Algernon Austin is a sociologist of racial relations with a specialization on black Americans. Prior to joining the Economic Policy Institute, he was assistant director of research at the Foundation Center and a Senior Fellow at the Demos think tank. From 2001 to 2005, he served on the faculty of Wesleyan University. Austin is the author of Getting It Wrong: How Black Public Intellectuals Are Failing Black America and Achieving Blackness: Race, Black Nationalism, and Afrocentrism in the Twentieth Century. He has published scholarly articles in Ethnic and Racial Studies, Qualitative Sociology, the Journal of African American Studies, and Race, Gender and Class.
Fred L. Block is a sociologist at Department of Sociology, University of California, Davis, California. Dr. Block is the author of The Vampire State and Other Myths and Fallacies about the U.S. Economy; Postindustrial Possibilities: A Critique of Economic Discourse; The Mean Season: The Attack on the Welfare State (with Richard A. Cloward, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Frances Fox Piven); Revising State Theory: Essays in Politics and Postindustrialism; The Origins of International Economic Disorder: A Study of United States International Monetary Policy from World War II to the Present.
John Neurohr is the Communication Director for the Center for American Progress (CAP). The Center for American Progress is dedicated to improving the lives of Americans through progressive ideas and action. Building on the achievements of progressive pioneers such as Teddy Roosevelt and Martin Luther King, CAP’s work addresses 21st-century challenges such as energy, national security, economic growth and opportunity, immigration, education, and health care. It develops new policy ideas, critique the policy that stems from conservative values, challenge the media to cover the issues that truly matter and shape the national debate. Founded in 2003 to provide long-term leadership and support to the progressive movement, CAP is headed by John D. Podesta and based in Washington, DC. CAP opened a Los Angeles office in 2007.
Walter Williams is Professor Emeritus of Public Affairs, Daniel J. Evans School of Public Affairs, University of Washington; Distinguished Scholar, Center for Politics and Public Policy, Political Science Department, University of Washington His publications include The Politics of Bad Ideas: The Great Tax Cut Delusion and the Decline of Good; Government in America (with Bryan D. Jones); Reaganism and the Death of Representative Democracy, Georgetown University Press, 2003; Honest Numbers and Democracy: Federal Domestic Policy Analysis Staffs, Georgetown University Press, 1998; Mismanaging America: The Rise of the Anti-Analytic Presidency, University Press of Kansas, 1990; Washington Policy Choices (edited with William Zumeta and Betty Jane Narver), Graduate School of Public Affairs/Institute for Public Policy and Management, 1990. Washington, Westminster and Whitehall, Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Dr. Stephen Zunes is a Professor of Politics and International Studies at the University of San Francisco, where he chairs the program in Middle Eastern Studies. A native of North Carolina, Professor Zunes received his PhD. from Cornell University, his M.A. from Temple University and his B.A. from Oberlin College. He has previously served on the faculty of Ithaca College, the University of Puget Sound, and Whitman College. He serves as a senior policy analyst for the Foreign Policy in Focus project of the Institute for Policy Studies, an associate editor of Peace Review, and chair of the academic advisory committee for the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict.
