About our 4/15/04
subscription price increase:
FTW
had not increased its subscription rates in more
than three years. In the meantime we continue to grow
journalistically in order to cover stories in foreign countries
and to enhance the depth, timeliness and quality of our
coverage, mainly by hiring talented journalists
who work very hard on their stories and who write
for us for a fraction of what they could earn in
the mainstream media. They have made their choice and shown
their intergrity. If FTW is to continue to lead the
way, we must be able to travel and pay the great talent
we are attracting to our pages. The more we grow, the
more intellectual “health
food” we can bring to our readers. It's that simple.
That's a promise we have kept to our readers for six
years.
_______________
I asked some our
frequent and newest contributors to give us a bio of
themselves. Aside from being grateful to have attracted
this caliber of writer, each with a unique skill set,
I am amazed also at the quality of human being drawn
to FTW's pages.
So much of our success is attributable to them.
(Being the editorial “control
freak” that
I am, I just couldn't resist adding a few comments
of my own to round out your picture of what makes
FTW so special.)
-- Mike Ruppert
From
The Wilderness
Frequent Contributors
| |
Dale
Allen Pfeiffer
FTW Science Editor |
|
Dale
Allen Pfeiffer was born in Michigan in 1958.
After graduating high school, he traveled extensively
throughout North America, by van, thumb and
bicycle. Over the next couple decades, he wrote
several novels, a volume of poetry and many short
stories. During the 1990s, he took degrees in
Geology, Earth Science and Mathematics, graduating
with honors. He has done field work in the Rocky
Mountains, Michigan's Upper Peninsula, and
in Ontario, Canada around the Lake Superior
shore. He specialized in Orogenic and Precambrian
structural geology.
In the 1990s, he also began exploring
and writing about socioeconomic issues. He
favored theories espousing a bottom up political
structure, egalitarian economics, and direct
democracy. He was a proud member of the IWW,
and he took an active role in the effort to
free Leonard Peltier. In 1999, he married Elizabeth
Anne Lovan.
In 2002, his daughter, Candace,
came to live with them, completing their family.
After 9-11, he realized that peak oil was
playing a major role in the events of this
young century. He began writing for FTW in
December of 2001. His magnum opus, Giants
in Their Steps, a novel, and the product of 20
years of work was published in December, 2003.
He is scheduled to release several more books
in the spring of 2004, including an anthology
of his geopolitical writings for FTW.
For a full list of his publications, please
visit http://www.lulu.com/allenadale.
Comment: Dale has been so
far ahead of the curve and so dedicated in
his work; so precise and accurate on energy
issues; that a half dozen Pulitzers should
be sitting on his mantle. He turned me on
to Peak Oil, he made the case, he was right,
and not once has he let me or out readers
down. What you're reading today in the LA
Times, The New York Times and many other
papers was written by Dale as much as two
years ago.
|
| |
Stan
Goff
FTW Military
and
Veteran's Affairs Editor |
|
Stan
retired as a Master Sergeant from the US
Army in 1996, his last assignment being 3rd
Special Forces Group. He entered military
service January, 1970, and his first assignment
was as an infantryman with the 173rd Airborne
Brigade in Vietnam. His service took
him to seven more conflict areas after Vietnam,
including Guatemala, Grenada, El Salvador,
Peru, Colombia, Somalia, and Haiti. His assignments
included 2nd Ranger Battalion, 1st Ranger
Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment, 1st Special
Forces Operational Detachment-Delta, 7th
Special Forces, the Jungle Operations Training
Center, and the US Military Academy at West
Point, where he taught military science.
He is the former Organizing
Director for Democracy South and is currently
a freelance writer, speaker, and consultant. He
is on the coordinating committee of Bring
Them Home Now, a campaign of Veterans for
Peace and Military Families Speak Out,
both of which he is a member. He is
the author of two books, one about the
1994 US military intervention in Haiti,
called “Hideous Dream: A Soldier's
Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti” (Soft
Skull Press, 2000), and one about the Bush
Doctrine and the military called “Full
Spectrum Disorder – The Military in the
New American Century” (Soft Skull
Press, 2004).
Comment: Stan is such
a brilliant and passionate writer that
I frequently have to sit down and smoke
a cigarette after reading one of his
stories. For me good writing is nothing
without passion and good journalism becomes
great journalism when passion turns the
mechanics of journalism into the art
of true teaching. This man is deep and
human and trustworthy and my friend;
a cross between Jackson Browne, Clint
Eastwood and the big brother with a heart
every kid should have. |
| |
Catherine
Austin Fitts
|
|
Currently founder
and President of Solari, Inc. ( http://www.solari.com ),
Catherine served as Managing Director and
Member of the Board of Directors of the Wall
Street investment bank, Dillon, Read & Co.,
Inc in the 1980s. She then served as Assistant
Secretary of Housing/Federal Housing Commissioner
at HUD in the first Bush Administration and
was the President and Founder of Hamilton
Securities Group, Inc., a broker-dealer/investment
bank and software developer that successfully
completed $12 billion of transactions and
$500 billion of portfolio strategy prototyping
the “Solari model”. Catherine has a BA from
the University of Pennsylvania, an MBA from
The Wharton School, and studied Chinese at
the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Catherine
serves on the advisory board of Sanders Research
Associates in London and publishes a column, Mapping
the Real Deal, in Scoop Media in New
Zealand ( http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/ ).
Comment: Fitts is an economic Da Vinci.
There's not a single FTW story discussing
economics and money where her voice isn't
in my head. She has taught me so much
about economics, about courage, about
optimism and about faith. She is one
of the few who has stood, face into the
wind, against government corruption and
has never wavered. We may not publish
many articles by her but she is in every
article that we publish. |
| |
Jamey Hecht, PhD
Assistant
Managing Editor
|
|
Jamey Hecht, PhD is a scholar
and artist living in Brooklyn. His articles
on poetry, politics, and the history of
ideas have appeared in a variety of scholarly,
literary, and popular journals and periodicals,
including The Sycamore Review, The
Massachusetts Review, The Cloverdale
Review, Nerve, English
Literary History (ELH), The Sixteenth
Century Journal, River City, Poetry
Calendar, Forschungen zur Frühen
Neuzeit, The Progressive Populist, Counterpunch, Sundry, Berlinerkunst, Media
Monitors Network, The Kennedy
Assassination Chronicles, and American
Book Review. His book, Plato's Symposium:
Eros and the Human Predicament, (Macmillan,
1999) is about ancient Greek philosophy.
Hecht's translation of Sophocles' Three
Theban Plays will be published by
Wordsworth Editions in early 2005 . He
has created the first Hip-Hop tribute to
Senator Robert Kennedy. Music, paintings,
and a resume are available at www.jameyhecht.com.
Dr. Hecht wishes to salute whistleblowers
everywhere.
“Few
will have the greatness to bend history
itself, but each of us can work to
change a small portion of events,
and in the total of all those acts
will be written the history of this
generation. It is from numberless
diverse acts of courage and belief
that human history is shaped. Each
time a man stands up for an ideal,
or acts to improve the lot of others,
or strikes out against injustice,
he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope,
and crossing each other from a million
different centers of energy and daring,
those ripples build a current that
can sweep down the mightiest walls
of oppression and resistance. ” --RFK
“Happiness
is not amusement. It is good activity.” –Aristotle
“The
Whistleblower is a political person in
an apolitical world.” – C. Fred Alford
And here's Shakespeare
on Bush:
A
murderer and a villain;
A slave that is not twentieth part the tithe
Of your precedent lord; a vice of kings;
A cutpurse of the empire and the rule,
That from a shelf the precious diadem stole,
And put it in his pocket …
A
king of shreds and patches. |
| |
Julian
Darley |
|
Julian
Darley MA, MSc, is the author
of High Noon for Natural Gas, forthcoming
from Chelsea Green Publishing Co ( http://www.chelseagreen.com ).
He is also the director of the Post Carbon
Institute, http://www.postcarbon.org )
More information and live
interviews about global oil peak and North
American gas peak can be found at http://www.globalpublicmedia.com.
Comment: Don't let the
short bio fool you. This loquacious and
charming Brit expatriate who lives in
Vancouver can talk your ear off and leave
you asking for more. He truly understands
energy and he walks the way he talks.
When mankind comes to see that having
less will mean survival, it will be people
like Julian to show us how to do it. |
| |
Suzan
Mazur |
|
Reflecting on
decades of reporting for print, television
and radio, Suzan Mazur says she is least
known for the story she broke in the anonymously
written Economist magazine (bylined "Riyadh")
on the world's first successful fetal-to-fetal
transplant surgery. And more recently,
best known for Carlyle Internet classics: "How
Bush Got Bounced From Carlyle Board" in Progressive
Review and "Arthur Levitt, Jr.: Why
I Joined Carlyle and Other Revelations",
in From The Wilderness, then Scoop, and
then financial and legal websites worldwide.
She began her writing career at Hearst
magazines where she was asked to assume
the pen name "Sam Mazur" for
an outdoors column. After the gun
lobby killed her environment page she fled
to the fashion runways of New York, modeling
for Geoffrey Beene and others, and in 1976,
on Iranian National Television as part
of an official "bicentennial goodwill
fashion tour" of the Middle East (former
CIA Director Richard Helms was then US
Ambassador to Iran). She says The
Royal Tehran Hilton and Kuwait Equestrian
Club, where the fashion galas were held,
later became headquarters for the Iranian
Revolution and JIB base during the Gulf
War. In 1984, heading a solar energy
film project, Mazur and her team were invited
by the Swedes and Saudis -- the Saudi Arabian
National Center for Science and Technology
-- to continue their research; she was
a guest on Saudi-TV's "In Focus" program
discussing the project.
Mazur says her approach to covering wars
(Gulf War, Colombia, Sudan, Kashmir) has
been a mix of Jonathan Randal's "stay
paranoid and you'll stay alive" with
a dash of the optimism of Martha Gellhorn
(Mrs. Hemingway), who arrived at the Andorran
border during the Spanish Civil War "with
a knapsack, a chiffon scarf and $50 and
crossed into Spain". Mazur's
stories have appeared in the Financial
Times, Economist, Forbes, Newsday, Philadelphia Inquirer (partial
list), and on PBS, CBC and MBC. She
has been a guest on McLaughlin, Charlie
Rose, and Fox television
shows.
Comment: Could I possibly say more?
Welcome to FTW. |
| |
Michael
Kane |
|
Michael
Kane, 25, is a Social Sculptor working in
the tradition of Joseph Beuyes, the artist
who declared "everyone is an artist".
He fronts the progressive hip-hop group CLARITY
whose latest CD "THIS IS NOT A TEST" features
the song "buddy buddy" detailing
the morning of 9-11-01. Kane reluctantly
stepped into journalism as one of a handful
of independent researchers to honestly investigate
the 411 Blackout. This culminated in a public
comment given in front of the U.S-Canadian
joint task force to investigate the blackout
in New York on December 5, 2003. Currently
he is working on a book titled What's
the 411 Blackout? - War Games, and 9-11.
Kane is the only journalist
actively covering the New York 9-11 Truth
Movement. This group has been at the footprint
of Ground Zero every Saturday since January
of 2004. He is an associate producer for
Shadow Government Television, the production
team that produced "BUSH KNEW",
which was a finalist in the Move On "Bush
in 30 Seconds" ad contest. Kane has
also worked with Public Citizen's "Water
for All" Campaign on a CD Rom which
details the facts surrounding the world
water crisis.
Comment: There's too
many “old” people around this place.
The world that's coming is the world
that needs to be seen through the eyes
of the young. Mike Kane is a gregarious
and truly perceptive talent, just starting
out as a writer the same way I did; not
out of choice but out of necessity. He's
someone who has looked at the world around
him and said, “I have to do something
about this.” A year and a half ago I
saw that he was someone to be watched
and supported. He has the makings of
a leader and a teacher, and the energy
to do great things. |
| |
Wayne
Madsen |
|
Wayne
Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative
journalist, author and syndicated columnist.
He has written for The Village Voice, The
Progressive, Counterpunch, Online Journal,
CorpWatch, Multinational Monitor, News Insider,
In These Times, and The American Conservative.
Mr. Madsen is the author of The Handbook
of Personal Data Protection (London: Macmillan,
1992), an acclaimed reference book on international
data protection law; Genocide and Covert
Operations in Africa 1993-1999 (Edwin Mellen
Press, 1999); co-author of America's Nightmare:
The Presidency of George Bush II (Dandelion,
2003).
He is a frequent political and national security commentator on Fox News
and has also appeared on ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, CNN, BBC, and MS-NBC. He has
been invited to testifty as a witness before the US House of Representatives,
the UN Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and an terrorism investigation panel
of the French government.
Mr. Madsen has some twenty years experience in security issues. As a U.S.
Naval Officer, he managed one of the first computer security programs for
the U.S. Navy. He subsequently worked for the National Security Agency,
the Naval Data Automation Command, Department of State, RCA Corporation,
and Computer Sciences Corporation.
Active in politics, Mr. Madsen was a volunteer for John McCain's 2000 presidential
campaign and established an exploratory committee to run in the 2004 Democratic
primary for Virginia's 8th Congressional District. |
| |
Gregson
Vaux |
|
| Gregson Vaux currently works as a power/energy engineer in private industry. His education reflects the years he spent in different professions: M.S. Civil and Environmental Engineering (Carnegie Mellon University), B.S. Physics - minor in Geology (University of Pittsburgh), M.A. Teaching English as a Second Language (Penn State), B.S. Science (Penn State). He recently finished his graduate work in Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University and before that taught Physics and Technical English at Kuwait University's School of Petroleum Engineering. |
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