With his wife Medea Benjamin and activist Kirsten Irgens-Moller, he co-founded Global Exchange,[1] a social justice and anti-globalization non-governmental organization based in San Francisco, California.

He graduated from high school in 1968, at which time he was drafted to fight in the Vietnam War, but purposefully failed his physical in order to avoid being deployed.

He then worked as a truck driver and bricklayer, as well as spending nights as a bass guitarist for a band (The Everlovin) that primarily played in strip clubs and topless bars.

Following this, he obtained a Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Cruz, writing his thesis on the boycott movement against the apartheid regime of South Africa.

[8] Along with Scott Ritter, Daniel Ellsberg, Jody Williams, Norman Mailer, Noam Chomsky, and Medea Benjamin, he appeared in the film Hijacking Catastrophe: 9/11, Fear & the Selling of American Empire.