing. On a hunch I sent him an email asking if he was okay. His reply ? He had been too busy. With what, he didnt elaborate. I got the answer like a kick in the stomach a short time later with the first line I read in the 21 23 July weekend issue : Alexander Cockburn, 1941 2012.

COUNTERFEIT CRIME