Michael Goldstein

In 2008, when so many of us had high hopes for "Change we can believe in," Michael Goldstein wrote:

"I, too, want Barack Obama to win, but I see him in a familiar lesser-of-two-evils light. Of course less evil is better than more evil, and, after eight years, I am as ready for less as anyone else. It is as if we have been fed a diet of stone soup, and someone is offering us a breakfast cereal composed of highly processed grains, loaded with high-fructose corn syrup, made multi-colored with chemicals, and preserved with God knows what. Yes, let's gratefully take Kellogg's, and start growing stronger. But let's not kid ourselves that we can get healthy on this stuff."

Michael lives in Northern California, where he works as a mediator, as well as an appellate lawyer handling death-penalty and other court-appointed cases. He graduated with high honors from Princeton University's School of Public and International Affairs and holds a J.D. from Stanford Law School and an M.A. in counseling psychology from John F. Kennedy University. Michael blogs in the Huffington Post and on his own site, www.michaelgoldstein.us, focusing on the need to move beyond the teeter-totter of the two-party system and the means to do so.

A native of the Midwest, Michael entered college in the 1960s as a liberal Democrat. However, his own research into original documents, and that of his colleagues, in an in-depth seminar on the Vietnam War made it clear that the justification for the United States' carrying out a war there was built on deliberate falsehoods--promoted by a liberal Democratic administration. Having also been a summer community organizer in an anti-poverty program in Appalachia and a supporter of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements, he began to listen when members of what was then called the New Left were saying that all the difficult issues facing the country were interconnected and flowed from the very nature of the system itself.

Michael continued his anti-war work while in law school and began to study revolutionary theory and practice in other parts of the world. He became disillusioned with the dogmatism and sectarianism of the New Left, while never losing faith in the capacity of a properly educated and united populace to turn the country around. He still believes that, if the best we can do is work for and vote for the lesser of two evils among corporate-funded political candidates for another 100 years, we are signing up for another 100 years of evil, which we certainly cannot afford.

Many revolutionaries of the '60s and '70s believed in violent overthrow of those who will use violence to stay in power. Michael believes that anything other than a commitment to nonviolence is is self-defeating on many levels, including that resort to "armed struggle" produces the disappointment expressed in the line from a famous song: "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss." Today his sense of what is needed to create a nation that lives up to its peoples' values is also informed by his spirituality and a strong faith in humanity, provided that people are well-informed rather than misled, and that those of us who already know what is needed organize ourselves to carry the message effectively.