21st Century Abolitionism: What Can Americans Do to End Student Loan Debt Servitude?
In October 2011, the White House announced, “Currently, more than 36 million Americans have federal student loan debt.” By the end of 2011, student loan debt had exceeded $1 trillion. Two-thirds of college seniors graduate with student loans, including over 62 percent of public university graduates. According to the The Project on Student Loan Debt, […]
7 Reasons Why I Became a Dissident Psychologist
Why do some of us become dissident mental health professionals? The majority of psychiatrists, psychologists, and other mental health professionals “go along to get along” and maintain a status quo that includes drug company corruption, pseudoscientific research, and a “standard of care” that is routinely damaging and occasionally kills young children. If that sounds hyperbolic, […]
How Ayn Rand Seduced Young Men and Helped Make the U.S. into an Uncaring Nation
Ayn Rand’s “philosophy” is nearly perfect in its immorality, which makes the size of her audience all the more ominous and symptomatic as we enter a curious new phase in our society. . . . To justify and extol human greed and egotism is to my mind not only immoral, but evil.— Gore Vidal, 1961 […]
How the Occupy Movement Has Embraced Liberation Psychology
While the term liberation psychology is less commonly known in the United States than in Latin America, the spirit of liberation psychology has been embraced by U.S. Occupy participants. Liberation psychology, unlike mainstream psychology, questions adjustment to the societal status quo, and it energizes oppressed people to resist all injustices. Liberation psychology attempts to discover […]
When the World Outlawed War: An Interview with David Swanson
David Swanson’s recently released book, When the World Outlawed War, tells the story of how the highly energized peace movement in the 1920s, supported by an overwhelming majority of U.S. citizens from every level of society, was able to push politicians into something quite remarkable—the Kellogg-Briand Pact and the renunciation of war as an instrument […]
New CDC Report on Soaring Antidepressant Use: Can More Americans Politicize Their Despair and Take It to the Streets?
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently reported that antidepressant use in the United States has increased nearly 400 percent in the last two decades, making antidepressants the most frequently used class of medications by Americans ages 18-44. Among Americans 12 years and older, 11 percent were taking antidepressants by 2005-2008 (the […]
Accelerating “The Coming Revolt of the Guards” —and Increasing the Thousands on the Streets to Millions
In a highly developed society, the Establishment cannot survive without the obedience and loyalty of millions of people who are given small rewards to keep the system going: the soldiers and police, teachers and ministers, administrators and social workers, technicians and production workers, doctors, lawyers. . . . They become the guards of the system, […]
How Can Anti-Authoritarian Critical Thinkers Rise Above Their Pessimism and Fight?
Critical thinking anti-authoritarians see the enormity of the military-industrial complex, the energy-industrial complex, and the financial-industrial complex. They see the overwhelming power of the U.S. ruling class. They see many Americans unaware of the true sources of their oppression or with little knowledge of the strategies and tactics necessary to overcome it. They see American […]
Talk at the “Military Industrial Complex at 50” Conference, Charlottesville, VA
American Political Passivity, Anti-Authoritarianism, and Building a Base
Battle for Brooklyn and Eminent Domain Abuse
Do we really accept that Big Money—through intimidation, bribery, or some other coercion—can shove us out of our homes and obliterate our communities? Eminent domain is the government’s right to seize private property, usually with compensation, for the public good. We live in a nation, however, in which the elite—not ordinary Americans—have the power to […]
