Rob Kall is executive editor, publisher and site architect of OpEdNews.com, Host of the Rob Kall Bottom Up Radio Show (WNJC 1360 AM), President of Futurehealth, Inc, inventor . He is also published regularly on the Huffingtonpost.com

With his experience as architect and founder of a technorati top 100 blog, he is also a new media / social media consultant and trainer for corporations, non-profits, entrepreneurs and authors.

Rob is a frequent Speaker on the bottom up revolution, politics, The art, science and power of story, heroes and the hero's journey, Positive Psychology, Stress, Biofeedback and a wide range of subjects. He is a campaign consultant specializing in tapping the power of stories for issue positioning, stump speeches and debates, and optimizing tapping the power of new media. He recently retired as organizer of several conferences, including StoryCon, the Summit Meeting on the Art, Science and Application of Story and The Winter Brain Meeting on neurofeedback, biofeedback, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology. See more of his articles here and, older ones, here.

Linda Milazzo is a Managing Editor at OpedNews. She's a Los Angeles based writer, educator and activist. Since 1974, she has divided her time between the entertainment industry, government organizations & community development projects and educational programs.

Linda began her writing career over 30 years ago, starting out in advertising and promotions. From 1976 to 1989, she operated an independent public relations service providing specialty writing for individual and corporate clients. Since 2003, Linda has focused on political writing. Her essays, letters and commentaries have appeared in domestic and international journals, newspapers and magazines. She's an educator and creator of a writers' program she's taught privately and in public schools. She currently facilitates an advocacy writing workshop and is developing an advocacy writing program to be implemented in public and private educational institutions and in community based organizations.

Linda is a frequent contributor to the HuffingtonPost, Alternet, MediaChannel, Commondreams, LAProgressive, AfterDowningStreet, SmirkingChimp, Buzzflash, PDAmerica, AtlanticFreePress and to other respected news and opinion websites.

Follow Linda on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/LindaMilazzo

Dr. John Moffett is a Managing Editor at OpEdNews.com, and is an active research neuroscientist in the Washington, DC area. Dr. Moffett has published numerous scientific articles on the nervous and immune systems. Dr. Moffett's main area of research focuses on the brain metabolite N-acetylaspartate, and an associated genetic disorder known as Canavan disease.

Cheryl Biren is on the managing editor team for OpEdNews.com. She is a Philadelphia-based writer, researcher and photographer. She also serves as a consultant and researcher for the Rob Kall Bottom Up Radio Show with guests such as Noam Chomsky, whistleblower Jesselyn Raddack and former FBI agent and Time Person of the Year, Coleen Rowley. In addition to producing, she co-hosted the program with guests Daniel Ellsberg, Rep. Robert Wexler and author Naomi Wolf.

She has covered numerous protests with a focus on getting stories out that are largely ignored by corporate media.

Cheryl's photographs have appeared in various publications including OpEdNews, The Huffington Post, The Philadelphia Jewish Voice, The Nuclear Resister, France 24, along with print magazines, The Humanist and The Progressive. Her protest photography is seen in the film, Democracy and Human Rights.

In addition to OpEdNews, Cheryl's articles are widely published on the Internet and cited in the book, Sinking the Ship of State, The Presidency of George W. Bush by Walter M. Brasch.

Mikhail Lyubansky, Ph.D., is a managing editor at OpEdNews and a member of the teaching faculty in the Department of Psychology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he teaches Psychology of Race and Ethnicity and Theories of Psychotherapy.

His research and writing interests focus on race relations and restorative justice. He is a regular contributor to edited volumes on popular culture, including Harry Potter, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Twilight, published by BenBella and recently co-authored a book on the Russian-Jewish diaspora: Building a diaspora: Russian Jews in Israel, Germany, and the United States. An autobiographical essay of his interests in race relations and basketball is available here. His Psychology Today blog about race is called Between the Lines.

All material on this site published under his byline remains the property of Mikhail Lyubansky, copyright 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011. Permission is granted to repost and distribute, with proper attribution.

Follow Mikhail on Twitter.

Sheila Samples is an Oklahoma writer and a former civilian US Army Public Information Officer. She is a Senior OpEd editor, and a regular contributor for a variety of Internet sites.

Walter Brasch is an award-winning journalist and university professor. His current books are America's Unpatriotic Acts: The Federal Government's Violation of Constitutional and Civil Rights, and 'Unacceptable': The Federal response to Hurricane Katrina, both available at amazon.com, borders.com and most major on-line bookstores.

Election Integrity Editor

Joan Brunwasser is a co-founder of Citizens for Election Reform (CER) which since 2005 existed for the sole purpose of raising the public awareness of the critical need for election reform. Our goal: to restore fair, accurate, transparent, secure elections where votes are cast in private and counted in public. Because the problems with electronic (computerized) voting systems include a lack of transparency and the ability to accurately check and authenticate the vote cast, these systems can alter election results and therefore are simply antithetical to democratic principles and functioning.


Since the pivotal 2004 Presidential election, Joan has come to see the connection between a broken election system, a dysfunctional, corporate media and a total lack of campaign finance reform. This has led her to enlarge the parameters of her writing to include interviews with whistle-blowers and articulate others who give a view quite different from that presented by the mainstream media. She also turns the spotlight on activists and ordinary folks who are striving to make a difference, to clean up and improve their corner of the world. By focusing on these intrepid individuals, she gives hope and inspiration to those who might otherwise be turned off and alienated. She also interviews people in the arts in all their variations - authors, journalists, filmmakers, actors, playwrights, and artists. Why? The bottom line: without art and inspiration, we lose one of the best parts of ourselves. And we're all in this together. If Joan can keep even one of her fellow citizens going another day, she considers her job well done.

Joan has been Election Integrity Editor for OpEdNews since December, 2005. Her articles also appear at RepublicMedia.TV and Scoop.co.nz.

Josh Mitteldorf, a senior editor at OpEdNews, was educated to be an astrophysicist, and has branched out from there to mathematical modeling in a variety of areas. He has taught mathematics, statistics, and physics at several universities. He is an avid amateur pianist, and father of two adopted Chinese girls. This year, his affiliation is with the University of Arizona, where he studies the evolution of aging.

Scott Baker is a Senior Editor and Writer at Op Ed News, a Writer for DailyKos, and is the author of Neitherworld - a two-volume novel blending Native American myth, archaeological detail, government conspiracy, with a sci-fi flair.
He has a blog: http://newthinking.blogspot.com/
He is President of Common Ground-NYC, a Geoist group focusing on achieving social justice and economic growth by untaxing production and taxing the abuse and use of the natural resources of the commons.
He is also NY State Coordinator for the Public Banking institute, which seeks to promote Public Banking, along the lines of the best-known American example, the Bank of North Dakota. The PBI is chaired by another OEN blogger, Ellen Brown.

Scott has several progressive petitions on Change.org:
A new form of capitalism: Geonomics
http://www.change.org/actions/view/a_new_form_of_capitalism_geonomics
and
Close the Gap (in the NYC Greenway's East Side)
http://change.org/actions/view/close_the_gap_2
Let NY fund its budget gap with a State Bank - change.org/actions/view/close_the_gap_2
www.change.org/petitions/view/let_the_empire_state_finance_its_own_budget_gap

Scott was an I.T. Manager for New York University for over two decades, where he initiated computing, developed databases, established networks for two major departments and earned a Certificate for Frontline Leadership. He had a video game published in Compute! Magazine.

Scott now chooses to use his computer for the greater good.
He is a graduate and advanced student of the Henry George School of Social Science in New York City and has published articles in the Georgist newsletter - Groundswell - put out by Common Ground.

Scott is a modern-day Renaissance Man with interests in economics, astronomy, history, natural sciences, psychology, philosophy, Native American culture, and all future-forward topics; he has been called an adept syncretist by Kirkus Discoveries for his novel, NeitherWorld.

Scott grew up in New York City and Pennsylvania. He graduated with honors and a Bachelor's degree in Psychology from Pennsylvania State University and was a member of the Psychology honor society PSI CHI.

Today he is an avid bicyclist and is active in several Green organizations and Progressive organizations such as Transportation Alternatives, East Coast Greenway, Common Ground, and has a presence on Facebook, Change.Org, OpEdNews, and PickensPlan.
Scott is a strong proponent of the Georgist Single Tax: "Tax the use (and abuse) of natural resources, not wages or capital," which would dramatically reduce use of finite resources - which, rightfully, belong to all of us, and increase productivity in Earth-saving ways, while virtually eliminating unproductive Speculation (by taxing away the fuel for it) and decrease poverty and Social Injustice.
Technorati code: a72h4zxgud

Amanda was a managing editor at OpEdNews and worked with Rob Kall on the site from 2004 to April 2009. A retired research ethnographer, she now resides in Georgia.

Anti-war activist, mother of three combat tour US marine; member of the national steering committee for the "World Can't Wait" www.worldcantwait.net and member of Military Families Speak Out (my opinions do not reflect the national position of MFSO).

Rick Wise is an industrial psychologist and retired management consultant. For 15 years, he was managing director of ValueNet International, Inc.

Before starting ValueNet, Rick was director, corporate training and, later, director, corporate strategy for Travelers Corp., an international insurance and financial services firm. He lost six friends in the World Trade Center on 9/11. Rick was a Vietnam-era Navy Hospital Corpsman.

Rick holds PhD and M.Ed. degrees from Penn State. His BS is from West Chester University. He completed post-doctoral work at Rensselaer, Northwestern, Colorado, and Harvard. A native of Pennsylvania, Rick now lives in New England.

Multimedia, audio/video specialist

I am a Freelance Audio Engineer/ Digital Media Producer.

Meryl Ann Butler is an artist, author, and educator who has been actively engaged in utilizing the arts as stepping-stones toward joy-filled enlightenment for the past two decades. See her YouTube video, "Visionary Artist Meryl Ann Butler on Creativity and Joy" at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcGs2r_66QE

A NYC native, her response to 9-11 was to pen an invitation to healing through creativity, entitled, "90-Minute Quilts: 15+ Projects You Can Stitch in an Afternoon" (Krause 2006), which is a bestseller in the craft field. The sequel, MORE 90-Minute Quilts: 20+ Quick and Easy Projects With Triangles and Squares will be released on April 7, 2011.

She has been active in a number of international, arts-related projects as a citizen diplomat.

She has written over 100 articles for OEN. Archived articles www.opednews.com/author/author1820.html
Older archived articles, from before May 2005 are here.,

Kathlyn Stone is a Minnesota-based writer covering science and medicine, health care and related policies.�She publishes www.fleshandstone.net, a health and science news site.

I'm a college English teacher working on my dissertation. I am an anime junkie and a Shakespeare scholar, a voracious reader and a political rebel.

Besides contributing to OpEdNews.com, I am also an editor. I am a student of history, religion, exoteric and esoteric, the Humanities in general and tempered advocate for peace, justice and the unity of humankind through self-realization and mutual respect, although I am not a pacifist, nor do I believe in peace at any price, which is no peace at all but only delaying the inevitable. There are times when the world must act. Planetary consciousness is evolving, but there are many retrograde forces that would dumb us back down.

I have also just come out with my first book, a combination of poetry, photography and essays entitled "Post Katrina Blues", my reflections on the Gulf Coast and New Orleans two years after Katrina struck. Go to the store at http://sanfranciscobaypress.com/ to purchase. I also have a blogspot blog called Plutonian Mac.

Paul Roden is a long time activist DFA & PDA member working for progressive change in America. I am also the point of organizer for PDA, the Progressive Democrats of America in Lower Bucks County. I am a "Neighborhood Leader" or "Victory Precinct Captain" or "VP" for the Democratic Party for the past election cycle in Lower Makefield Township, in Bucks County. I am running in the 2010 Democratic Primary for Committee Person in the South S7th Precinct in Lower Makefield Township, Bucks County PA. I am also a member of the Coalition for Peace Action of Bucks and Montgomery County. I have been trained in nonviolent direct action campaigns, including civil disobedience by George Lakey, George Willoughby and the late William Moyer(not the PBS guy). These three men amoung others who have trained me, worked with Dr. King in the civil rights, anti-Vietnam War, Peace and nuclear disarmament movements. I have been arrested twice at the Limerick Nuclear Power Plant in Montgomery County PA. I believe in democracy and nonviolent action for a more sustainable, just and cooperative world.

(OpEdNews Contributing Editor since October 2006) Inner city schoolteacher from New York, mostly covering media manipulation. I put election/finance reform ahead of all other issues but also advocate for fiscal and ethical responsibility and reform, exposing waste and fraud, and curbing overpopulation. I enjoy open debate, history, the arts and hope to adopt a third child. Gustav Wynn is a pseudonym, but you knew that.
=--> Users may repost my articles, provided it links to the original,

Richard W. Overfield is an artist/writer currently based in New Mexico after living in Vancouver, Canada for 20 years.His paintings are represented in over 300 public & private collections in the U.S., Canada, Switzerland, France, England, Japan & who knows where else. Paintings have a habit of migrating to strange places. He has done numerous murals in New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, California & Kansas. He is currently on the Board of Directors of the Northern New Mexico Regional Art Center in Española, New Mexico.

Margaret Bassett--OEN editor--is an 88-year old, currently living in senior housing, with a lifelong interest in political philosophy. Bachelors from State University of Iowa (1944) and Masters from Roosevelt University (1975) help to unravel important requirements for modern communication. Early introduction to computer science (1966) trumps them. It's payback time. She's been "entitled" so long she hopes to find some good coming off the keyboard into the lives of those who come after her.

An OpEdNews editor, Sherwin Steffin is a retired educator, and research analyst. His working career ranged from classroom teacher, university administrator, founder and CEO of two software companies, independent consultant, ending as a research statistician for a large Internet Service Provider.

I have been an advertising executive most of my career with a long-time interest in progressive politics and journalism. I am now running as the Democartic candidate for the Pennsylvania House of Representatives on PA-41 where one of my objectives will be pass HB 1660 which will bring universal, comprehensive, single-payer healthcare to Pennsylvania and the ultimately, the entire country.

Whistleblower Editor

I am a lifelong progressive activist working for a better future. This has included work to create head of household green jobs, strengthening education, from pre-K to Higher Education, enactment of a single payer health insurance system, and modern transportation systems and infrastructure.

Growing up in Canoe Country of Northern Minnesota has given me a deeply embedded love of wilderness, not to mention nearly five thousand canoeing miles. I am an outdoor enthusiast, enjoying rock climbing, mountain biking, hiking, and of course wilderness canoeing.

I am a graduate of Hamline University in St. Paul, MN with a degree in International Relations, majoring in Political Science.

Kevin Gosztola is a multimedia editor for OpEdNews.com and a writer for WLCentral.org. He is currently serving as an intern for The Nation Magazine. And, he follows all things related to WikiLeaks, media, activism, the unfolding revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa and sometimes writes movie reviews for OEN.

He is a 2009 Young People For Fellow and a documentary filmmaker who graduated with a Film/Video B.A. degree from Columbia College Chicago in the Spring 2010. In April 2010, he co-organized a major arts & media summit called "Art, Access & Action," which explored the intersection of politics, art and media and was supported by Free Press. Chicago.

His work can be found on Open Salon, The Seminal, Media-ocracy.com, and a personal blog he started on Alternet called Moving Train Media.

An "Old Army Vet" and liberal, qua liberal, with a passion for open inquiry in a neverending quest for truth unpoisoned by religious superstitions. Per Voltaire: "He who can lead you to believe an absurdity can lead you to commit an atrocity."

Mother of two adult children, freelance artist with fine works in private collections in 20 US states, 7 European countries, Africa, China, and Japan, concerned citizen of the US.

Overreaching corporate controls of food, housing, clothing, medicine, transportation, information, and education have been a serious concern of mine for decades. Consequently I've spent a great deal of time studying and practicing self-sufficiency/ removal from "the grid".

I no longer have credit cards, I raise my own vegetables and chickens, am an herbalist, a reiki master, a shiatsu practitioner who's worked with people with serious illnesses for more than a decade, as well as an ordained minister [I call myself a shamanist because it's the closest description of what I do, not because I'm from Tibet].

I've worked in construction for many years, and I've spent some time beating dead horses on the subject of independance from corporate control and learning to live a life of value as opposed to one of dehumanization.

My message to surburbanites: rototill your front lawn, grow vegetables, put up solar panels, stay home more often, make things for yourself, and cut up your credit cards.

Live your life as if truth, honor, and love were the most important things.

The corporate culture would have us believe that we owe someone rent for the privilege of being on the planet, that some pigs are more equal than others, that it's important to be royalty- as opposed to noble- and that happiness is available for purchase.

I spend a lot of time trying to figure out the truth of things.

Eric Nelson is freelance writer, an editor at OpEdNews, and a spiritual progressive from Minnesota who has become more politically active. The reasons for this should be obvious to most; rising poverty, a broken health care system, and a growing global environmental crisis. Eric's writings are as "fair and balanced" as those of FOX news. Eric is also a web informatics expert, former intelligence analyst, and biathlon olympian.

DFA organizer, Democratic Precinct Committee Officer, writer, and programmer. My op-ed pieces have appeared in the Seattle Times, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and elsewhere. See http://TruthSite.org for my writing, my musical creations, and my animations.

A long time grassroots organizer and political activist, Arun Prabhakaran served as an Assistant Education Director at the Kensington Welfare Rights Union during its heyday. He developed popular education projects on issues of gentrification and drugs, including the Drug War Reality Tour, which looked at the impact of the global drug crisis on Philadelphia's poor and was the subject of the Guerrilla News Network documentary, "Drug War Reality Tour." He is also a member of the National Staff of the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign.

For six years, Arun worked at the Youth Health Empowerment Project developing a harm reduction drop-in center for youth in Philadelphia providing a variety of services, including case management, therapy, and basic health care. Prabhakaran is currently employed at Solutions for Progress, a public policy consulting firm which innovates and creates new public and private partnerships that benefit all involved utilizing technology, research, analysis and practical applications to improve the quality of life of their clients.

Arun graduated from Kent State University with a degree in Chemistry. He lives in West Philadelphia with his wife, Carrie and their two children, Kamal and Nina.

Tawanda Kanhema is an investigative journalist studying political science and communication at Truman State University. Kanhema is involved in independent due diligence research and production of news documentaries on a wide range of subjects including money laundering and mineral smuggling throughout southern and central Africa. Editor of Investigative Africa.

A retired counselor from Texas now living in Romania.

JOAN WILE -- author of newly-published book,
GRANDMOTHERS AGAINST THE WAR: GETTING OFF OUR FANNIES AND STANDING UP FOR PEACE (Citadel Press, May 2008 -- available at amazon.com and in book stores), which is an account of her founding of the anti-war group, Grandmothers Against the War, who famously were arrested and jailed when they tried to enlist in the military at the Times Square recruitment center. She is a lyricist-composer-singer-musician for TV, cabaret, jingles, theatre,
recordings, concerts, movie film scores. Winner, ASCAP POPULAR AWARD, and WESTPORT-WESTON ARTS COUNCIL AWARD FOR MOST PROMISING NEW MUSICAL. Runner-up AMERICAN SONG FESTIVAL AWARD. She's had 5 musicals produced off- and off-off-Broadway. Joan has received numerous civic awards for her work with the grannies and is listed in Who's Who in America and all its various spin-offs. She is a grandmother of five.

In 1995, Frank Paynter launched his first web site and joined the web publishing revolution. By the end of 2001 he was blogging on a daily basis across a range of topics from progressive politics to environmental concern to critical theory and postmodernism. In those early days, a lot of his writing was a meta narrative: blogging about bloggers and blogging. The navel gazing didn't last long. Soon he was blogging about what bloggers were blogging about.

In the 1960s he was thoroughly alienated by the Vietnam War and rampant race and gender discrimination. He dropped out of his PhD program and left Madison, Wisconsin for the San Francisco Bay Area. In San Francisco he worked for the Bank of America and became an expert in the fields of data networking and information technology. He also wrote for "underground" newspapers, alt weeklies as they're called today. He accepted the contradictions of corporate work and life in the counter-culture. Those contradictions remain unresolved today.

Paynter is a progressive, a pacifist, and a fan of government regulation of big business. He would rather see a military draft than an all volunteer army augmented by mercenaries. A supporter of Barack Obama from the earliest days of his candidacy, Paynter worries today that the President is squandering the mandate for peace that we gave him in November 2008.

In 1990, realizing his expertise was portable and that distances had been destroyed by public and private networks, he returned to the Madison area, bought a small farm from the Nature Conservancy, and went into the Information Technology consulting business.

Married, a farmer, and the father of two grown sons, Paynter's activist interests include organic agriculture, land use planning, energy alternatives to fossil fuels and other combustibles and addressing racial disparities in justice administration. His educational background includes a BA in English, an MBA, and telecommunications engineering course work at Berkeley and MIT. In 2007, he received an honorary fellowship in Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he studied the drivers that influence racial disparities in criminal justice administration, issues in public policy formation around this concern, and how these disparities affect us culturally and personally.

"Secularists are often wrongly accused of trying to purge religious ideals from public discourse. We simply want to deny them public sponsorship." -- Wendy Kaminer

All material offered here is the property of Frank Paynter, copyright 2009. Permission is granted to repost, with proper attribution including the original link.

Michael Bonanno is an associate editor for OpEdNews.

He is also a published poet, essayist and musician who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Bonanno is a political progressive, not a Democratic Party apologist. He believes it's government's job to help the needy and that leaving the people's well being to the so called "private sector" is social suicide.

I'm a retired neuropsychopharmacologist. I used to be a computer guy. Now I teach adult education at a Literacy / GED center. That covers the professional end fairly well!

I'm rural, live on a farm in the South, raise chickens and duckies, sell eggs, and have a LOT of critters.

Um... so there.

Judy White of Leeds, Alabama, is the wife of former Republican Jefferson County Commissioner Gary White and is dedicated to the pursuit of justice in his case, as well as other political prosecutions. She is devoted to their children and family, which includes a number of "furry children." A long-time community and political volunteer, former member of the Alabama and Jefferson County Republican Executive Committees and former congressional district director, Ms. White is currently the administrator of a small Birmingham law firm, and a licensed real estate broker.

Webmaster

Vidya is the webmaster for OpedNews