207 David Cay Johnston and Laura Briggs

One of my all time favorite journalists is my guest today. His books have had a more profound affect on my thinking re tax policy than any other

David Cay Johnston   won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting he did for The New York Times, he has hunted down a killer the police failed to catch, exposed LAPD abuses, caused two television stations to lose their licenses over news manipulations, and revealed Donald Trump's true net worth. He has uncovered so many tax dodges that he has been called the "de facto chief tax enforcement officer of the United States."

His book, Perfectly Legal, was a New York Times bestseller and honored as Book of the Year by the journalism organization Investigative Reporters and Editors. Over his forty-year career he has won many other honors, including a George Polk Award.

David Cay Johnston is the founder and editor of DCReport.org.

His most recent book is titled “It’s Even Worse Than You Think: What the Trump Administration Is Doing to America.”

Professor Laura Briggs is an expert on U.S. and international child welfare policy and on transnational and transracial adoption. She received her A.B. from Mount Holyoke College, her M.T.S. from Harvard University, and her Ph.D. in American Studies from Brown University. Her research studies the relationship between reproductive politics, neoliberalism, and the longue durée of U.S. empire and imperialism. Briggs has also been at the forefront of rethinking the field and frameworks of transnational feminisms. Briggs newly published  Briggs also recently co-edited a special issue of Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism on “Radical Transnationalisms: Reimagining Solidarities, Violence, Empires” that brings transnational feminism studies into new light by developing new and alternative analytical frameworks and exploring alternative or forgotten genealogies of the field. Briggs’s new book project, entitled The Future is Born in Small Places: The Gendered (Bio)Politics of Freedom, Debt Imperialism, and Unnatural Disaster in the Caribbean, focuses on historical and contemporary uses of debt in the United States and the Caribbean as a political tool of disenfranchisement, expropriation, and necropolitics.

Briggs is also a public intellectual whose work has been featured in court cases, podcasts, and journalism, including on National Public Radio, Slate, PBS, New Republic, Indian Country Today, andMs.magazine. She began her intellectual career as a journalist for Gay Community News. She regularly teaches seminars on transnational feminisms, reproductive politics, and contemporary feminist theory.