TRNN Bloggers

Based in New Delhi, Aijaz Ahmad has appeared many times on The Real News Network; he is Senior Editorial Consultant, and political commentator for the Indian newsmagazine, Frontline. He has taught Political Science, and has written widely on South Asia and the Middle East.

Alex Politaki is a radio and print journalist living in Athens

Allen Ruff is a U.S. historian and investigative researcher. His primary work centers on opposition to U.S. "grand strategy" and interventions in the Middle East, Central Asia and elsewhere. He hosts a weekly a public affairs program on WORT, 89.9 FM in Madison, Wisconsin and blogs at allenruff.blogspot.com.

Annie Machon was an intelligence officer for the UK's MI5 in the 1990s, but she left after blowing the whistle on the incompetence and crimes of the British spy agencies. She is now a writer, media commentator, political campaigner, and international public speaker on a variety of intelligence-related issues. She is also the Director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) in Europe.

Arjen is co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Gendo. He studied Science & Policy at Utrecht University and worked for IBM and Twynstra Gudde as IT architect, trainer and IT strategy advisor. Since late 2001 Arjen has been self-employed, advising clients on the strategic impact of new technological developments. He is a certified EDP auditor and information security specialist. As a much sought-after international speaker on technology policy issues he gives over 100 keynote talks every year.

Since 2002 he has been involved in formulating public IT policy in the areas of open standards and opensource for the government and public sector. Arjen advises senior managers and administrators of companies and public institutions, members of parliament in several European countries and the Dutch Cabinet about the opportunities offered by open standards and open source software for the European knowledge economy and society as a whole.

In addition to information technology, Arjen also works on scenario planning and strategic assessments of emerging technologies such as bio- and nanotechnology. With clients he investigates the social, economic and geo-political impact of science and technology.

Austin Mackell is a freelance journalist who has worked for a variety of corporate and community outlets from my hometown of Sydney and from the Middle East, including from Lebanon during Israels 2006 invasion and from Iran during the tumultuous presidential elections there in 2009. You can find more of my blog posts at: austingmackell.wordpress.com

Bill McKibben, a well known environmental author and activist, is the founder of 350.org, an international climate change campaign. 350.org is named for the safe level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, 350 parts per million. This October 24, Bill and 350.org are coordinating an International Day of Climate Action to call for a strong climate treaty that meets the 350 target.

When he's not busy organizing, Bill is an active writer on the climate crisis and other environmental issues. His 1989 book The End of Nature was the first book to warn the general public about the threat of global warming. Bill is a frequent contributor to various magazines including The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's,Orion Magazine, Mother Jones, The New York Review of Books, Granta, Rolling Stone and Outside. He is also a board member and contributor to Grist Magazine. He has been awarded Guggenheim and Lyndhurst Fellowships, and won the Lannan Prize for nonfiction writing in 2000. He is currently a Scholar in Residence at Middlebury College and lives in Ripton, Vermont with his wife, author Sue Halpern and daughter Sophie.

For more information, visit www.billmckibben.com.

Bill's been leading the fight against global warming for 20 years, since he wrote the first book for a general audience on the subject, The End of Nature in 1989. But, let's face it, taking on the climate crisis is going to take more than a few good books: it's going to take a movement.

Carles Muntaner is Professor of Nursing, Public Health and Psychiatry at the University of Toronto. He has been working on the public health aspects of the Bolivarian Revolution for more than a decade including Muntaner C, Chung H, Mahmood Q and Armada F. “History Is Not Over. The Bolivarian Revolution, Barrio Adentro and Health Care in Venezuela.” In T Ponniah and J Eastwood The Revolution in Venezuela. Harvard: HUP, 2011

María Páez Victor is a Venezuelan sociologist, specializing in health and medicine.

Joan Benach is a professor of Public Health at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona. He has collaborated in a number of studies on the public health policies of the Bolivarian Revolution.

Costas Lapavitsas is a professor of economics at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London

Danny Schechter, "The News Dissector," is a former network TV producer, radio newscaster, and edits MediaChannel.org. He has written nine books on media themes. His latest, 'Plunder', was inspired by his latest film, In Debt We Trust: America Before The Bubble Bursts

Daphne Wysham is a Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies and founder and host of Earthbeat, now airing on 61 public radio stations in the US and Canada.

David Swanson's books include: War Is A Lie (2010), When the World Outlawed War (2011), and The Military Industrial Complex at 50 (2012).  He is the host of  Talk Nation Radio. He has been a journalist, activist, organizer, educator, and agitator.  Swanson helped plan the nonviolent occupation of Freedom Plaza in Washington DC in 2011.  Swanson holds a master's degree in philosophy from the University of Virginia. He has worked as a newspaper reporter and as a communications director, with jobs including press secretary for Dennis Kucinich's 2004 presidential campaign, media coordinator for the International Labor Communications Association, and three years as communications coordinator for ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. He blogs at http://davidswanson.org and http://warisacrime.org and works as Campaign Coordinator for the online activist organization http://rootsaction.org Swanson also works on the communications committee of Veterans For Peace, of which he is an associate (non-veteran) member. Swanson is Secretary of Peace in the Green Shadow Cabinet.

Dean Baker is co-director of the Centre for Economic and Policy Research

Dimitri Lascaris is a lawyer called to practice in the State of New York and the Province of Ontario, Canada, where he is a Securities Class Action Lawyer. Dimitri was a securities lawyer for a major Wall Street law firm in their New York and Paris offices. He represented the underwriting syndicate in what was, at the time,the largest initial public offering of common stock in United States history. He also acted on behalf of the Republic of France in the privatization of state industries, and the government of Greece and the German development bank in numerous cross-border securities offerings.

Doug Henwood is the founder and editor of the Left Business Observer. Henwood is also a contributing editor of The Nation and does a weekly program on WBAI radio, New York's Pacifica outlet. His book, The State of the USA Atlas, was published by Simon & Schuster in 1994; his Wall Street was published by Verso in 1997 (paperback, 1998) to great acclaim.

Frank Hammer is a retired General Motors employee and former President and Chairman of Local 909 in Warren, Michigan. He now organizes with the Auto Worker Caravan, an association of active and retired auto workers who advocate for workers demands in Washington.

Gareth Porter is a historian and investigative journalist on US foreign and military policy analyst. He writes regularly for Inter Press Service on US policy towards Iraq and Iran. Author of four books, the latest of which is Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam.

Gerald Epstein is codirector of the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) and Professor of Economics. He received his Ph.D. in economics from Princeton University. He has published widely on a variety of progressive economic policy issues, especially in the areas of central banking and international finance, and is the editor or co-editor of six volumes.

Gideon Levy is a prominent Israeli journalist and author of the weekly column Twilight Zone in the Israeli paper Ha'aretz. He is also an editorial board member of Ha'aretz. Between 1978 and 1982 Levy served in the Shimon Peres office when Peres was the leader of the Labor Party.

Gilbert Achcar grew up in Lebanon, and is currently Professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) of the University of London. His books include The Clash of Barbarisms: The Making of the New World Disorder, published in 13 languages, Perilous Power: The Middle East and U.S. Foreign Policy, co-authored with Noam Chomsky, and most recently the critically acclaimed The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives.

Greg Palast is a New York Times-bestselling author and a journalist for the British Broadcasting Corporation as well as the British newspaper The Observer.[4] His work frequently focuses on corporate malfeasance but has also been known to work with labor unions and consumer advocacy groups. Notably, he has claimed to have uncovered evidence that Florida Governor Jeb Bush, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, and Florida Elections Unit Chief Clay Roberts, along with the ChoicePoint corporation, rigged the ballots during the US Presidential Election of 2000 and again in 2004 when, he argued, the problems and machinations from 2000 continued, and that challenger John Kerry actually would have won if not for disproportional "spoilage" of Democratic votes.[5]

Palast lectured at Cambridge University and the University of Sao Paulo. He lives in London and New York City. Palast is originally from Los Angeles, and was educated at the University of Chicago,where he studied with the "Chicago Boys", and eventually earned an MBA.

On September 13, 2006, after filming a camp of Hurricane Katrina refugees in Louisiana near a massive Exxon oil refinery, Palast reported that a complaint had been filed against him for the unauthorized videotaping of a "critical infrastructure asset." Palast's office later indicated that Exxon had "called off the dogs" and that no charges would be filed.

He is best known in the US for uncovering Katherine Harris' purge of black voters from Florida's voter rolls in 2000. His  new book which is  a New York Times bestseller is called  Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps.

Gregory Wilpert a German-American sociologist who earned a Ph.D. in sociology from Brandeis University in 1994. Between 2000 and 2008 he lived in Venezuela, where he taught at the Central University of Venezuela and then worked as a freelance journalist, writing on Venezuelan politics for a wide range of publications and also founded Venezuelanalysis.com, an english-langugage website about Venezuela. In 2007 he published the book Changing Venezuela by Taking Power: The History and Policies of the Chavez Government (Verso Books). He moved back to the U.S. in 2008 because his wife was named Consul General of Venezuela in New York. Since returning to the U.S. he has been working as an Adjunct Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College.

James R. Crotty is a Professor Emeritus of Economics and Sheridan Scholar at University of Massachusetts. His writings have appeared in such diverse journals as the American Economic Review, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Cambridge Journal of Economics, the Review of Radical Economics, Monthly Review, the Journal of Post Keynesian Economics, and the Journal of Economic Issues.

James K. Galbraith teaches at the LBJ School of Public Affairs, The University of Texas at Austin. He is a Senior Scholar of the Levy Economics Institute and the Chair of the Board of Economists for Peace and Security. The son of a renowned economist, the late John Kenneth Galbraith, he writes occasional commentary for many publications, including Mother Jones, The Texas Observer, The American Prospect, and The Nation. He directs the University of Texas Inequality Project, an informal research group based at the LBJ School, and is President this year of the Association for Evolutionary Economics.

Dr. Jayati Ghosh is Professor of Economics and currently also Chairperson at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Educated at Delhi University, Jawaharlal Nehru University and the University of Cambridge, England, her research interests include globalization, international trade and finance, employment patterns in developing countries, macroeconomic policy, and issues related to gender and development.

Among other books, she has co-authored (with Prof. C.P. Chandrasekhar) Crisis as a Conquest: Learning from East Asia, The Market that Failed: A Decade of Neoliberal Economic Reforms in India and Work and Well-being in the Age of Finance. In addition to numerous academic articles, she is a regular columnist for Frontline magazine and Businessline financial daily, as well as a weekly columnist for several newspapers.

She is one of the founders of the Economic Research Foundation in New Delhi and is on the board of various other social research organizations. Since 2002 she has been the Executive Secretary of International Development Economics Associates (IDEAS), an international network of heterodox development economists www.networkideas.org. She was the Chairperson of the Commission on Farmers Welfare in 2004 constituted by Andhra Pradesh Government. She continues to be closely involved in working with progressive organizations and social movements.

Jeff Cohen is the director of the Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College, and he was the founder of the media watchdog FAIR. He is the co-founder of RootsAction.org. He joins us from Ithaca, New York.

Jeremiah Goulka writes about American politics and culture, focusing on security, race, and the Republican Party, of which he is a former member.  He was formerly an analyst at the RAND Corporation, a recovery worker in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, and an attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice.  He lives in Washington, D.C.  You can follow him on Twitter @jeremiahgoulka or contact him at jeremiah@jeremiahgoulka.com.  His website is jeremiahgoulka.com.

Jesse Freeston is a Canadian video journalist and filmmaker. His work focuses primarily on social movements in North and Central America, but he has also done investigative work around topics such as the military-industrial complex, the global economic crisis, and undocumented migration. He is mostly known for exposing fraud ^[1][2] in the Honduran election of 2009, and for his coverage of the 2010 G-20 summit in Toronto, where Freeston himself was attacked by an officer with the Toronto Police Service before having his microphone ripped from his hand by another officer.^[3] His video-journalism work with The Real News Network, which is all licensed copyleft, has been republished by numerous outlets including The Huffington Post, Common Dreams and Le Monde Diplomatique. In 2012, he made three 30-minute Spanish-language documentaries for TeleSUR. He is currently finishing a feature-length documentary on the plantation occupation movement in Honduras' Lower Aguan Valley.

Jesse Rosenfeld is the editor of The Daily Nuisance. He is based in Tel Aviv - Jaffa and Ramallah since 2007, where he's written for The Guardian online, The National, Haaretz English and The Washington Report on Middle East Affiars.

Professor Johan Galtung is the founder and director of TRANSCEND-International. A non-profit network for Mediation and Conflict Resolution by non violent means. The network was founded in 1993. He has mediated in about 50 conflicts between and within states in conflict for over 50 years. Transcend connects over 400 experts in peace and reconciliation work. He currently teaches at the World Peace Academy at the University of Basel. http://www.transcend.org/

John Pilger was born and grew up in Bondi, Sydney, Australia. He launched his first newspaper at Sydney High School and later completed a four year cadetship with Australian Consolidated Press. "It was one of the strictest language courses I know," he says. "Devised by a celebrated, literate editor, Brian Penton, the aim was economy of language and accuracy. It certainly taught me to admire writing that was spare, precise and free of cliches, that didn't retreat into the passive voice and used adjectives only when absolutely necessary. I have long since slipped that leash, but those early disciplines helped shape my journalism and writing and my understanding of moving and still pictures".

John Weeks is Professor Emeritus and Senior Researcher at the Centre for Development Policy and Research, and Research on Money and Finance Group at the School of Oriental & African Studies at the University of London.

Justin Elliott was previously a reporter at Salon.com and TPMmuckraker and news editor at Talking Points Memo. He was also a fact-checker at Mother Jones and has written for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and other publications.

Kathy Kelly (kathy@vcnv.org) is a co-coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence (www.vcnv.org).  She has been living in Kabul for the past three weeks as a guest of the Afghan Peace Volunteers (ourjourneytosmile.com)

Kevin Zeese is co-director of It's Our Economy, an organization that advocates for democratizing the economy. He's also an attorney who is one of the original organizers of the National Occupation of Washington, DC. He has been active in independent and third party political campaigns including for state legislative offices in Maryland, governor of California and U.S. president, where he served as press secretary and spokesperson for Ralph Nader in 2004. He ran for the U.S. Senate in 2006 and was the only person ever nominated by the Green Party, Libertarian Party and Populist Party.

Lenny Brody has been politically active for 50 years fighting in the interests of poor and working class people. He was involved in the civil rights movement in South Carolina and the anti Vietnam War protests during the 1960s. Since that time he has studied economics and theories of political change while continuing his political activism. Mr. Brody is working with the Chicago chapter of Progressive Democrats of America to build an independent political movement that will fight for and empower the victims of the current economic crisis.

Lia Tarachanskyis an Israeli-Canadian journalist with The Real News Network covering Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories. Born in the Soviet Union, Tarachansky grew up in a settlement in the occupied West Bank. She is currently working on her first documentary, Seven Deadly Myths, about the 1948 ethnic cleansing and its denial in Israeli society. Before Israel/oPt, Tarachansky was based with The Real News in Toronto, Canada and Washington D.C.

Lynn Parramore is an AlterNet senior editor. She is cofounder of Recessionwire, founding editor of New Deal 2.0, and author of 'Reading the Sphinx: Ancient Egypt in Nineteenth-Century Literary Culture.' She received her Ph.d in English and Cultural Theory from NYU, where she has taught essay writing and semiotics. She is the Director of AlterNet's New Economic Dialogue Project. Follow her on Twitter @LynnParramore.

M.J. Akbar is editor of The Sunday Guardian, published from Delhi, India on Sunday, published from London and editorial director, India Today and Headlines Today.

Mark Karlin is the editor of BuzzFlash at Truthout.  He served as editor and publisher of BuzzFlash for ten years before joining Truthout in 2010.  BuzzFlash has won four Project Censored Awards.

Mark Weisbrot is the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research

Mary Bottari is the Deputy Director of the Center for Media and Democracy publishers of PRWatch.org, BanksterUSA.org and their new site ALECExposed.org. CMD recently published a report documenting ALEC's dominance of the Wisconsin legislature under the leadership of ALEC alum Scott Walker.

Murray Cooke is a member of CUPE Local 3903, and he has two children in the public school system. An earlier version of this article first appeared on the New Socialist Webzine site.

Noam Chomsky has written and lectured widely on linguistics, philosophy, intellectual history, contemporary issues, international affairs and U.S. foreign policy. His works include: Aspects of the Theory of Syntax; Cartesian Linguistics; Sound Pattern of English (with Morris Halle); Language and Mind; American Power and the New Mandarins; At War with Asia; For Reasons of State; Peace in the Middle East?; Reflections on Language; The Political Economy of Human Rights, Vol. I and II (with E.S. Herman); Rules and Representations; Lectures on Government and Binding; Towards a New Cold War; Radical Priorities; Fateful Triangle; Knowledge of Language; Turning the Tide; Pirates and Emperors; On Power and Ideology; Language and Problems of Knowledge; The Culture of Terrorism; Manufacturing Consent (with E.S. Herman); Necessary Illusions; Deterring Democracy; Year 501; Rethinking Camelot: JFK, the Vietnam War and US Political Culture; Letters from Lexington; World Orders, Old and New; The Minimalist Program; Powers and Prospects; The Common Good; Profit Over People; The New Military Humanism; New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind; Rogue States; A New Generation Draws the Line; 9-11; and Understanding Power. His most recent book is called Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on Israel's War Against the Palestinians published in November of 2010.

Norman Solomon is co-founder of RootsAction.org and founding director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He co-chairs the Healthcare Not Warfare campaign organized by Progressive Democrats of America. His books include “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.” He writes the Political Culture 2013 column.

Paul Jay, is CEO and Senior Editor of The Real News Network. TRNN is independent of political parties, is viewer supported and not-for-profit. TRNN does not accept advertising, government or corporate funding. This funding model allows for uncompromising broadcast journalism. Now in start up phase, its mission is to be a daily video news service for a mass audience online and on television.

Prior to TRNN, Jay was for ten seasons the creator and executive producer of CBC Newsworld's flagship debate programs, counterSpin and FaceOff.

Jay has produced and directed more than 20 major documentary films including "Return to Kandahar", Lost in Las Vegas and Hitman Hart: wrestling with shadows, a feature length documentary, that was screened in 25 major festivals and won more than a dozen awards. It's been called "one of the most acclaimed Canadian films in years"(eye magazine), "A tale as bizarre as Kafka and as tragic as Shakespeare" (Ottawa Citizen) and "one of the best films of 1998"(Peter Plagens, art critic for Newsweek).

A past chair of the Documentary Organization of Canada, Jay is the founding chair of Hot Docs!, the Canadian international documentary film festival.

Phyllis Bennis is a Fellow and the Director of the New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington DC. She is the author of Before and After: US Foreign Policy and the September 11 Crisis , Ending the US War in Afghanistan: A Primer and Understanding the US-Iran Crisis: A Primer.

Ray McGovern is a retired CIA officer. McGovern was employed under seven US presidents for over 27 years, presenting the morning intelligence briefings at the White House under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. McGovern was born and raised in the Bronx, graduated summa cum laude from Fordham University, received an M.A. in Russian Studies from Fordham, a certificate in Theological Studies from Georgetown University, and graduated from Harvard Business School's Advanced Management Program. McGovern now works for "Tell the Word," a ministry of the inner-city/Washington Church of the Saviour, which sent him forth four weeks ago to join other Justice people on "The Audacity of Hope," the U.S. Boat to Gaza.

Reese Erlich is a best-selling book author and freelance journalist who writes regularly for the Dallas Morning News, Canadian Broadcasting Corp. Radio and National Public Radio. He has won numerous journalism awards, including the prestigious Peabody (shared with others). He is the author of several books, and is currently touring across the country promoting his most recent one called: Conversations with Terrorists: Middle East Leaders on Politics, Violence and Empire, published in September 2010. Reese Erlich received a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting for his reporting from Bahrain.www.reeseerlich.com.

Richard D. Wolff is an Economist, Author, and Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and New School University. He has also been a visiting professor at the University of Paris I (Sorbonne). He has authored or co-authored 10 books including The Economics of Colonialism, Bringing It All Back Home: Class, Gender and Power in the Modern Household, and Rethinking Marxism. His recent work has concentrated on analyzing the causes and alternative solutions to the current global economic crisis.

Rinku Sen is an Indian-American author and activist, who is currently the president and executive director of the Applied Research Center and publisher of Colorlines.com.

Sen received a B.A. in Women's Studies from Brown University in 1988 and an M.S. in Journalism at Columbia University in 2005. In 1996, Ms. Magazine named her one of 21 feminists to watch in the 21st century and she was named in 2008 by Utne Reader as one of 50 Visionaries who are changing your world.^[1]

She has written two books. Her first book, Stir It Up: Lessons in Community Organizing (Jossey-Bass) was commissioned by the Ms. Foundation for Women and released in the fall of 2003.^[2] Her latest book, The Accidental American: Immigration and Citizenship in the Age of Globalization (Berrett-Koehler) was released in September 2008, winning the Nautilus Book Award Silver Medal, as well as a Finalist for the ForeWord Magazine 2008 Book of the Year Award (May 2009),^[3] and the 2009 IPPY Book Awards in "Current Events" Bronze Medal (May 2009).^[4]

Robert Pollin is Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. He is the founding co-Director of the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI). His research centers on macroeconomics, conditions for low-wage workers in the US and globally, the analysis of financial markets, and the economics of building a clean-energy economy in the US. His latest book is Back to Full Employment. Other books include: A Measure of Fairness: the Economics of Living Wages and Minimum Wages in the United States, and Contours of Descent: US Economic Fractures and the Landscape of Global Austerity.

Russell Diabo is the Publisher and Editor of First Nations Strategic Bulletin where this article first appeared.

Shikha Dalmia is the senior analyst for the Reason Foundation, a nonprofit think tank promoting free markets. Dalmia is a columnist at Forbes and writes regularly for Reason magazine. She is the co-winner of the first 2009 Bastiat Prize for Online Journalism for her columns in Forbes and Reason.

Shir Hever is an economic researcher in the Alternative Information Center, a Palestinian-Israeli organization active in Jerusalem and Beit-Sahour. Researching the economic aspect of the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories, some of his research topics include the international aid to the Palestinians and to Israel, the effects of the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories on the Israeli economy, and the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaigns against Israel. His work also includes giving lectures and presentations on the economy of the occupation. His first book: Political Economy of Israel's Occupation: Repression Beyond Exploitation, has been published by Pluto Press.

Soheil Asefi is an Iranian journalist in Berlin. He left Iran some years ago after  ten years professional experience in major Iranian media outlets. He had been in prison and was released on bail.   He came to Germany as the guest of the City of Nuremberg under the project ‘Writers in Exile’ funded by the German Pen Center. He is the recipient of the Hermann Kasten award in Nuremberg.

Steve Horn is a Research Fellow for DeSmogBlog. He joined the DeSmogBlog team in September 2011.

Steve previously was a reporter and researcher at the Center for Media and Democracy, interned in Washington, DC with former U.S. Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI), and interned at the Rotary International world headquarters in Evanston, Illinois. In his free time, Steve is a competitive runner, with a personal best time of 2:43:04 in the 2009 Boston Marathon.

A graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, majoring in political science and legal studies, his writing has appeared on The Guardian, AlterNet, PR Watch, The Nation, Truth-Out, FireDogLake, Common Dreams, CounterPunch, Mondoweiss, Wisconsin Watch, Antiwar.com, Nation of Change, EcoWatch, PolicyMic, WhoWhatWhy.com, Z Magazine, Climate Connections, Business Insider, The Real News Network, Uganda's Daily Monitor, Modern Ghana, the London Evening Post, CleanTechnica.

Steven Hill is a political writer whose latest books are "10 Steps to Repair American Democracy: 2012 Election Edition (www.10Steps.net) and "Europe's Promise: Why the European Way is the Best Hope in an Insecure Age" (www.EuropesPromise.org).

Thomas Ferguson is Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts, Boston and a Senior Fellow of the Roosevelt Institute. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University and taught formerly at MIT and the University of Texas, Austin. He is the author or coauthor of several books, including Golden Rule (University of Chicago Press, 1995) and Right Turn (Hill & Wang, 1986). Most of his research focuses on how economics and politics affect institutions and vice versa. His articles have appeared in many scholarly journals, including the Quarterly Journal of Economics, International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, and the Journal of Economic History. He is a long time Contributing Editor to The Nation and a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of the Historical Society and the International Journal of Political Economy.

Vijay Prashad is a professor of international studies at Trinity College. Among the many books he has authored are The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World and Arab Spring, Libyan Winter. He also writes regularly for Asia Times Online, Frontline magazine and Counterpunch.

Black was litigation director of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, deputy director of the FSLIC, SVP and general counsel of the Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco, and senior deputy chief counsel, Office of Thrift Supervision. He was deputy director of the National Commission on Financial Institution Reform, Recovery and Enforcement.

Black developed the concept of "control fraud" frauds in which the CEO or head of state uses the entity as a "weapon." Control frauds cause greater financial losses than all other forms of property crime combined. He recently helped the World Bank develop anti-corruption initiatives and served as an expert for OFHEO in its enforcement action against Fannie Mae's former senior management.

F William Engdahl is an economist and author and the writer of the best selling book "A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order." Mr Engdhahl has written on issues of energy, politics and economics for more than 30 years, beginning with the first oil shock in the early 1970s. Mr. Engdahl contributes regularly to a number of publications including Asia Times Online, Asia, Inc, Japan's Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Foresight magazine; Freitag and ZeitFragen newspapers in Germany and Switzerland respectively. His newest book is called "Gods of Money: Wall Street and the Death of the American Century". He is based in Germany.

William Fisher has managed economic development programs for the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development in the Middle East, North Africa, Latin America, Asia and elsewhere for the past 25 years. He has supervised major multi-year projects for AID in Egypt, where he lived and worked for three years. He returned later with his team to design Egypt's agricultural strategy. Fisher served in the international affairs area in the administration of President John F. Kennedy. He began his working life as a reporter and bureau chief for the Daytona Beach News-Journal and the Associated Press in Florida. He now reports on a wide-range of issues for a number of online journals.

Yves Smith has written the popular and trenchant financial blog "Naked Capitalism" since 2006.

Yves has spent more than 25 years in the financial services industry and currently heads Aurora Advisors, a New York-based management consulting firm specializing in corporate finance advisory and financial services. Prior experience includes Goldman Sachs (in corporate finance), McKinsey & Co., and Sumitomo Bank (as head of mergers and acquisitions). Yves has written for publications in the United States and Australia, including The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, Slate, The Conference Board Review, Institutional Investor, The Daily Deal and the Australian Financial Review. Yves is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Business School.