Speakers at Take Back the American Dream

Robert Borosage is founder and president of the Institute for America’s Future and co-director of its sister, Campaign for America’s Future. He writes regularly on politics and economics. He is a contributing editor of The Nation and a regular blogger on The Huffington Post. Borosage is founder and board chair of Progressive Majority. He is co-founder and board chair of ProgressiveCongress.org, and a member of the board of Working America. He previously founded and directed the Campaign for New Priorities, a non-profit coalition of over 100 organizations calling for post-Cold War reinvestment in America. He served as director of the Institute for Policy Studies where he remains as a board member. He has also served as an issues advisor to progressive political campaigns, including those of Paul Wellstone, Barbara Boxer and Carol Moseley Braun. He was senior issues advisor for the 1988 Jesse Jackson Campaign. Borosage is a graduate of Yale Law School and holds a master’s degree in International Relations from George Washington University.

Christopher Hayes is Editor at Large of The Nation and host of Up w/ Chris Hayes on MSNBC. From 2010 to 2011, he was a fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J Safra Foundation Center for Ethics. His essays, articles, and reviews have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Time, The American Prospect, The New Republic, The Washington Monthly, and The Guardian. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife Kate and daughter Ryan.

Roger Hickey is Co-Director of the Campaign for America’s Future. He was also one of the founders of Health Care for America Now!, a coalition of over 1,000 national and local organizations united to achieve quality affordable health care for all. He was also one of the leaders of the successful campaign to stop the privatization of Social Security, called Americans United to Protect Social Security. Hickey was a founder and Communications Director of the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think tank that looks at economics from the point of view of working Americans. He was also a founder of the Public Media Center in San Francisco. A graduate of the University of Virginia, Hickey began his career in the 1960s as an organizer for the Virginia Civil Rights Committee.

Van Jones is a globally recognized, award-winning pioneer in human rights and the clean-energy economy. He is the best-selling author of the definitive book on green jobs: The Green-Collar Economy. He served as the green jobs adviser in the Obama White House in 2009.

Heather C. McGhee is the Director of the Washington office of Demos, a non-partisan policy center. Previously, she was the Deputy Policy Director, Domestic and Economic Policy, for the John Edwards for President 2008 campaign.

Her writing and research on debt, financial services regulation, tax and budget policy, retirement and inequality have appeared in numerous outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the Detroit Free-Press and CNN. She served as the Chair of the Systemic Risk and Resolution Authority Policy Task Force for Americans for Financial Reform during the Dodd-Frank legislative debate. She is the co-author of a chapter on retirement insecurity in the book Inequality Matters: The Growing Economic Divide in America and its Poisonous Consequences (New Press, 2005). She holds a B.A. in American Studies from Yale University and a J.D. from the University of California at Berkeley School of Law.

Bernie Sanders was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2006 after serving 16 years in the House of Representatives. He is the longest serving independent member of Congress in American history. Sanders has focused on the shrinking middle class and widening income gap in America that is greater than at any time since the Great Depression. Other priorities include reversing global warming, universal health care, fair trade policies, supporting veterans and preserving family farms. He serves on five Senate committees: Budget; Veterans; Energy; Environment; and Health, Education, Labor and Pensions.

Katrina vanden Heuvel is Editor and Publisher of The Nation.

She is a frequent commentator on American and international politics on ABC, MSNBC, CNN and PBS. Her articles have appeared in The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, Foreign Policy magazine and The Boston Globe.

She writes a weekly web column for The Washington Post. Her blog "Editor's Cut" appears at thenation.com.

She is the author of The Change I Believe In: Fighting for Progress in The Age of Obama (Nation Books, 2011). She is also the editor of Meltdown: How Greed and Corruption Shattered Our Financial System and How We Can Recover" and co-editor of Taking Back America--And Taking Down The Radical Right.