State of Democracy Lecture: Jesse Eisinger

"How the Ultra-Rich Avoid Taxes, and Why It Matters for Our Democracy."  

Jesse Eisinger is a senior editor and reporter at ProPublica. He is the author of the “ The Chickenshit Club: Why the Justice Department Fails to Prosecute Executives.”

He serves on the advisory board of the University of California; Berkeley’s Financial Fraud Institute and he was a consultant on season three of the HBO series “Succession.”

He was the lead reporter on “The Secret IRS Files,” a series that explored the tax avoidance techniques of the ultrawealthy, drawing a massive trove of previously never-seen tax records of the richest Americans. It won the Selden Ring and the Barlett & Steele prize, among others.

In April 2011, he and a colleague won the  Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for a series of stories on  questionable Wall Street practices that helped make the financial crisis the worst since the Great Depression. He won the 2015 Gerald Loeb Award for  commentary. He has also  twice been a finalist for the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting.

He was a regular columnist for The New York Times’s Dealbook section. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, NewYorker.com, the Washington Post, the Baffler, the American Prospect and on NPR and “This American Life.” Before joining ProPublica, he was the Wall Street Editor of Conde Nast Portfolio and a columnist for the Wall Street Journal, covering markets and finance.