It’s hard to believe that our Expert Town Hall, “How to Beat the Broligarchs,” is only five days away!
We told you a bit about our Expert Town Hall event last week. This coming Monday, April 7th, we will host thought leaders, journalists, advocates, and policymakers in Washington, DC for a high-level discussion about America’s long slide from democracy into oligarchy, and what we can do to turn the tide. Across six urgent and unflinching sessions, the Town Hall will explore the historic tensions between capitalism and democracy, examine how unchecked wealth has captured our political and judicial systems, and trace the global authoritarian playbook that threatens to reshape our world.
Be sure to tune into the livestream of our Expert Town Hall, “How to Beat the Broligarchs,” HERE next Monday, April 7th, from 9 AM to 12 PM ET.
For this week’s Closer Look, we want to tell you about the incredible speakers slated for our Expert Town Hall, some of which include our very own Patriotic Millionaire members.
Nabil Ahmed
Nabil Ahmed is the Director of Economic and Racial Justice at Oxfam America, where he works with policymakers, advocates, and movements to lead the organization’s agenda to tackle inequality in the US and internationally. Previously, Nabil sat on the Steering Committee for the Health Inclusivity Index of The Economist Group, was an Expert for Club de Madrid’s “System Change for Economic Transformation” Policy Dialogue, and supported the G7 Gender Equality Advisory Council. He also co-founded the People’s Vaccine Alliance.
Ashley Allison
Ashley Allison served as the Executive Vice President at The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. She was previously the Deputy Director and Senior Policy Advisor for the Obama White House Office of Public Engagement. As the National Coalitions Director for the Biden-Harris 2020 presidential campaign, she led nearly 500 staff and paid fellows to activate the most robust coalition of voters in modern history. Allison also serves as the Board Chair for the Color of Change PAC Board, is a member of the Free Press Action Fund Board, and is a political commentator for CNN.
Ana María Archila
Ana María Archila is the Co-Director of the New York Working Families Party and serves as a Board member of Patriotic Millionaires. She has been a leader in New York and nationally in the fight for immigrant rights, worker justice, LGBTQ rights, and women’s rights for two decades. Over her career, she has co-founded and led several grassroots progressive organizations, including Make the Road New York and the Center for Popular Democracy. She has been deeply involved in the fight for paid sick days, raising the minimum wage, and a range of other economic, racial, and justice campaigns.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat
Ruth Ben-Ghiat is Professor of History and Italian Studies at New York University. She writes about authoritarianism, propaganda, and democracy protection. Her latest book, the New York Times bestseller Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present (2020), examines how authoritarian leaders use corruption, violence, propaganda, and machismo to stay in power, and how resistance to them has unfolded over a century. She publishes Lucid, a Substack newsletter on threats to democracy in the US and abroad, and frequently appears on MSNBC and other networks.
Rutger Bregman
Rutger Bregman is a Dutch historian and author. He is the co-founder of The School for Moral Ambition, a nonprofit which helps ambitious people tackle the world’s most pressing problems. He is the author of Utopia for Realists: And How We Can Get There (2017), Humankind: A Hopeful History (2020), and Moral Ambition: How to Stop Wasting Your Talent and Start Making a Difference (May 2025).
Abigail Disney
Abigail Disney is a philanthropist, social activist, Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker, and member of Patriotic Millionaires. Her latest film, “The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales,” made its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival and is available on-demand. She is also the Chair and co-founder of Level Forward, an ecosystem of storytellers, entrepreneurs, and social change-makers dedicated to balancing artistic vision, social impact, and stakeholder return; the founder of Peace is Loud, a nonprofit which uses storytelling to advance social movements; and the founder of the Daphne Foundation, which supports organizations working for a more equitable, fair, and peaceful New York City.
John Driscoll
John Driscoll is a member of Patriotic Millionaires and the Chair of Magnit Global, an international staffing firm managing over 700,000 employees. He also chairs the boards of the Waystar Corporation and UCONN Health. He is the former President and Executive Vice President of Walgreens Boots Alliance (WBA), overseeing Walgreens’ healthcare assets. John joined WBA in October 2022 when the company acquired CareCentrix, where he had served as Chief Executive Officer since 2013. He has been an executive at some of the fastest growing and innovative companies in healthcare and technology, including Oxford Health Plans (sold to United Health Group), Walker Digital (parent of Priceline), and Medco (sold to Cigna/Express Scripts). He is also a Senior Advisor to the EQT Group and the co-author of Pay the People: Why Fair Pay is Good for Business and Great for America (2024).
Jesse Eisinger
Jesse Eisinger is a Pulitzer Prize-winning senior editor and reporter at ProPublica. He has won awards for his writing on questionable Wall Street practices that led to the 2008 financial crisis, tax avoidance strategies of the ultra-wealthy, and the influence of billionaires on the Supreme Court. He is also the author of The Chickenshit Club: Why the Justice Department Fails to Prosecute Executives (2017) and serves on the advisory board of the University of California, Berkeley.
Brooke Harrington
Brooke Harrington is Professor of Economic Sociology at Dartmouth College. Since 2007, she has examined inequality from the top end of the socioeconomic spectrum, via the offshore financial system – a research program inaugurated by her training for two years to become a certified offshore wealth manager. She is the author of Offshore: Stealth Wealth and the New Colonialism (2024) and Capital without Borders: Wealth Managers and the One Percent (2016). She was also previously on the faculties of Brown University and the Copenhagen Business School.
Dennis Kelleher
Dennis Kelleher is Co-founder, President, and CEO of Better Markets, a Washington, DC-based nonprofit established to make the economy, finance, and government serve society, fight injustice and inequality, and promote economic, social, and racial justice. He served as a member of the Biden-Harris Transition team and has worked with the Federal Reserve, Banking and Securities (FBS) Agency Review Team, the Treasury Department, the Department of Justice, and the US Senate. Earlier in his career, Dennis was a partner at the international law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom.
Stephanie Kelton
Stephanie Kelton is a Senior Fellow at the Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis and a Professor of Economics and Public Policy at Stony Brook University. She is a leading authority on Modern Monetary Theory and the author of the New York Times bestseller, The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People’s Economy (2020). Stephanie previously served as chief economist on the US Senate Budget Committee and as a senior economic advisor to Senator Bernie Sanders’ 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns.
Nancy MacLean
Nancy MacLean is a Professor of History and Public Policy at Duke University. She is the award-winning author of several books, including Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America (2017); Freedom is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace (2006); and Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan (1995). Nancy is also a fellow of the Society of American Historians, which recognizes literary distinction in the writing of history and biography.
Helaine Olen
Helaine Olen is the Managing Editor at the American Economic Liberties Project and a contributing columnist for MSNBC.com. She is the author of Pound Foolish: Exposing the Dark Side of the Personal Finance Industry (2012) and the co-author of The Index Card: Why Personal Finance Doesn’t Have to Be Complicated (2016). She also serves on the advisory board of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.
Elizabeth Pancotti
Elizabeth Pancotti is the Managing Director of Policy and Advocacy at Groundwork Collaborative. Previously, she advised Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) on economic issues and researched economic policy at the Roosevelt Institute, Employ America, and the National Bureau of Economic Research. Her research has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Guardian.
Erica Payne
Erica Payne is the Founder and President of Patriotic Millionaires. Previously, she founded and ran The Agenda Project, a public policy advocacy organization, and the Tesseract Group, a marketing strategy firm specializing in public policy advocacy. She is the co-author with Morris Pearl of Tax the Rich: How Lies, Loopholes, and Lobbyists Make the Rich Even Richer (2021) and the author of The Practical Progressive: How to Build a 21st Century Political Movement (2008).
Morris Pearl
Morris Pearl chairs the Board of Directors at Patriotic Millionaires. He was formerly a managing director at BlackRock and had a long tenure on Wall Street, where he invented some of the securitization technology connecting America’s capital markets to consumers in need of credit. He has also co-authored two books: Tax the Rich: How Lies, Loopholes, and Lobbyists Make the Rich Even Richer (2021) and Pay the People: Why Fair Pay is Good for Business and Great for America (2024).
Guillaume Rambourg
Guillaume Rambourg is a member of Patriotic Millionaires UK whose career in fund management in London and Paris spanned over a decade from 1995 to 2018. He was recognized as one of the best in the field of European equities. As a father of six, he has spent the last few years focusing on nonprofit ventures, spearheaded by his family foundation, the Rambourg Foundation. Guillaume is also a longstanding London Committee Member of Human Rights Watch.
Donald Sherman
Donald Sherman serves as the Executive Director and Chief Counsel of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW). Prior to joining CREW, he served as Senior Counsel to Ranking Member Claire McCaskill on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and was Chief of Staff and Senior Counsel for Oversight and Investigations in the Office of General Counsel at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development. He also practiced law in the Washington, DC office of Crowell & Moring, LLP.
Damon Silvers
Damon Silvers is the Director of Policy and Special Counsel for the AFL-CIO. Damon serves on a pro bono basis as a special assistant attorney general for the state of New York. He is also a member of the Investor Advisory Committee of the US Securities and Exchange Commission, the Treasury Department’s Financial Research Advisory Committee, and the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board’s Standing Advisory Group and its Investor Advisory Group.
Sabina Vohra-Miller
Sabina Vohra-Miller is a Patriotic Millionaire from Canada who is the founder of Unambiguous Science, an educational platform that aims to make science approachable. Together with her husband, Craig Miller, she also started the Vohra Miller Foundation, a philanthropic endeavor to make systemic, sustainable, and meaningful changes to the health of the planet and its people. Sabina has a degree in clinical pharmacology and toxicology and is currently a Doctor of Public Health candidate at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto.
Michael Waldman
Michael Waldman is President and CEO of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, a nonpartisan law and policy institute that focuses on improving systems of democracy and justice. In 2021, he was a member of the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States. He also served as the Director of Speechwriting for President Bill Clinton. Michael is the author of several books, including The Supermajority: How the Supreme Court Divided America (2023); The Fight to Vote (2016); and The Second Amendment: A Biography (2014).
Elizabeth Wilkins
Elizabeth Wilkins is the President and CEO of the Roosevelt Institute. She formerly served as a fellow at Workshop: Catalyzing Change for Workers and at the American Economic Liberties Project and as chief of staff to the chair and director of the Office of Policy Planning at the Federal Trade Commission. Elizabeth was also a senior advisor to the White House chief of staff, and worked in several senior leadership roles at the Office of the Attorney General for the District of Columbia.
Join us for this bold and powerful call to action to reclaim democratic capitalism and forge a prosperous, equitable, and just future. We hope to see you at our livestream – which you can access HERE – on Monday, April 7th, at 9 AM ET for this can’t-miss event, “How to Beat the Broligarchs: An Expert Town Hall.”