Cazenovia Forum
(Cazenovia, NY- April 2013) Corporate tax dodges and other manipulations of the U.S. economy will be in the spotlight as former New York Times reporter David Cay Johnston, a best-selling author widely known as one of the nation’s foremost muckraking journalists, delivers the next Cazenovia Forum lecture at 7 p.m. Friday, April 26, in the Morgan Room of Hubbard Hall, Seminary Street at Cazenovia College.
Johnston’s lecture, entitled “Monopolists Rising: How Big Business Uses Government to Thwart Competition, Jack Up Prices and Deliver Services Europeans and Asians Laugh At,” is free and open to the public.
As with all Cazenovia Forum events, the speaker will entertain questions from the audience, and a reception will follow.
Over 13 years at The Times, Johnston reported on hidden aspects of executive compensation, showing how top executives built vast fortunes while paying little or no income tax; revealed shortcomings in the pension and retirement savings systems that prompted reforms; exposed abuses of the bankruptcy system; and revealed how the rules of electricity “markets” raise prices rather than lower them.
He wrote warnings about the housing bubble years before it popped.
A frequent guest on national television shows, Johnston is the author of a best-selling trilogy on the American economy: “Perfectly Legal,” a book about the American tax system that won the 2004 Investigative Book of the Year Award, “Free Lunch” (on subsidies) and “The Fine Print” (on monopolies and oligopolies).
In 2001, he won the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on tax loopholes and abuses, which prompted numerous criminal convictions with long prison sentences, successful civil cases against tax cheats and tax-shelter promoters, as well as adoption of reforms by Congress and Oregon lawmakers.
An anthology he is editing for The New Press will be published this fall under the title “DIVIDED: The Perils of Our Growing Inequality.”
Over the years, Johnston’s reporting has shut down so many tax dodges that Professor Douglas Shackelford of the University of North Carolina’s business school named him the “de facto chief tax enforcement officer of the United States.”
Other newspapers Johnston was worked for in his 40-year career include the San Jose Mercury, Detroit Free Press, Los Angeles Times and Philadelphia Inquirer. Since 2009, he has been a Distinguished Visiting Lecturer at Syracuse University College of Law, where he teaches the property, tax and regulatory law of the ancient world as a way to showing the principles and theory in the law today.
He is board president of the 4,200-member Investigative Reporters & Editors professional association.