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I am a 63 year old American child and adolescent psychiatrist and political refugee in New Zealand. I have just published a young adult novel THE BATTLE FOR TOMORROW (which won a NABE Pinnacle Achievement Award) about a 16 year old girl who participates in the blockade and occupation of the US Capitol. I also have a new non-fiction ebook REVOLUTIONARY CHANGE and a 2010 memoir, THE MOST REVOLUTIONARY ACT: MEMOIR OF AN AMERICAN REFUGEE describing the circumstances that led me to leave the US in 2002 to start a new life in New Zealand. My memoir won an Allbooks Review Editor's Choice Award. I have a political commentary blog at my website.
(4 comments) SHARE Thursday, January 31, 2019 MK-Ultra, LSD and the CIA War on Musicians and Activists
On January 29, John Potash will release his film Drugs as Weapons Against Us: The CIA War on Musicians and Activists - based on his 2015 book Drugs as Weapons Against Us: The CIA's Murderous Targeting of SDS, Panthers, Hendrix, Lennon, Cobain, Tupac and Other Activists. A virtual encyclopedia of illegal government drug trafficking and covert assassinations.
(6 comments) SHARE Wednesday, August 22, 2018 The Rohingya Crisis: Is Myanmar the New Syria
The western media is flooding us with images of Muslim Rohingya fleeing Rakhine state in Myanmar. Yet for some reason western accounts rarely mention the country's 70-year civil war with Rohingyan separatists - nor the support the latter receive from Saudi Arabia. The US is notorious for using humanitarian crises to justify both direct and proxy military intervention. Is Myanmar possibly the new Syria.
(9 comments) SHARE Tuesday, December 13, 2011 The V-Word
The two biggest obstacles OWS will face in maintaining their commitment to non-violence will be the attitude of low income and minority groups who deal with police violence on a daily basis and growing concerns about the possible role CIA-funded left gatekeeping foundations have played in engineering OWS's exclusive commitment to nonviolence. This concern is heightened by the use of Gene Sharp's materials at several OWS sites.
(5 comments) SHARE Sunday, December 11, 2011 Developing Story: Hundreds of US-NATO Soldiers Arrive & Begin Operations on the Jordan-Syria Border
According to first-hand accounts by several sources in Jordan, during the last few hours foreign military groups, estimated at hundreds of individuals, are spreading near the Jordanian and Syrian border. Another report received from our source in Amman identified an additional US-NATO Command Center in "al-Houshah,' a village near Mafraq.
(10 comments) SHARE Friday, December 9, 2011 The Wikipedia Revolution
Lih's book stands as a testament to the unsung heroes of the Open Source movement. From the outset, there has been a split between entrepreneurs like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, who view the Internet as an opportunity to become enormously rich, and visionaries in the OS movement, who see it as a medium of social change. Like OWS, it reclaims electronic communications as a "commons" to be jointly owned for the common good.
(3 comments) SHARE Sunday, December 4, 2011 The 2011 New Zealand Elections
The outcome of the November 26 elections was extremely gratifying for the New Zealand Green Party. We received an unprecedented 10.6% of the party vote, which will translate into 13 MPs in the new Parliament. We also passed a referendum to preserve MMP (New Zealand's system of proportional representation).
(8 comments) SHARE Friday, December 2, 2011 Paying the Piper
It's impossible to rationally discuss economic reform separate from political reform. At present, there is no commitment to require the ruling elite to engage in the belt tightening they seek to impose on the middle class and young people. Where there is political will to share equally the cost of fixing the financial crisis, there are some straightforward policies that could restore global economic stability within months.
(6 comments) SHARE Tuesday, November 29, 2011 Guess Who's Printing Money?
The Eurozone debt crisis and Occupy movement have revived the monetization debate in Europe (and elsewhere) in a way that isn't happening in the US. Monetization is the term applied when government, rather than private banks, issues the money used by the public and by government itself.
(18 comments) SHARE Thursday, November 24, 2011 Fairy Tale Economics
The only way I know to make sense of the global economic crisis is to assume, until proven otherwise, that everything Obama, Wall Street and the corporate media tell us is a lie. The economy Wall Street and our political leaders talk about is a fairy tale economy that bears no relation to the real world. Thanks to Occupy Wall Street, a new narrative about the global economic crisis is beginning to emerge.
(5 comments) SHARE Wednesday, November 23, 2011 OWS Demographics and Privilege
OWS protestors have little hope of recruiting the traditional working class if they self-identify as middle class. The question of their class orientation will revolve around what they want OWS to accomplish. Are they willing to settle for student loan forgiveness and other short term policy fixes? Or do they have a vision for massive social change that will benefit everyone who has joined them in the park?
(6 comments) SHARE Saturday, November 19, 2011 Is #OccupyWallStreet Working Class?
The success of OWS in expanding into the traditional working class will depend on their willingness to discard the label middle class. Although our corporate-controlled western democracies are rapidly dismantling the middle class in the name of debt reduction, the professional and academic bedrock of the American middle class is still largely intact. Their members have very different interests than minimum wage workers.
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, November 15, 2011 Ending Corporate Rule: the Citizens' Rights Movement
The citizens' rights movement was born in 2000 when Belfast Pennsylvania, passed a law prohibiting factory farms from operating within their township. In 2005 this law was upheld in court, and twelve other Pennsylvania townships in five counties now have similar ordinances. In addition to laws banning sewage sludge and factory farms, one community has banned mining and four have passed laws establishing ecosystem rights.
(2 comments) SHARE Sunday, November 13, 2011 Don't Eat the Fish
People who clean up or live near toxic oil spills - or who eat contaminated fish - are at high risk for PAH-related cancers, birth and immune defects, miscarriage, and bleeding and nervous system disorders. Toxicologists have known about the health hazards of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons for two decades. Why is the public being kept in the dark?
(3 comments) SHARE Wednesday, November 9, 2011 The Corporatization of Breast Cancer
Is the real purpose of Breast Cancer Awareness Month and the Pink Ribbon Campaign to help women or the dozens of corporations who have jumped on the pink ribbon band wagon? To end breast cancer we must eliminate its causes, including the hundreds of endocrine disruptors and other cancer-causing chemicals in our environment.
(5 comments) SHARE Sunday, November 6, 2011 OWS: A Quandary for Long Time Activists
I encounter many long time activists in a quandary how to relate to #OccupyWallStreet. A vibrant, growing mass movement involving thousands of activists is always far more interesting and exciting than the drudgery of keeping existing grassroots organizations going. There is a strong temptation to abandon current organizing commitments to join the groundswell created by the OWS movement. This could be a big mistake.
(11 comments) SHARE Wednesday, November 2, 2011 Tackling Wall Street Criminality
Inside Job should be required viewing for all media skeptics who question the rationale behind OWS. The film lays to rest the myth that the 2008 economic collapse was merely a "perfect storm" of regulatory failure, greed and conflict of interest. Not only does our current economic mess stem from blatant Wall Street criminality, but the IMF repeatedly warned Bush and the Federal Reserve of the need for urgent intervention.
(9 comments) SHARE Tuesday, November 1, 2011 The End Of Global Economic Growth
In Heinberg's previous work on resource scarcity, he envisions a timeline of a decade or more before the scarcity and prohibitive cost of natural resources (oil, coal, water, etc.) cause the capitalist economic system to hit the wall. In The End of Growth, he argues that it has already happened -- when global economic expansion ended in October 2008. His data shows that while a few countries can claim an occasional quarter of
(11 comments) SHARE Friday, October 28, 2011 General Strike: Where OWS Needs To Go
Prior to Tuesday's violent police attack on Occupy Oakland, I had the sense that the authorities were quite comfortable with thousands of us camping out in city parks every night -- so long as we weren't interfering with business as usual. Occupy Oakland, which has retaken Oscar Grant Plaza, seems ready to up the ante with their call for a general strike next Wednesday.
(4 comments) SHARE Wednesday, October 26, 2011 The #occupywallstreet Report Card
Capturing the corporate media spotlight, even briefly, with a strong anticapitalist message is a major, unprecedented feat for any grassroots organization. There are also dangerous pitfalls in becoming too reliant on the corporate media. Thus it's critically important that we continue to produce our own media, as well as devise self-assessments tools to review and critique our accomplishments.
(9 comments) SHARE Thursday, October 20, 2011 The Real Vampires: An Insider's View Of Banks
Ex-mentor to former president Bill Clinton, Harvard, Princeton and Georgetown professor Carroll Quigley was the ultimate Washington insider. Most history books written by the ruling elite teach that wars, recessions and depressions are accidents of history that can't be avoided. It's extremely rare for one of their own to tell the truth about the role of the corporate/banking elite in precipitating most global calamities.