Guests – The Rise of the Oligarchs
Our guests examine the rise and role of the new oligarchs and the decline of democracy in the United States and beyond.
Rev Dr William J Barber II is the leader of a progressive movement in North Carolina that challenges the overreach of conservative powers and is well known for its “Moral Mondays” protests.
Liza Featherstone is a New York City-based journalist who covers student and youth activism. She is the author of Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle for Worker’s Rights at Wal-Mart (2004) and the co-author of Students Against Sweatshops: The Making of a Movement (2002).
James Andrew Felkerson is a visiting instructor in economics at Bard College who specializes in monetary theory and policy and international finance.
Amin Hussain is a lawyer, activist and key figure in the Occupy Wall Street movement.
Luisa Kroll is a journalist at Forbes who has been covering wealth and the world’s richest people for over 16 years. Kroll is responsible for signing off on the publication’s billionaires’ list.
Branko Milanovic is an economist and a scholar of income inequality. He joined the City University of New York’s The Graduate Center as Visiting Presidential Professor. Prior to this, he was the Lead Economist at the World Bank’s research department. He is the author of The Haves and the Have-Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality (2012).
Erik Prince is the chairman of the Hong Kong-listed logistics and securities company Frontier Services Group, an Africa-focused company that is building a pan-African fleet of aircraft. The former Navy Seal and CEO of the private security firm, Blackwater USA, is a controversial figure. Blackwater was contracted by the US State Department for thousands of missions in Iraq and Afghanistan and its contractors have been linked to the killing of innocent civilians.
Nomi Prins is a journalist, author and speaker and a Senior Fellow at the non-partisan public policy think-tank Demos. Her most recent book, All the Presidents’ Bankers: The Hidden Alliances that Drive American Power (2014) details the relationships between influential bankers and American presidents down the ages. Before becoming a journalist, she worked on Wall Street as a managing director at Goldman Sachs and as an analyst and strategist at Lehman Brothers, among others.
David Rothkopf is the CEO and editor of the FP Group and is editor-at-large of Foreign Policy magazine. He is a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment and the author of a number of books, including the title Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They are Making (2008). He is also the president and CEO of Garten Rothkopf, an international advisory firm that focuses on emerging markets.
Avik Roy is the opinion editor at Forbes and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. He is the author of How Medicaid Fails the Poor (2013). He writes about politics, policy, health care, fiscal matters and finance. In 2012, he was a health care policy advisor to Mitt Romney and has worked as an analyst at J.P. Morgan and other firms.