Background
Giordano was born in the Bronx and attended Mamaroneck High School in Mamaroneck, New York.
Giordano was born in the Bronx and attended Mamaroneck High School in Mamaroneck, New York.
Mamaroneck High School.
In 1976, when he was sixteen, he went to Albany and testified before a legislative commission in the state senate against nuclear power, felt completely ignored and concluded that the tactic of lobbying the government was futile. He was arrested for what would be the first of twenty-seven times on May 1st, 1977. When he was twenty and living in a cabin in Rowe, Massachusetts, running the Rowe Nuclear Conversion Campaign, which ended in the first-ever shutdown of an operating nuclear power plant in America, he met Abbie Hoffman, who called him "the best political organizer of his generation." The two worked together until Hoffman's death in 1989, opposing U.S. intervention in Nicaragua and fighting to save the Delaware and St. Lawrence rivers.
Giordano was for a time a prominent media figure in Western Massachusetts. He sometimes worked on political campaigns, notably for senator John Kerry and for the legalization of marijuana. Al Giordano is a musician who has performed with numerous bands On April 18, 2000, Giordano launched , a nonprofit news organization, to better inform Americans on the actions of the United States and other governments in the War on Drugs in Central and South America. features both original reporting and English translations of reports from Spanish-language media.
On December 13, 2007, Giordano launched The Field, a political blog initially covering the 2008 presidential election, and later expanded to include American politics more generally. On June 14, 2008, Giordano relocated from RuralVotes to In September 2007, Giordano wrote an article in the Boston Phoenix describing how Barack Obama would overtake then frontrunner Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination. Vanity Fair commented that "he first to grasp the portent of what was taking shape was the prophet of the Obama paradigm shift, the journalist/activist/online editor/blogger Al Giordano, who, as a student of the teachings and tactics of community organizer Saul Alinsky (whose Rules for Radicals is the guerrilla guide for domestic insurgents), divined the advantage that Obama’s small-donor base gave him against old-school juggernauts.".