For Immediate Release: May 12, 2020

Media Contact: Robyn Shapiro, rshapiro@economicliberties.us

Economic Liberties Launches New Website and Welcomes Nine New Members to its Team

Washington, D.C. – The American Economic Liberties Project, which launched in February to advance a growing, cross-ideological movement to combat monopolies and the systems that entrench their power, today launched a new website and welcomed nine new members to its team: Pat Garafolo, Denise Hearn, Leah Hunt Hendrix, Laleh Ispahani, Nia Johnson, Robyn Shapiro, Maureen Tkacik, Lori Wallach, and Kate Yeager.

“At a moment when the dangers of corporate concentration are no longer possible to ignore, we are thrilled to welcome this smart, independent group of progressive leaders to our fight to end monopolies’ dominance over our economy and democracy,” said Economic Liberties’ Executive Director Sarah Miller. “We are eager to work with and continue learning from our growing network of allies so that we can fight together for economic liberty for all.”

Pat Garofalo joins as Economic Liberties’ Director of State and Local Policy. Garofalo is a writer and economic policy expert, who previously served as managing editor for Talk Poverty at the Center for American Progress. He is also the author of The Billionaire Boondoggle: How Our Politicians Let Corporations and Bigwigs Steal Our Money and Jobs. Garofalo was previously assistant managing editor for opinion at U.S. News & World Report and economic policy editor at ThinkProgress, and his work has also appeared in The Atlantic, The Nation, The Guardian, and The Week, among others.

Denise Hearn joins Economic Liberties as a Senior Fellow. Hearn is a respected advisor and recognized leader in new economic thinking. Co-author of The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition, which was named one of the Financial Times’ Best Books of 2018 and endorsed by two Nobel Prize winners, Hearn has explored corporate industrial concentration and its effects on workers, consumers, economic dynamism, and inequality. Her writing has been featured in publications like the Financial Times, Quartz, The Globe and Mail, and The Washington Post.

Leah Hunt-Hendrix joins Economic Liberties as a Senior Advisor. Hunt-Hendrix is a writer and organizer whose work has focused on social movements and building progressive political power. She has a PhD from Princeton University, where she studied political philosophy and philosophy of religion. In 2012, Hunt-Hendrix founded Solidaire, a network of philanthropists dedicated to funding progressive movements, which contributed to a shift in the philanthropic field towards “movement philanthropy.” In 2017, building on that work, she co-founded Way to Win, a community for high net worth political donors, coordinating their electoral strategies. She has served on numerous boards, including the New Economy Coalition and the Solutions Project, and she acts as an advisor to her family foundation, the Sister Fund.

Laleh Ispahani, managing director of Open Society-U.S., joins Economic Liberties as a member of its Board of Directors. At Open Society-U.S., Ispahani oversees the organization’s grant making, advocacy, and administrative work in the Open Society-U.S. offices in New York, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C. Previously, she directed the team’s work on issues of U.S. democracy. Before joining the Open Society Foundations in 2008, Ispahani, a lawyer and advocate specializing in democracy and human rights issues, spent six years as senior policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union working on racial justice and human rights.

Nia Johnson joins Economic Liberties as a Communications and Program Associate. Previously, Johnson interned with the U.S. Senate Committee on Finance, where she drafted and edited analyses relating to national healthcare spending, prescription drug pricing and healthcare mergers. In 2018, she served as President of the Associated Students Incorporated, where she organized and managed a strategic plan to allocate a $1.4 million budget for student development at California State University of Los Angeles. She has also worked with the California State Student Association and the Academic Senate of the California State University system to increase student tools for financial literacy and economic opportunity.

Robyn Shapiro joins as Economic Liberties’ Communications Manager. Prior to joining Economic Liberties, Shapiro was an Account Supervisor at BerlinRosen, where she supported communications work for progressive organizations leading on a range of policy issues, including economic inequality, reproductive justice, environmental protection and gun violence prevention. She has crafted messages and driven campaigns for leading organizations, including the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the Southern Environmental Law Center, the Roosevelt Institute and Moms Demand Action.

Maureen Tkacik joins Economic Liberties as a Senior Fellow. A former journalist, Tkacik has worked for the Wall Street Journal, Time, the Philadelphia Daily News, Philadelphia Magazine, and co-founded the website Jezebel with Anna Holmes. Tkacik has written about business and economics for the New Republic, the Baffler, Bloomberg BusinessWeek and Reuters. Her cover story on Boeing, “Crash Course: How Boeing’s Managerial Revolution Created the 737 Max Disaster” ran in the October 2019 issue of The New Republic magazine.

Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, joins Economic Liberties as a member of its Steering Committee. A 25-year veteran of congressional trade battles starting with the 1990s fights over NAFTA and WTO, Wallach was named to “Politico’s 50” list of thinkers, doers and visionaries transforming American politics in 2016 for her leadership in the Trans-Pacific Partnership debate. Wallach is an internationally recognized expert on trade with experience advocating in Congress and foreign parliaments, trade negotiations, courts, government agencies, the media and in the streets. She is the author of two books on trade, including The Rise and Fall of Fast Track Trade Authority (2013) and Whose Trade Organization? A Comprehensive Guide to the WTO (2004).

Kate Yeager joins Economic Liberties as a Communications and Program Associate. Prior to joining Economic Liberties, Yeager was the Executive Assistant to the Campaign Manager for Bernie 2020, where she coordinated the campaign manager’s schedule and travel bookings, and assisted senior staff and other departments with various projects. Before joining the Sanders campaign, she interned for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf’s re-election campaign, the Delaware County Chamber of Commerce and Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney.

Learn more about Economic Liberties here.

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Economic Liberties works to ensure America’s system of commerce is structured to advance, rather than undermine, economic liberty, fair commerce, and a secure, inclusive democracy. AELP believes true economic liberty means entrepreneurs and businesses large and small succeed on the merits of their ideas and hard work; commerce empowers consumers, workers, farmers, and engineers instead of subjecting them to discrimination and abuse from financiers and monopolists; foreign trade arrangements support domestic security and democracy; and wealth is broadly distributed to support equitable political power.