Personal Democracy Forum

Raymond Glendening is the Chief Operations Officer at Ruckus, an online political engagement platform that connects like-minded people around issues. Previously, Glendening was the National Political Director at the Democratic Governors Association (DGA), the committee that oversees campaigns for Democratic Governors and candidates across the country. In 2010, Glendening oversaw 37 races and a $55M budget. Before DGA, Glendening was a senior advisor to New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson (D). Glendening has also run dozens of campaigns for Democrats across the country. Glendening is a Maryland native who lives in Washington, D.C.

Reihan Salam is a non-fiction writer and policy analyst. He is a policy advisor at Economics 21, a columnist for The Daily, a contributing editor at National Review and National Affairs, and a CNN contributor. He is the co-author, with Ross Douthat, of Grand New Party.

Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers is Eastern Washington’s chief advocate in Congress and one of the rising stars in American politics. Since first being elected to the House in 2004, she has earned the trust of her constituents and praise on Capitol Hill for her hard work, conservative principles, bipartisan outreach, and leadership. She is currently serving as the Chair of the House Republican Conference, a position making her the fourth highest-ranking Republican, and the highest ranking female Republican in the House of Representatives. As someone who grew up on a family farm, worked at a small business, and later became a wife and mom, Cathy McMorris Rodgers has lived the American Dream, and she sees her chief goal in Congress as rebuilding that Dream for our children and grandchildren.

Congressman Darrell Issa represents the people of California’s 49th Congressional District in the United States House of Representatives, a seat he has held since 2001. The 49th District includes Camp Pendleton, the largest Marine Corps training facility in the United States, and the northern portions of San Diego County and southwest Riverside County. Congressman Issa and his wife Kathy live in Vista, CA. They have one son, William, and celebrated their 30th wedding anniversary in 2010.

As a senior in high school, Issa enlisted in the United States Army. Through his Army service, he received an ROTC scholarship and graduated with a degree in business from Sienna Heights University in Adrian, Michigan. Upon graduation, Issa was commissioned as an Army officer, and ultimately obtained the rank of captain. He completed his active-duty military service in 1980 and turned his interests to the private sector.

At the height of his career in business, Issa served as CEO of California-based Directed Electronics, a company that Issa founded and built in the mid-1990s to become the nation’s largest manufacturer of vehicle anti-theft devices, including the highly-successful Viper system. In 1994, Issa was named Entrepreneur of the Year by Inc. Magazine, Ernst & Young and The San Diego Union Tribune. During his leadership of Directed Electronics, Issa served as chairman of the Consumer Electronics Association, an organization of 2000 companies within the consumer technology industry that hosts the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. When he stepped down as CEO to serve as a Member of the U.S. House of Representatives, Directed Electronics employed nearly 200 people.

As a Congressman and leader in California grassroots politics, Issa has championed the cause of smart, efficient government, and has pushed legislation to balance the federal budget and promote transparency across the federal bureaucracy. In 2003, Issa was the architect behind the successful popular uprising to recall former Democratic California Governor Gray Davis.

Issa currently is a member of the House Judiciary Committee and the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, where he serves as the Chairman. Previously, Issa served on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, the Foreign Affairs Committee, the Energy & Commerce Committee, and the Small Business Committee. As the holder of 37 patents himself, Issa has been vigilant about protecting the intellectual property rights of artists and other entrepreneurs to help protect America’s position at the forefront of innovation and creativity in the entertainment and technology industries. His successful efforts to fight human trafficking along the United States border has resulted in tougher laws, stiffer penalties, and more consistent enforcement. His watchful concern to guarantee that U.S. taxpayers receive the royalties they are owed from mineral interests on federal lands exposed fraud and mismanagement at the Mineral Management Service (MMS) in 2006.

In 2008, when Congress was asked to pass the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) in the wake of an historic financial crisis, Issa stood by his instincts as a businessman and opposed giving a blank-check bailout to Wall Street – he voted against all bailouts during the financial crisis. Refusing to give up and concede to those who favored a bailout-centered response to this and future financial failures, Issa put forward a proposal to create a bipartisan commission to uncover the root causes of the financial crisis. This idea was passed into law in early 2009 and the investigation commenced in January 2010. Issa expects the results will reveal government mistakes and protect U.S. taxpayers from future runaway government intervention in the financial and housing markets.

Recognizing his success as a Congressional watchdog of taxpayer dollars, at the beginning of the 111th Congress House Republicans tapped Issa to serve as the top Republican on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which is the main investigative committee of the United States House of Representatives charged with the protecting the interests of U.S. taxpayers and eliminating waste, fraud and abuse in the federal bureaucracy. In the first year of his leadership, the committee has undertaken numerous detailed investigations of the Countrywide Financial VIP Program that benefitted government officials with special reduced-rate mortgage loans, the illegal use of taxpayer dollars by the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), the decades-old misplaced government agenda to manipulate the U.S. housing market through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that created the housing crisis, the politicization of science at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and a broad investigation into the financial crisis of 2008-2009.

As a fiscal conservative committed firmly to low taxes and free markets, Issa has opposed the rise of out-of-control government spending and fought tirelessly for the responsible, transparent use of taxpayer dollars. He’s pushed to achieve more whistleblower protections for those who report waste, fraud and abuse in the federal bureaucracy. And he’s offered substantive reform initiatives to open up government so that Americans know what’s happening in Washington and can become more democratically engaged in the day-to-day oversight of their government.

Rhett Bradbury is a freelance graphic designer with a digital focus currently working as a front-end freelance designer for Verbal+Visual Interactive in NYC. Recently Rhett has worked as a freelance designer on the creative services team in The Wall Street Journal’s sales and marketing department. Rhett graduated from the masters program at Pratt Institute with a MS in Communications Design in the spring of 2013. In his spare time, Rhett enjoys developing personal projects with focuses in civic engagement and Stanley Kubrick movies.

Born in 1981 in Cremona, Italy, Riccardo Sabatini got his B.S. in Physics at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Brescia, Italy.

After an internship at the Max-Planck-Institut in Göttingen (Germany), he worked for two years as an entrepreneur with private and public companies, developing two patents on high-tech devices.
In 2006 he started his M.S. in Theoretical Physics at University of Trieste, which he completed “summa cum laude” in 2008. In 2012 he then got his Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics at SISSA.

Riccardo’s research is focused on new material discovery based on numerical modeling at the atomistic scale, a work developed between Switzerland (EPFL) and Italy (SISSA).
As an entrepreneur he is the Co-Director at the Master in Complex Actions, a business school oriented to young scientists.
He also serves as scientific advisor and co-founder of The HUB Trieste, a startup accelerator focused on sustainable and highly innovative business ideas; co-director of the Quantum ESPRESSO Foundation, a no-profit activity supporting young researchers around the globe; Chief Research Scientist for Enerlife, a young startup working on new technologies for energy optimization and trading.

In order to fullfill his duties for the Open Source ecosystem, he is also an active developer of the Quantum ESPRESSO project, an open-source code for electronic-structure calculations and materials modeling at the nanoscale.

In the past he won the 2009 StartCUP FVG competition for the most innovative start-up idea and he organized TEDxTrieste.
More recently, he’s been the project manager of FoodCAST, a national research project focus on building quantitative forecasting technologies on commodities markets.

Rinku Sen is the President and Executive Director of Race Forward: The Center for Racial Justice Innovation and the Publisher of the award-winning news site Colorlines. Race Forward brings systemic analysis and an innovative approach to complex race issues to help people take effective action toward racial equity through research, media, and practice.

Under Sen’s leadership, Race Forward has generated some of the most impactful racial justice successes. One example is the groundbreaking Shattered Families report, which changed the immigration debate with research on how record deportations of parents were leading to the placement of thousands of children in foster care, often separating them permanently from their families. Sen was the architect of Drop the I-Word, a campaign for media outlets to stop referring to immigrants as “illegal,” resulting in the Associated Press, USA Today, LA Times, and many more outlets dropping the i-word, affecting millions of readers every day.

A visionary and a pragmatist, Sen is one of the leading voices in the racial justice movement, building upon the legacy of civil rights by transforming the way we talk about race, from something that is individual, intentional, and overt to something that is systemic, unconscious, and hidden. Prior to her work at Race Forward, Rinku served in leadership roles for over a decade at the revolutionary Center for Third World Organizing (CTWO), where she trained new organizers of color and crafted public policy campaigns. Sen’s cutting edge book Stir it Up, read widely by community organizers and taught on campuses across the country, theorized a model of community organizing that integrate a political analysis of gender, class, poverty, sexuality, and other issues.

Sen’s second book The Accidental American: Immigration and Citizenship in the Age of Globalization told the story of Moroccan immigrant Fekkak Mamdouh, who co-founded the Restaurant Opportunities Center of New York in the aftermath of September 11 and is currently being made into a film.

Rinku is the Co-Chair of the Schott Foundation for Public Education and sits on the boards of the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, Working America, and the Philanthropic Initiative for Racial Equity. A highly sought-after keynote speaker for colleges Sen has spoken at Harvard, Brown, University of Michigan, Penn State, and was the Commencement Speaker at Antioch New England.

Sen received a B.A. in Women’s Studies from Brown University and an M.S. in Journalism at Columbia University. A native of India, Rinku grew up in the northeastern factory towns, and learned to speak English in a two-room schoolhouse.