Reading Politics with The New Republic: Plutocracy in America

It so often seems that the pursuit of extreme wealth is the only driving force in Congress and the White House. Americans organize for social justice, climate awareness, and myriad other political issues, just to come up against the same nebulous powers again and again. Our panel gathers to tackle the problem. This solution-oriented group has first hand experience in fighting plutocracy and will share its experience by addressing how campaigns are financed, the struggle for antitrust laws in the 21st century, and the role the middle class will have in pushing for economic equality.

Panelists:

Lawrence Lessig is an American academic, attorney, and political activist. He is the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and the former director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. His book, They Don’t Represent Us (Dey Street Books 2019), will be published November 2019.

Ganesh Sitaraman is Chancellor’s Faculty Fellow, Professor of Law, and Director of the Program on Law and Government at Vanderbilt Law School. He is the author of The Public Option: How to Expand Freedom, Increase Opportunity, and Promote Equality (Harvard Univ. Press, 2019) (with Anne Alstott), The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution: Why Economic Inequality Threatens Our Republic (Alfred A. Knopf, 2017), which was one of The New York Times‘ 100 notable books of 2017, and The Counterinsurgent‘s Constitution: Law in the Age of Small Wars (Oxford University Press, 2012), which won the 2013 Palmer Civil Liberties Prize.

Matt Stoller is a fellow at the Open Markets Institute. He is writing a book on monopoly power in the 20th century for Simon and Schuster. Previously, he was a Senior Policy Advisor and Budget Analyst to the Senate Budget Committee. He also worked in the U.S. House of Representatives on financial services policy, including Dodd-Frank, the Federal Reserve, and the foreclosure crisis. He has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, The New Republic, Vice, and Salon.

Zephyr Teachout is an Associate Law Professor at Fordham, where she teaches courses in the intersection of business law and public law, such as election law, market structure and democracy, corporations, and prosecuting public corruption. She has written extensively on corruption, and her award-winning book Corruption in America has been cited in Congressional hearings, court decisions, and political campaigns. iShe is a board member of CREW, and was on the legal team that developed the initial Emoluments lawsuit against Donald Trump. She has forthcoming book on antitrust and democracy, to be published by St. Martin's press next spring. She has run for public office three times, most notably winning over a third of the vote against incumbent Governor Andrew Cuomo in 2014, and was endorsed by the New York Times in the New York Attorney General race last year. Prior to becoming an academic, she was a death penalty defense lawyer in North Carolina.

Tim Wuis a policy advocate, a professor at Columbia Law School, and a contributing opinion writer forThe New York Times. He worked on competition policy in the Obama White House and the Federal Trade Commission, served as senior enforcement counsel at the New York Office of the Attorney General, and worked at the Supreme Court for Justice Stephen Breyer. He is the author of The Master Switch (2010), The Attention Merchants (2016) and, most recently, The Curse of Bigness (2018), which argues for a revitalization of antitrust law.