Mark's Story
Mark was born at Maimonides Hospital in Brooklyn in March of 1945. After spending his early years in Bensonhurst, his family moved to Nassau County, where Mark graduated in 1963 from Great Neck South High School.
Over the past 39 years Mark Green has been a public official, public interest lawyer, author, teacher, tv commentator and, now, the president of Air America Radio.
He graduated with honors from both Cornell University School of Arts & Sciences (1967) and then Harvard Law School (1970), where he was editor-in-chief of the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review.
Becoming a member of the Washington, D.C. Bar (and later the New York State Bar), he spent 10 years in the 1970s working with Ralph Nader, ultimately running Public Citizen's Congress Watch, the largest consumer lobbying group in D.C. In 1982, The Nation magazine said, "Next to Nader himself, Mark is the leading public interest lawyer of his generation."
In 1981, Mark founded and ran the Democracy Project, a public policy institute in New York City.
Public Service
From 1990 to 1993, he served as Consumer Affairs Commissioner in the administration of Mayor David Dinkins, leading a 340-person, $17-million agency that licensed 45,000 businesses in 72 lines of commerce. Mark left the Consumer Affairs Department in 1993 to successfully seek election as New York City's first Public Advocate.
As a consumer prosecutor and Public Advocate, Mark established numerous local and national precedents:
- He exposed and helped break up the mob garbage cartel;
- enacted the law protecting the victims of domestic violence from unjust firings;
- filed the FTC petition that led to the elimination of Joe Camel ads addicting children;
- and twice successfully sued Mayor Giuliani because of racial profiling and police misconduct.
- See more of Mark's actions for New Yorkers.
In 2001 he won the Democratic nomination for NYC Mayor, losing the general election by two points to Michael Bloomberg.
Author, Commentator, Teacher, Businessman
Since 1970, Mark has written or edited 22 books - ranging from the #1 best-selling Who Runs Congress? (1972, 1975, 1979 and 1984 editions) to the 2004 bestseller The Book on Bush: How George W. (Mis)leads America (with Eric Alterman, 2004) and in 2006 Losing our Democracy: How Bush, the Far Right and Big Business are Betraying Americans.
In January 2009, he co-edited Change for America: A Progressive Blueprint for the 44th President in conjunction with John Podesta and his Center for America Progress Action Fund.
Mark appeared several hundred times on programs like CNN's Crossfire debating Pat Buchanan or Bob Novak and PBS's Firing Line vs. William F. Buckley, and was more recently regularly on MSNBC’s Hardball with Chris Matthews. From 2002-2009, he was a weekly panelist on NY1's weekly public affairs segment, Wiseguys.
In 2002, Mark was the "Distinguished Visiting Lecturer" at NYU Law School and from 2003-2008 taught an honors freshman seminar at the Arts College. He is now president of The New Democracy Project, a public affairs institute in New York City that he founded in 1981. On March 1, 2007, he became the president of Air America Radio and took it out of Chapter 11 bankruptcy to where it is now – on 60 stations nationally and XM radio.