Stephen B. Kaplitt is the first Director of the Economic Empowerment in Strategic Regions (EESR) initiative at the U.S. Department of State. EESR promotes private-sector job-creation in regions where lack of economic opportunity helps fuel conflict and extremism.
Previously he was Special Assistant to the General Counsel at the U.S. Agency for International Development. He advised Agency leaders on a variety of subjects, including the First Amendment/ Establishment Clause, terrorist financing, USAID's relationship with the intelligence community and implementation of the Millennium Challenge Corporation's Threshold program. In December 2004 he was a member of USAID's delegation to the OSCE short-term observer mission for the presidential election in Ukraine.
Before entering government, Kaplitt was Executive Vice President and General Counsel of Lumenis Ltd., a Nasdaq-listed manufacturer of medical laser and light technology devices. At Lumenis he managed an annual budget of $10 million; supervised in-house and external counsel; and oversaw all of the Company's legal affairs, which included an SEC investigation, multiple shareholder class action lawsuits, complex intellectual property disputes, global product litigation and a broad range of transactional matters.
Prior to Lumenis, Kaplitt was a senior associate at Becker, Glynn, Melamed & Muffly LLP, a boutique international law firm in New York. While there he was seconded for two years to the International Finance Corporation, where he worked on numerous finance and equity transactions in Asia, Central Europe and the Baltics. He began practicing law at Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP, and was also an associate in mergers and acquisitions at Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft LLP, both in New York. During his legal career, Kaplitt acted as associate or lead counsel on corporate transactions totaling $3 billion in aggregate value, in over twenty countries.
Stephen Kaplitt received his JD cum laude from the Georgetown University Law Center, and his AB in Government with high honors from Dartmouth College.
The reason why we discussed that is because there's been a lot of commentary over the years to the effect that terrorism is simply a natural outgrowth of poverty and so if there was more equitable distribution of wealth around the world, you wouldn't have conflict, you wouldn't have terrorism and th...(Full transcript available to logged in subscribers.).
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