Muckraking Journalist to Discuss Corporate Abuses at Cazenovia Forum

CAZENOVIA, NY – 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 on Friday, April 26th at 7:00 pm in the Morgan Room of Hubbard Hall, located on Seminary Street at Cazenovia College.

David Cay Johnston

 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 open to the public and is free of charge.  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, he 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 currently board president of the 4,200-member Investigative Reporters & Editors (IRE).

 The Cazenovia Forum is a 501 (c) 3, not-for-profit organization established in 2006 by community members focused on promoting the understanding and discussion of national and international issues. By organizing and underwriting lecture events featuring nationally-known experts, the group intends to further Cazenovia’s commitment to knowledge-seeking and community involvement.  The Forum’s email address is cazlectureseries@gmail.com.

Former Director of Vatican Observatory Addresses Science vs. Religion Debate at Cazenovia Forum

        Across the centuries and down to the present day, science and religion have often been in conflict. But it doesn’t have to be that way argued Father George Coyne in the latest Cazenovia Forum lecture. Father Coyne, a Jesuit priest and former Director of the Vatican Observatory and Associate Director of the Steward Observatory at the University of Arizona, spoke at the Catherine Cummings Theatre on March 22^nd.  He said science and religion are different, but not opposed.

“Science seeks natural explanations for natural events. But it doesn’t say there’s nothing beyond natural explanations,” Father Coyne told the audience of about 200 people.  “Science does a very good job, but it doesn’t do the whole job.”

In a talk that ranged from the works of Galileo and Thomas Aquinas to personal debates with Stephen J. Hawkings and beer with Carl Sagan, Father Coyne first used photographs from the Hubble Space Telescope to explain what science has learned about the creation of the universe, before considering the implications of that knowledge for religious belief.

Coyne said that as a scientist there is no way he can answer whether God created the universe because it is not a scientific question.

“I cannot know whether God did it. I can believe God did it. And once I believe God did it I see a marvelous God,” he said.

Father Coyne added that science tells him a lot about the God he believes in. “It tells me of a magnificent God who made a dynamic universe that is creating itself as God participates in the creation. That’s the way God made the universe—as a dynamic, evolving, expanding universe.”

Father Coyne also addressed man’s place in the universe, and how we got here. “The best scientific explanation (for man’s creation) is Neo-Darwinian evolution,” he said. “Neo-Darwinian evolution is perfectly compatible with Catholic doctrine.” The story of Adam and Eve is a way of speaking about the origins of the human race, Coyne said.  “Scripture is telling stories that are true, but they’re not scientific truth.”

Father Coyne laced his talk with humor and a few strong declarations about people and organizations that don’t value science. He did not shy away from confronting what he sees as the problem of ignoring or misunderstanding science in  both religion and the political arena.  Evolution and Intelligent Design, he said emphatically, are not alternative scientific explanations for the creation of complex life. “Scientific evolution, in every case intelligent design has offered, has given a natural explanation for this more complicated organism. Putting together all the parts. It’s happened by the evolutionary process,” he said.

He also bemoaned the rejection of scientific knowledge in making policy. “It’s disastrous,” he said. “Science comes to some very significant conclusions, that are limited, and to ignore them in both the political sphere and the religious sphere is looking for disaster.”

During the question and answer session following his talk, Father Coyne spoke movingly of his own deep, personal relationship with God. “God loves me and I try to return that love by what I do. Faith is a gift. God gave that gift of himself. I accepted the gift. Each day, I try to accept.”

Father Coyne’s talk was sponsored by St. James Church in Cazenovia.

The next Cazenovia Forum speaker will be journalist David Cay Johnston on Friday April 26^th in Hubbard Hall at Cazenovia College. A fundraiser featuring puzzlemaster Will Shortz is also being planned.

John Zogby Speaks at Caz Forum

About 140 people turned out at the latest Cazenovia Forum lecture to hear nationally known pollster and Utica native John Zogby analyze the results of the recent presidential election. Zogby spoke at St. James Church on Friday, November 9^th, just days after President Obama was re-elected.

In introducing Zogby, Forum board member David Chanatry reminded the audience that Zogby also spoke after the 2008 election.

”We at the Cazenovia Forum are always pleased to bring nationally known speakers to our village,” Chanatry said. “And as central New Yorkers it is a real pleasure when they are one of our own. Please join me in welcoming back to the Cazenovia Forum one of the nation’s most respected pollsters, Mr. John Zogby.”

Taking the pulpit before the politically inclined congregation, Zogby paused as if reflecting, and with a wry grin addressed the audience. “Well, this is especially nice,” he said. “No one ever asks me to come back. Respected and pollster in the same sentence, that’s so awesome, because we all took a beating this time around and we were all right, so let’s hear it for the all the pollsters.”

His opening remarks drew hearty laughter from the audience, and set the tone for an evening in which he weaved intellectual humor and light-hearted sarcasm with many interesting facts about his work.

Peppering his talk with references to American history, he spent the next hour and half breaking down voting patterns, describing his methods and those of other pollsters, and offered his insights as to why polling itself became an issue during the campaign.

Zogby said he had Obama up by four percent the night before the election but in interviews with several news organizations via Skype and in their studios, he described how the same candidate might not take the popular vote along with the Electoral College.

Zogby attributed Presidents Obama’s re-election to the establishment of a demographic coalition not unlike that of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932. Roosevelt stitched together liberal intellectuals, urban voters, poor whites and black voters (who until that point had been loyal to Lincoln’s GOP) forming the New Deal coalition.

President Obama cultivated his coalition from the young, African-Americans,  Hispanics and a group that economist Richard Florida has deemed the “creative class” and what Zogby simply termed “knowledge-based workers”–—educators, engineers, programmers, scientists, and health care workers, among others.

Zogby said what no pollster could determine was that while their research showed the young women of this creative class would most likely not vote for Gov. Romney, it was not clear how many would cast their ballot for Obama.

He  went on to discuss how the groups in Obama’s coalition were growing, making it problematic this year for Romney or any other Republican candidate, but more than once he reminded his listeners, “it was close.”

Most interesting was his explanation of the perspectives one gets by viewing political parties as “markets” in the United States. Polling, or quantitative and qualitative research, measures trending patterns that allow the researchers, or pollsters, to understand when and why one market is surpassing another.

Zogby’s blend of wit, humor and political punditry segued into his Q & A  where he fielded questions on the impact of the internet and new models that technology has provided allowing national pollsters to be so accurate.

He told of giving an interview in 1997 in which he told a magazine the future of polling was the internet.

“How can you say that, [the interviewer asked],”  Zogby said. “Of course that was back in the day when it took three hours to get on the internet…remember, AOL.”

Onondaga County Legislator, John Dougherty (R), attended the evening’s event and said he thought the speech was very good.

“I liked his details, the numbers he pulled and his methods,” Dougherty said.

Sandra Kaplan of Cazenovia said she also enjoyed herself.

“I found him very interesting,” Kaplan said. “And I thought his demographic analysis was very useful.

Before finishing Zogby thanked the Cazenovia Forum for giving him the opportunity to be heard, and as he departed for a reception to meet members of his audience it was hard to not to think of something he said earlier in the evening, while standing upon the stately alter of St. James

“I am often asked, ‘how do you remember all those numbers?,’ he said. “Well, let me assure you, later this evening there will be an aging [baby] boomer wandering the streets of Cazenovia wondering where he parked his car…the good Lord giveth and the good Lord taketh away.”

By Thomas M. Baker.