Our Authors

Bob Blain

  • Weaving Golden Threads: Integrating Social Theory

Dr. Blain is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville. He has written extensively on how a rational denomination of currency in hours of labor is a natural framework for economic democracy. His introductory sociology textbook Weaving Golden Threads: Integrating Social Theory is a masterful survey that frames sociology as a discipline that is central to the project of global justice and peace.

Dr. Blain resides in Edwardsville, IL, and may be reached through the IED Press contact page.

Tony Equale

  • Religion in a Material Universe
  • The Mystery of Matter
  • An Unknown God: Essays in Pursuit of the Sacred

Tony's work examines the philosophical foundations needed for a deep understanding and reconciliation with the material universe as revealed by science. He focuses on the transcendent vitality of material energy and its communitarian character as the antithesis to both dualism and reductionsim, and grounds ethics in the politics that derives from the communitarian nature of matter itself. His work speaks to the possibility of relationship to the matrix of all existence.

Tony Equale is retired from commercial farming and lives in southwestern Virginia. He is an ex-priest and activist who worked in Mexico, Handuras, and Nicaragua from 1981 to 1988. He fills his retirement time volunteering with labor organizations, subsistence farming, art, and writing. He blogs at tonyequale.wordpress.com, and may be reached through the IED Press contact page.

Alanna Hartzok

  • The Earth Belongs to Everyone

Alanna Hartzok, M.A. is Co-Director of Earth Rights Institute, a civil society organization working for economic justice and peaceful resolution of conflicts. Her 2001 E.F. Schumacher Lecture was published as Democracy, Earth Rights and the Next Economy. That same year she was a candidate for Congress in the Ninth District of Pennsylvania. In 1993 she initiated tax reform legislation and worked with state Senator Terry Punt and his staff to guide it through Pennsylvania legislative hearings to nearly unanimous passage of Senate Bill 211, signed by Governor Thomas Ridge as Act 108 in November of 1998.

Her published articles on tax reform are used by legislators in the states of Pennsylvania, Maryland, New Jersey and New York. Her articles are referenced in the literature of the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) in California, a recent issue of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Review, Dialogues, a publication of the Canada West Foundation, and in several books, including the Worldwatch Institute book by David Roodman, The Natural Wealth of Nations and Creating a Sustainable World, an anthology edited by Trent Schroyher and Tom Golodik. She is one of several people featured in Planet Champions: Adventures in Saving the World - New Paths to Peace, Prosperity & Human Rights, authored by Jack Yost. She may be reached through the IED Press contact page.

Glen T. Martin

  • The Earth Federation Movement: Founding a Global Social Contract; History, Documents, Vision
  • A Constitution for the Federation of Earth (ed.), with Historical Introduction, Commentary, and Conclusion
  • Triumph of Civilization: Democracy, Nonviolence, and the Piloting of Spaceship Earth
  • Ascent to Freedom: Practical and Philosophical Foundations of Democratic World Law
  • World Revolution Through World Law: Basic Documents of the Emerging Earth Federation
  • Millennium Dawn: The Philosophy of Planetary Crisis and Human Liberation

Dr. Martin is a professor of philosophy and religious studies and the founder and chairperson of the Peace Studies Program at Radford University in Virginia. He is also President of the Radford University Chapter of the American Association of University Professors. During his twenty-seven years at Radford Dr. Martin has been active in the national and international work of philosophers focusing on issues of peace. He has regularly presented papers at national conferences of the Concerned Philosophers for Peace (CPP) and the international conferences of International Philosophers for Peace and the Prevention of Nuclear and Other threats to Global Existence (IPPNO). He is the current president of IPPNO.

Dr. Martin’s work for peace includes honorary membership on the Advisory Board of the International Society for Intercultural Studies and Research (ISISAR), headquartered in Calcutta, membership on the Board of Advisors of the World Prout Assembly (WPA), membership on the International Advisory Board of Radio for Peace International (RFPI) (1998-2006), Costa Rica, membership on the Board of Directors of the New Humanity Center in Kalamata, Greece, appointment as a Global Associate to the International Institute for Sustainable Future, headquartered in Mumbai (2000-2004), and membership in the Global Advisory Board of Human Dignity and Humiliation Studies (2010). From 1993 to 2002, he was Chairperson of the New River Bocay Project, a nationwide network of U.S. citizens working for the survival and sustainable development of the indigenous peoples of Northern Nicaragua.

For a number of years Dr. Martin has been active in the movement to create non-military, democratic world government under the Constitution for the Federation of Earth. Since 1997 he has been a member of the World Executive Council of the World Constitution and Parliament Association (WCPA) which coordinates a network of people from 120 countries worldwide in their work toward these goals. At the Provisional World Parliament in Chennai, India, December 2003, he was nominated and confirmed as Secretary-General of WCPA.

Arindam Mukherjee

  • A Matter of Greed.

Arindam Mukherjee is a corporate executive with a multinational company. After more than a decade as a behavioural trainer developing industry professionals within India and abroad, he now undertakes to build social and political awareness through his writing. He is a conflict and geo-political observer by passion and believes that true global development is possible only when the focus shifts from upgrading commodities and products towards upgrading human values.

Mr. Mukherjee resides with his wife in South Calcutta. He can be reached through the IED Press contact page.

Michael Rivage-Seul

  • The Emperor's God: Misunderstandings of Christianity<
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    Michael Rivage-Seul is a professor of general studies and religion at Berea College, Berea, Kentucky, and a former Roman Catholic priest who worked with the Christian Appalachian Project, a central Kentucky grassroots rural development program.

    Dr. Rivage-Seul's essay on Christianity shows how that religion came to be exploited, turning Jesus of Nazareth's anti-imperialist teachings on their head to support plunder by the world's elites. His work is rich with provocative insight drawn from the liberation theology tradition, and a “welcome counterpoint to the apocalypticism of the evangielical Christian right.” He can be reached through the IED Press contact page.

B. Sidney Smith

  • The Good American: A Situation Report for Citizens

B. Sidney Smith is a former assistant professor of mathematics and a present writer living near Appomattox, Virginia. He is the creator of the Platonic Realms website, author of the mystery The Officer's Wife, and current co-director and editor for the Institute for Economic Democracy where he helps bring new authors and their works into print.

Dr. Smith’s The Good American offers first a concise, exhaustively-sourced review of five grave threats consistently overlooked by media and big-party politicians: our out-of-control militarism and security establishment, the sabotage of public discourse by propaganda and commercial culture, the destruction of our economic infrastructure by financial elites, the already-unfolding crisis of human overshoot that can destroy the very foundations of human existence, and the capture of democracy itself by an integrated, oligarchic duopoly. Firmly rejecting cynicism and resignation, Smith next charts a clear course for American renewal, a course whose first step is not just to vote, but to vote for rather than to vote against. Dr. Smith may be reached through his website, bsidneysmith.com.

J.W. Smith

  • Money: A Mirror Image of the Economy, 2nd ed.
  • Economic Democracy: A Grand Strategy for World Peace and Prosperity, 2nd ed.
  • Cooperative Capitalism: A Blueprint for Global Peace and Prosperity, 2nd ed.
  • Economic Democracy: The Political Struggle of the Twenty-First Century, 4th ed.
  • WHY? The Deeper History Behind the September 11th Terrorist Attack on America, 3rd ed.

J. W. Smith, the founder and emeritus director of the Institute for Economic Democracy, is an independent economist with a PhD in Political Economics from Union Institute and University, Cleveland, Ohio.

J.W. Smith takes a different view from most economists: his deep research pushes dense and impossible to understand neoliberal economics off the table and replaces it with sensible economics that we can all understand. Dr. Smith points out, “neoliberal economics makes sense only within borders of an empire. As soon as one steps outside those borders it make no sense at all. How could it? It is designed to lay claim to the wealth of the periphery of empire.” Where else do you read how wealth accumulation increases or decreases exponentially with the differential in pay between equally productive labor? That evolving from plunder by raids to plunder by trade became the signature of “civilized” nations? That Adam Smith free trade was specifically designed to entrench this system of laying claim to others wealth? Or that no nation ever developed under that philosophy? The exposure of these realities provide a new foundation upon which to understand the world.