Jobs, Investment, and Rebuilding America: Economic and National Security Issues
EPS Bernard L. Schwartz Symposium
Co-sponsored by The New America Foundation
Program
Welcoming Remarks: James K. Galbraith — Economists for Peace and Security (video)
Session One: A Jobs-Investment-Security Agenda (video)
Chair: Michael Lind
Allen Sinai
Economic Performance in PerspectiveMichael Tomasky
The State of the Middle Class NowSherle Schwenninger
Jobs and InvestmentRon Unz
Raising the Minimum Wage
Keynote: Jason Furman — Chair, Council of Economic Advisers (video)
Session Two: US Security Policy After Syria (video)
Chair: Richard Kaufman
Heather Hurlburt
The Implications of the Syrian BargainWinslow Wheeler
An Unaffordable Defense BudgetPeter Galbraith
Lessons for Future DiplomacyCarl Conetta
US Grand Strategy Now
Session Three: The Economic and Financial Risks and Dangers (video)
Chair: Richard Parker
Josh Bivens
Wages and IncomesBruce Bartlett
Tax ReformStan Collender
The Budget and Spending CutsBill Black
Out-of-Control Banks and Non-RegulationYanis Varoufakis
Europe
Gallery
Participant Biographies
Bruce Bartlett
Bruce Bartlett is a columnist for The Fiscal Times, an online newspaper covering public and personal finance, and Tax Notes, a weekly magazine for tax practitioners and policymakers. He also contributes a weekly post to the Economix blog at the New York Times, and writes regularly for the Financial Times. Bartlett was previously a columnist for Forbes magazine and Creators Syndicate. His writing often focuses on the intersection between politics and economics and attempts to inform politicians about economics, and economists about the current nature of politics.
Bartlett’s work is informed by many years in government, including service on the staffs of Congressmen Ron Paul and Jack Kemp and Senator Roger Jepsen, as executive director of the Joint Economic Committee of Congress, senior policy analyst in the Reagan White House, and deputy assistant secretary for economic policy at the Treasury Department during the George H.W. Bush administration.
Bruce is the author of eight books including the New York Times best-seller, The Benefit and the Burden: Tax Reform—Why We Need It and What It Will Take. His earlier book, Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy, was also a New York Times best-seller.
Josh Bivens
Josh Bivens joined the Economic Policy Institute in 2002. He is the author of Everybody Wins Except for Most of Us: What Economics Teaches About Globalization and has published numerous articles in both academic and popular venues, including USA Today, The Guardian, The American Prospect, Challenge Magazine, and Worth. He is a frequent commentator on economic issues for a variety of media outlets, including NPR, CNN, CNBC, Reuters and the BBC.
William K. Black
Bill Black is an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. He was the executive director of the Institute for Fraud Prevention from 2005-2007. He previously taught at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin and at Santa Clara University, where he was also the distinguished scholar in residence for insurance law and a visiting scholar at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics.
Professor Black was litigation director of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, deputy director of the FSLIC, SVP and general counsel of the Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco, and senior deputy chief counsel, Office of Thrift Supervision. He was deputy director of the National Commission on Financial Institution Reform, Recovery and Enforcement.
Professor Black recently helped the World Bank develop anti-corruption initiatives and served as an expert for OFHEO in its enforcement action against Fannie Mae’s former senior management.
He teaches white-collar crime, public finance, antitrust, law and economics, and Latin American development.
Stan Collender
Mr. Stanley Collender serves as Managing Director and Partner of Qorvis Communications, LLC. Mr. Collender's financial and public affairs communications experience is extensive. Prior to joining Qorvis, Mr. Collender served as Managing Director and General Manager of Financial Dynamics US Business Communications, where he rapidly built their corporate and public affairs client base in DC, directed FD's efforts to establish a public affairs practice in the United States and significantly enhanced the agency's global public affairs offering. Mr. Collender joined FD in February 2004. He served as National Director of Public Affairs for Fleishman-Hillard and its Director of Financial Communications in Washington, DC. He served as Senior Vice President at Burson-Marsteller. He has also served as a Director of federal budget policy for two major international accounting firms-Price Waterhouse and Touche Ross-and as President of the Budget Research Group, a private Washington-based consulting organization. Mr. Collender has also worked in senior positions for two of the "Big 4" global accounting firms, three members of the US House of Representatives, and both the House and Senate Budget Committees. He was a Member of the Executive Committee of the board of the Wolf Trap National Park for the Arts near Washington, DC. He is an expert on the federal budget and Wall Street’s response to federal economic initiatives, frequently appears on radio and television and is often quoted by print reporters. Mr. Collender received two of the public relations industries highest awards-a Silver Sabre and the PR Week Award. He has also received the Howard Award for lifetime achievement in federal budgeting from the American Society for Public Administration. He holds B.A. from New York University and has an MA in Public Policy from the University of California, Berkeley.
Carl Conetta
Since January 1991, Carl Conetta has been co-director of the Project on Defense Alternatives (PDA). Prior to joining PDA, Mr. Conetta was a Research Fellow of the Institute for Defense and Disarmament Studies (IDDS) and also served for three years as editor of the IDDS journal Defense and Disarmament Alternatives, and the Arms Control Reporter.
As co-director of PDA, Mr. Conetta has authored and co-authored numerous reports on security issues and has published in Defense News, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, NOD and Conversion Journal, the Boston Review, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the American Sentinel, Security Dialogue, and Hawk, the journal of the Royal Air Force Staff College of the United Kingdom. Mr. Conetta has also made presentations at the Pentagon, US State Department, US House Armed Services Committee, Army War College, National Defense University, UNIDIR, and other governmental and nongovernmental institutions in the United States and abroad. He is a frequent expert commentator on radio and TV. He edits the Chinese Military Power and Revolution in Military Affairs Webpages.
Jason Furman
Jason Furman is the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. Prior to this role, he served as Assistant to the President for Economic Policy and the Principal Deputy Director of the National Economic Council. From 2007 to 2008 Furman was a Senior Fellow in Economic Studies and Director of the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institute. Previously, he served as a Staff Economist at the Council of Economic Advisers, a Special Assistant to the President for Economic Policy at the National Economic Council under President Clinton and Senior Adviser to the Chief Economist and Senior Vice President of the World Bank. Furman was the Economic Policy Director for Obama for America.
Furman, who earned his Ph.D. in economics and a M.A. in government from Harvard University and a M.Sc. in economics from the London School of Economics, has also served as Visiting Scholar at NYU’s Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, a visiting lecturer at Yale and Columbia Universities, and a Senior Fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. He has conducted research in a wide range of areas, including fiscal policy, tax policy, health economics, Social Security, and monetary policy. In addition to numerous articles in scholarly journals and periodicals, Furman is the editor of several books on economic policy, including Path to Prosperity and Who Has the Cure.
James K. Galbraith
James K. Galbraith teaches economics and a variety of other subjects at the LBJ School. He holds degrees from Harvard (B.A. magna cum laude, 1974) and Yale (Ph.D. in economics, 1981). He studied economics as a Marshall Scholar at King's College, Cambridge in 1974-1975, and then served in several positions on the staff of the U.S. Congress, including Executive Director of the Joint Economic Committee. He was a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution in 1985. He directed the LBJ School's Ph.D. Program in Public Policy from 1995 to 1997. He directs the University of Texas Inequality Project, an informal research group based at the LBJ School. Galbraith maintains several outside connections, including serving as a Senior Scholar of the Levy Economics Institute and as Chair of the Board of Economists for Peace and Security. He writes a column called "Econoclast" for Mother Jones, and occasional commentary in many other publications, including The Texas Observer, The American Prospect, and The Nation. He is an occasional commentator for Public Radio International's Marketplace.
Peter Galbraith
Ambassador Peter W. Galbraith is the Senior Diplomatic Fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation where his work focuses on Iraq, the greater Middle East, and conflict resolution and post-conflict reconstruction, specifically in the Balkans, Indonesia, Iraq, India/Pakistan, and Southeast Asia.
Prior to joining the Center, Galbraith was a professor of National Security Strategy at the National War College. He has held senior positions in the United States government and with the United Nations. From 1979 to 1993, Galbraith was a senior advisor on Near East and South Asia and international organizations to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. From 1993 to 1998, he served as U.S. Ambassador to Croatia where he was actively involved in the Croatia and Bosnia peace processes. In 1995, he helped mediate the Erdut Agreement that ended the war in Croatia by providing for peaceful reintegration of Serb-held Eastern Slavonia into Croatia. From 2000 to 2001, Galbraith was Director for Political, Constitutional, and Electoral Affairs at the U.N. Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET). He also served as a Cabinet Member for Political Affairs and the Timor Sea in the First Transitional Government of East Timor.
Galbraith has authored numerous books, including, most recently, The End of Iraq (2006). He is the author of published Foreign Relations Committee reports on ethnic cleansing in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Iran-Iraq War, the Iraqi Kurds, nuclear proliferation in South Asia, and the Cambodian famine.
Galbraith holds an A.B. from Harvard College, an M.A. from Oxford University, and a J.D. from Georgetown University.
Heather Hurlburt
Heather Hurlburt’s policy work focuses primarily on the politics of US foreign policy, counter-terrorism and resilience, and the nexus of civilian and military approaches to conflict resolution. She has previously served in the White House, State Department and Congress and held leadership positions in Washington-based non-governmental organizations. Before joining NSN, Hurlburt ran her own communications and strategy practice, working on global and political issues with political, entertainment, and educational leaders. From 1995-2001, Hurlburt served in the Clinton Administration as Special Assistant and Speechwriter to the President, speechwriter for Secretaries of State Albright and Christopher, and member of the State Department’s Policy Planning staff. She has also worked for the International Crisis Group, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and the Congressional Helsinki Commission. In 2012, Hurlburt was named to Foreign Policy’s “FP Top 50”. She appears frequently as a commentator in print and new media and her work has been published by the New York Times, Washington Post, Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, Guardian, POLITICO, and New Republic. Hurlburt holds a BA from Brown University and an MA from the George Washington University Elliott School of International Affairs.
Michael Lind
Michael Lind is a co-founder of the New America Foundation, where he is Policy Director of its Economic Growth Program and Next Social Contract Initiative. A former editor or staff writer at Harper’s Magazine, The New Yorker, The New Republic and The National Interest, he has taught at Harvard and Johns Hopkins. He is the author of a number of books of history, political journalism, fiction and poetry, including The Next American Nation (1995) and The American Way of Strategy (2006). His most recent book is Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States. He is a member of the board of Economists for Peace and Security.
Richard Parker
Richard Parker is Lecturer in Public Policy and Senior Fellow of the Shorenstein Center at Harvard University. An Oxford-trained economist, his career before coming to the Kennedy School in 1993 included journalism (he cofounded the magazine Mother Jones as well as Investigative Reporters & Editors, and chairs the editorial board of The Nation); philanthropy (as executive director of two foundations he donated more than $40 million to social-change groups); social entrepreneurship (he grew environmental group Greenpeace from 2,000 to 600,000 supporters, helped launch People for the American Way, and raised over $250 million for some 60 non-profits), and political consulting (advising, among others, Senators Kennedy, Glenn, Cranston, and McGovern). From 2009 to 2011 he was an economic advisor to Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou.
His books include The Myth of the Middle Class, an early study of widening U.S. income and wealth distribution and Mixed Signals: The Future of Global Television, a critical assessment of the spread of satellite-based news and its political impacts. His intellectual biography, John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics, which traces the history of 20th century economic theory and policy through the career of Harvard's most famous economist, was described by William F. Buckley as "the best biography of the century", by Sean Wilentz as "the best progressive history I've read in 15 years", and by Keynes' biographer Robert Skidelsky as "an unparalleled achievement."
His academic articles appear in numerous academic anthologies and journals and he writes regularly for magazines and newspapers, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, New Republic, Nation, Harper's, Le Monde, Atlantic Monthly, and International Economy, among others.
He received the Kennedy School's Carballo award for outstanding teaching in 2011 and ALANA's Teacher of the Year award in 2007 from the School's students of color.
Sherle Schwenninger
Sherle Schwenninger directs the New America Foundation's Economic Growth Program, and the Global Middle Class Initiative. He is also the former director of the Bernard L. Schwartz Fellows Program. Mr. Schwenninger was Founding Editor of World Policy Journal from 1983 to 1992, and served as Director of the World Policy Institute at The New School from 1992 to 1996. He was also Director of the Institute's Policy Studies Program and its Transnational Academic Program. More recently, Mr. Schwenninger served as Senior Program Coordinator for the Project on Development, Trade, and International Finance at the Council on Foreign Relations, and is the author, with Walter Russell Mead, of the CFR publication A Financial Architecture for Middle-Class-Oriented Development. He is also a Senior Fellow at the World Policy Institute. Mr. Schwenninger writes and speaks frequently on questions of American foreign policy and international economic strategy.
Allen Sinai
Dr. Allen Sinai is CEO, Co-Founder and Chief Global Economist and Strategist of Decision Economics. Prior to DE, he was Chief Economist at Lehman Brothers and The Boston Company (1983-96). Prior to Lehman, Dr. Sinai was Chief Financial Economist at Data Resources, Inc. (1971-1983), a pioneer in new techniques of econometric modeling. Dr. Sinai has also been a non-partisan adviser and consultant to multiple facets of the U.S. Government including past Presidential Administrations, House and Senate Committees. He meets regularly with fiscal and monetary policy leaders globally including Japan, Europe, and Asia, on current matters relating to the economy, macroeconomic policy and financial markets. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Northwestern University and an A.B. from the University of Michigan.
Michael Tomasky
Michael Tomasky is a columnist, journalist and author. He is the editor in chief of Democracy, a special correspondent for The Daily Beast, a contributing editor for The American Prospect, and a contributor to The New York Review of Books. He is the author of two books, Left for Dead and Hillary's Turn. He lives with his wife and daughter in Silver Spring, MD.
Ron Unz
A theoretical physicist by training, Mr. Unz serves as founder and chairman of UNZ.org, a content-archiving website providing free access to many hundreds of thousands of articles from prominent periodicals of the last hundred and fifty years. He also serves as publisher of The American Conservative, a small opinion magazine, and had previously served as chairman of Wall Street Analytics, Inc., a financial services software company which he founded in New York City in 1987. He holds undergraduate and graduate degrees from Harvard University, Cambridge University, and Stanford University, and is a past first-place winner in the Intel/Westinghouse Science Talent Search.
He has long been deeply interested in public policy issues, and his writings on issues of immigration, race, ethnicity, and social policy have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Commentary, The Nation, and numerous other publications.
In 1994, he launched a surprise Republican primary challenge to incumbent Gov. Pete Wilson of California, running on a conservative, pro-immigrant platform against the prevailing political sentiment, and received 34% of the vote. Later that year, he campaigned as a leading opponent of Prop. 187, the anti-immigration initiative, and was a top featured speaker at a 70,000 person pro-immigrant march in Los Angeles, the largest political rally in California history to that date.
In 1997, Mr. Unz began his “English for the Children” initiative campaign to dismantle bilingual education in California. He drafted Prop. 227 and led the campaign to qualify and pass the measure, culminating in a landslide 61% victory in June 1998, effectively eliminating over one-third of America’s bilingual programs. Within less than three years of the new English immersion curriculum, the mean percentile test scores of over a million immigrant students in California rose by an average of 70%. He later organized and led similar initiative campaigns in other states, winning with 63% in the 2000 Arizona vote and a remarkable 68% in the 2002 Massachusetts vote without spending a single dollar on advertising.
Winslow Wheeler
Winslow T. Wheeler focuses on the defense budget, why some weapons work and others don’t congressional oversight, and the politics of Pentagon spending. Before joining the Center for Defense Information in 2002, he worked on Capitol Hill for four U.S. Senators from both political parties and for the Government Accountability Office. At GAO and the Senate, Wheeler focused on Pentagon budget issues, weapons testing, the performance of U.S. systems in actual combat, and the U.S. strategic "triad" of nuclear weapons.