Paul Jay was the founder, CEO and senior editor of The Real News Network, where he oversaw the production of over 7,000 news stories. Previously, he was executive producer of CBC Newsworld's independent flagship debate show CounterSpin for its 10 years on air. He is an award-winning documentary filmmaker with over 20 films under his belt, including Hitman Hart: Wrestling with Shadows; Return to Kandahar; and Never-Endum-Referendum. He was the founding chair of Hot Docs!, the Canadian International Documentary Film Festival and now the largest such festival in North America.

Dr. Gerald Horne holds the John J. and Rebecca Moores Chair of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston. His research has addressed issues of racism in a variety of relations involving labor, politics, civil rights, international relations and war. Dr. Horne has also written extensively about the film industry. His latest book is The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America. Dr. Horne received his Ph.D. in history from Columbia University and his J.D. from the University of California, Berkeley and his B.A. from Princeton University.

Juan Gonzalez was a columnist for the New Daily News for nearly 30 years and has been co host of Democracy Now since the show's inception in 1996. He is the author of several books, including "Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America, and the forthcoming Reclaiming Gotham: Bill de Blasio and the Movement to End America's Tale of Two Cities.

George Ciccariello-Maher is Associate Professor of Politics and Global Studies at Drexel University in Philadelphia, and currently a visiting researcher at the Institute for Social Research at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. He is the author of We Created Chávez: A People's History of the Venezuelan Revolution, Decolonizing Dialectics, and Building the Commune: Radical Democracy in Venezuela, published in the Jacobin Books series at Verso.