The whistleblowers Washington ignores

Lisa Simeone · Mar 6, 2012

This is what I mean. Corruption runs so deep, at so many organizations, throughout the country, all over the political spectrum, good luck voting in a national election and expecting anything to change. (And the parallels to the TSA are obvious):

The whistleblowers Washington ignores

What’s worse: to be persecuted and indicted for trying to expose an act of wrongdoing — or to be ignored for doing so?
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Whistle-blowers have been under intense scrutiny in Washington lately, at least when it comes to the national security state. In recent years, the Obama administration has set a record by accusing no fewer than six government employees, who allegedly leaked classified information to reporters, of violating the Espionage Act, a draconian law dating back to 1917. Yet when it comes to workers who have risked their careers to expose misconduct in the corporate and financial arena, a different pattern has long prevailed. Here, the problem hasn’t been an excess of attention from government officials eager to chill dissent, but a dearth of attention that has often left whistle-blowers feeling no less isolated and discouraged.

Consider the case of Leyla Wydler, a broker who, back in 2003, sent a letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) about her former employer, the Stanford Financial Group. A year earlier, it had fired her for refusing to sell certificates of deposit that she rightly suspected were being misleadingly advertised to investors. The company, Wydler warned in her letter, “is the subject of a lingering corporate fraud scandal perpetrated as a ‘massive Ponzi scheme’ that will destroy the life savings of many, damage the reputation of all associated parties, ridicule securities and banking authorities, and shame the United States of America.”

It was a letter that should have woken the dead and, as it happened, couldn’t have been more on target. Wydler didn’t stop with the SEC either. She also sent copies to the National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD), the trade group responsible for enforcing regulations throughout the industry, as well as various newspapers, including the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. No one responded. No one at all.

The experiences of corporate whistle-blowers like Foster and Wydler underscore a truth highlighted by legal scholar Cass Sunstein in his book “Why Societies Need Dissent.” The voices of dissidents who have the courage to bring uncomfortable news to light — information that can prevent disastrous economic or other blunders from happening — matter only to the extent that anyone pays attention to them.

“A legal system that is committed to free speech forbids government from silencing dissenters,” observed Sunstein. “That is an extraordinary accomplishment.” But as he went on to note, the formal existence of this right hardly ensures that individuals who exercise it in situations that cry out for opposition have an impact. “Even in democracies, disparities in power play a large role in silencing dissent — sometimes by ensuring that dissenters keep quiet, but more insidiously by ensuring that dissenters are not really heard.”

. . . And it seems that, if the present House of Representatives has anything to say about it, the law will soon ensure that corporate whistle-blowers are silenced anew. Although the financial meltdown of 2008 didn’t exactly inspire the Justice Department to hold high-ranking Wall Street executives accountable (to date, not one CEO has been prosecuted for fraud), the abusive practices and billion-dollar scams that regulatory agencies somehow overlooked did prompt some reform. As part of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, Congress put in place new rules that, at least theoretically, enhanced the protections and incentives available to whistle-blowers.

. . . Despite the lore of the whistle-blower that pervades popular culture, Americans turn out to be less sympathetic to such dissenters than Europeans. Drawing on data from the World Value Surveys and other sources over multiple years, the sociologist Claude Fischer has found that U.S. citizens are “much more likely than Europeans to say that employees should follow a boss’s orders even if the boss is wrong.” They are also more likely “to defer to church leaders and to insist on abiding by the law,” and more prone “to believe that individuals should go along and get along.”
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The whistleblowers Washington ignores

Lisa Simeone Original Member

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The whistleblowers Washington ignores

Lisa Simeone Original Member

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