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In the 1960s he was thoroughly alienated by the Vietnam War and rampant race and gender discrimination. He dropped out of his PhD program and left Madison, Wisconsin for the San Francisco Bay Area. In San Francisco he worked for the Bank of America and became an expert in the fields of data networking and information technology. He also wrote for "underground" newspapers, alt weeklies as they're called today. He accepted the contradictions of corporate work and life in the counter-culture. Those contradictions remain unresolved today. Paynter is a progressive, a pacifist, and a fan of government regulation of big business. He would rather see a military draft than an all volunteer army augmented by mercenaries. A supporter of Barack Obama from the earliest days of his candidacy, Paynter worries today that the President is squandering the mandate for peace that we gave him in November 2008. In 1990, realizing his expertise was portable and that distances had been destroyed by public and private networks, he returned to the Madison area, bought a small farm from the Nature Conservancy, and went into the Information Technology consulting business. Married, a farmer, and the father of two grown sons, Paynter's activist interests include organic agriculture, land use planning, energy alternatives to fossil fuels and other combustibles and addressing racial disparities in justice administration. His educational background includes a BA in English, an MBA, and telecommunications engineering course work at Berkeley and MIT. In 2007, he received an honorary fellowship in Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he studied the drivers that influence racial disparities in criminal justice administration, issues in public policy formation around this concern, and how these disparities affect us culturally and personally. "Secularists are often wrongly accused of trying to purge religious ideals from public discourse. We simply want to deny them public sponsorship." -- Wendy Kaminer All material offered here is the property of Frank Paynter, copyright 2009. Permission is granted to repost, with proper attribution including the original link. OpEdNews Member for 215 week(s) and 0 day(s) 1 Articles, 0 Quick Links, 7 Comments, 0 Diaries, 0 Petitions, 0 Polls 1 Articles
Friday, August 21, 2009 |
