AMERICAN POLARIZATIONS A
Participant Backgrounds
After 18 years as a corporate lawyer in Los Angeles, Alan Bersin spent 25 years in public service. He served in the Clinton Justice Department as the US Attorney in San Diego and the so-called “Border czar” on the Mexico/US Border. He was Commissioner of Customs and Border Protection for President Obama and the DHS Assistant Secretary for Policy & International Affairs. He was elected Vice-President of INTERPOL Bersin also held state and local government positions, including California’s Secretary of Education (Schwarzenegger Administration), Superintendent of Public Education in San Diego and Chairman of the San Diego Airport Authority. He currently is a Senior Adviser to Covington & Burling, a Fellow at the Belfer Center (HKS), and a Global Fellow at the Wilson Center for International Scholars.
Following several decades at the head of two global financial firms, Bob Pozen has been teaching at MIT‘s Sloan School of Management — courses on corporate governance and financial institutions. He frequently writes op-eds and has published seven books. His latest book, Extreme Productivity, has been translated into ten languages. He serves on several corporate boards and sponsors several non profit programs, including the Tax Policy Center. On the government side, he has been a senior official at the SEC and the state of Massachusetts. He also has developed a progressive plan for reforming Social Security, as a follow up to his work on a Presidential commission.
Barbara Sard leads the low-income housing work of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a DC think tank, which she has done for the last 20 years with an 18-month sojourn as Senior Advisor for Rental Assistance at HUD in 2009 - 2011. In hindsight, her career seems to have evolved in a relatively straight line since her undergraduate volunteer work at Phillips Brooks House as part of the Roosevelt Towers project (tutoring and then organizing public housing tenants). As a legal aid lawyer for the 23 years before CBPP, mostly in Boston, she focused on welfare, homelessness and housing issues.