Jesse Isinger
speaker
31 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Oct 2024
last heard Oct 2024
Jesse Isinger’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
It's the longest sentence, I believe, for anyone who did not leak classified information. Yes, he did break the law, and it's up to society to punish people who break the law, but understanding what he did and how that was a public service is very important. We used his information to publish many, many stories in the public interest.
So I think what he did was a huge service to the American public to reveal things that would not have been revealed otherwise. He took great risk and now is going to pay an enormous price.
Not when he was arrested, but when it first hit the public as arraignment or something like that. We never knew who it was before that. And had you wondered about who he was? Oh, of course. What had you thought when you wondered? Well, I wondered, am I ever going to know? And if I do, can that circumstance be anything but terrible news?
Yeah, it wasn't surprising. Relatively young, someone who had principles, I mean, I'm taking what they've attested to under the threat of perjury as true, and it rings true, what little John and his lawyers have said, which is he didn't profit from it, he didn't sell the information, and he was motivated by the desire to do a public service. And I think he did do a public service.
Well, so you talk about these billionaires saying that they're victims of this. And... At the beginning, a couple of them felt like they had to respond to our questions about this and have some justification for how they avoided taxes or what they did, their techniques. And by the end, you know, we did about 50 stories. By the end, we were almost entirely blown off.
So we would send our 50 questions to the subject of a story and hear nothing back. No response. And the reason I ended up concluding was that they feel they're untouchable in American society and they're right. we didn't touch them at all. We exposed the greatest injustice about American inequality in decades, and nothing happened.
This is a policy. People really want billionaires to pay more taxes. It polls very well with Republicans, even. But billionaires have disproportionate power in this country, and they have a lot more power than the 70% of people who want them to be taxed more. I mean, you know, they wield extraordinary amount of influence and power in society. And so they can bend public policy to their will.
It's a tough fight. Yeah.
A rare, rare emotion for me. You know, we go back to Cordell Hull and 100 years ago, there was extraordinary power from the wealthiest people who'd ever walked the earth. And the government was relatively powerless at the time.
And somehow, coalitions cobbled together to reform the system and to start to bring billionaires to heel, not just with taxes, but with the advent of antitrust enforcement and eventually securities regulation. And so there are ways to corral the power and and bring billionaires, if not to heal, then bring them back into the fold where they have some sense of civic and social responsibility.
But you also think they should be paid a higher salary. I wouldn't mind if they got paid a salary. Or let's say they can keep their stock options. We just tax their unrealized gains.
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