(5) Chapter 1 - Becoming a Whistleblower

"This is the story of how Allen Jones, an investigator at the state Office of the Inspector General in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, moved in gradual, irrevocable steps to a crossroads in his life, and one day made a fateful choice."(5)

Hier betreft het het omkopen door de farmaceutische industrie van iedereen die relevant was om 'Risperdal and other atypical antipsychotics' voorgeschreven te krijgen, al was het 45 keer duurder en minder effectief of veilig dan de aloude antipsychotica en was al het onderzoek eromheen gemanipuleerd.

"Texas turned out to be the ideal state in which to roll out treatment guidelines driven more by marketing than by science. The company [Johnson & Johnson - GdG] had cultivated strong ties with leaders in the University of Texas medical community, as well as with Medicare and Medicaid officials, and together with other pharmaceutical companies had donated generously to numerous prominent politicians. Such connections were particularly valuable in a notoriously political state, where the regents and administrators of state universities, hospitals and prisons are routinely nominated by the governor. What’s more, Texas had enormous prison, juvenile detention and state mental hospital populations, all ripe targets for Risperdal." [mijn nadruk] (71)

"Johnson & Johnson’s marketing strategy was highly successful. Risperdal and related Johnson & Johnson drugs using the same active ingredient became the world’s best-selling antipsychotic, with sales of over $4 billion in 2006 alone. More broadly, efforts by Johnson & Johnson and other pharmaceutical companies to modify the perceptions and prescribing habits of psychiatrists throughout the United States produced a global second-generation antipsychotics market with sales of $13 billion per year."(73)

"Jones and his team delved into the details of Johnson & Johnson’s skewed science — how the company had designed misleading clinical trials to exaggerate Risperdal’s effectiveness, concealed unfavorable evidence, and misrepresented dangerous side effects and other health risks. When doctors began to report that Risperdal was causing neurological disorders in their patients, Johnson & Johnson mounted a misinformation campaign to “neutralize” the doctors’ concerns." [mijn nadruk] (74)

"Finally, prodded by these state-level successes, the federal government got into the act; in November 2013, the DOJ settled further Risperdal charges with Johnson & Johnson for $2.2 billion. Again, with a few trivial exceptions, Johnson & Johnson admitted no wrongdoing in these cases, accepted no liability. None of its employees was prosecuted. The jury verdicts in Louisiana and Arkansas were voided on technicalities by the supreme courts in those states; the penalty in South Carolina was halved on appeal. And though Risperdal suits have cost the company nearly $3 billion, it sold $34 billion of the drug between 1993 and 2011 alone, sometimes at profit margins approaching 97 percent. Viewed like this, $3 billion in fines seems a smart investment. That’s evidently how the company felt. In April 2012, two months after the Texas trial, the board of Johnson & Johnson made Alex Gorsky, the mastermind of Risperdal marketing, the firm’s new chief executive. Wall Street cheered: the company’s share price held firm throughout the trial and, aside from brief blips, has climbed steadily ever since. (Johnson & Johnson stock now sells for more than twice what it was worth during the trial.) The Department of Justice showed little more respect for whistleblowers. Its press release on the $2.2 billion umbrella settlement praised the hard work of DOJ lawyers and celebrated the government’s victory over fraud. The release did not name Jones or any of the other whistleblowers, without whose knowledge and courage the case against Johnson & Johnson would never have been brought in the first place. Allen Jones had testified about the state betraying vulnerable people, people who needed to trust that state to take care of them. But reading the DOJ press release, he, too, felt betrayed, by government entities that had long ignored his contribution and at times seemed to have conspired against him." [mijn nadruk] (84)

"Beyond fighting crime, whistleblowers are raising some of the fundamental questions of our democracy. They are forcing debate on the pervasive influence of corporations, and the proper balance between free speech and secrecy, between citizen rights and state power." [mijn nadruk] (91)

"But ultimately, as we’ll see, the power of whistleblowers is often illusory: their rise is a symptom of a society in deep distress. We are in the midst of a battle over whistleblowing, part of a larger struggle between personal conscience and group solidarity, between the rights of individuals to know what their corporations and their government are doing, and the ever greater power of organizations to keep their secrets. How these conflicts are ultimately resolved will say much about the future strength of our democracy." [mijn nadruk] (93)

(93) Chapter 2 - Question Authority

Het eerste verhaal speelt in Irak tijdens de Amerikaanse bezetting ervan.

"Humvees were widely known to be vulnerable to IED attacks, especially when the explosion occurred beneath their flat, low-slung undercarriage ..."(96)

Ene Franz Gayl - een marinier - wordt door generaal Zilmer gevraagd beter materiaal naar Irak te krijgen, want via de officiële kanalen lukt dat niet. Hij ontdekt waarom:

"Partisanship over weapon systems and strategic priorities has likely been a part of military procurement since the birth of standing armies. Yet after serving as an adviser at Camp Fallujah, he knew firsthand the human cost of these bureaucratic turf wars." [mijn nadruk] (104)

Gayl besluit na allerlei vormen van tegenwerking de klok te luiden over die praktijken.

"The military had accepted Gayl’s message about the MRAPs. Yet it swiftly attacked the messenger, for having committed the two cardinal sins of the defense establishment: speaking to Congress and speaking to the press. The Pentagon’s bitter and elaborate persecution of Gayl would last for eight years."(113)

"Finally, on September 23, 2014, the Marines and GAP reached an agreement that allowed Gayl to keep his job, receive an undisclosed payment for damages and a citation for his whistleblowing, and be entrusted with formulating whistleblower guidelines for the Marine Corps."(132)

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Andere kwesties, waaronder het aankaarten van de My Lai slachting in Vietnam in 1968.

"Many observers felt that the real villains of the story were the whistleblowers. Hugh Thompson was attacked as a traitor by war-hawk congressmen while testifying. He received death threats, and dead animals were left by night at his door. Nationwide polls revealed that many Americans didn’t believe Ridenhour, while many others felt that atrocities like My Lai were inevitable in wartime. Even some experts who saw Calley and his fellow soldiers as murderers, like General William Peers, leader of the Army’s investigation into the massacre, viewed My Lai as an aberration."(181)

"In time, Ron Ridenhour came to a very different perception of My Lai and its aftermath. He recognized the immense power of authority to make people do virtually anything they are ordered to do, even against their conscience. He also understood that organizations that demanded and enforced such authority had self-defense mechanisms that led them to conceal or to defend their crimes. He was certain that My Lai hadn’t been the work of a few corrupt soldiers; rather, he felt, the military culture itself corrupted many soldiers."(182)

"Ridenhour saw that Robert McNamara, the homo mathematicus, had reduced war to technology, people to data. McNamara had proclaimed that American supremacy in money and technology would overwhelm this stubborn third-world nation: Agent Orange, developed by researchers at the University of Chicago, the University of Hawai‘i, Monsanto and Dow Chemical, would burn away Vietcong ground cover, just as napalm, invented in a secret laboratory by scientists from Harvard, Standard Oil and DuPont, would burn the Vietcong themselves. IBM computers predicted when and where the enemy would attack, and portable radar units and sweat and urine “sniffers” tracked him in the jungle. Unprecedented use of bombs and artillery were expected to win the war. (The US dropped on Vietnam more than three times the bomb tonnage it had dropped in all of World War II.) This focus on firepower made mass civilian killings inevitable."(184)

"After he spoke out, most people asked him not why the soldiers of C Company had done what they’d done but why he had blown the whistle on them. They did not seem to recognize the disturbing similarities that Ridenhour saw between Nazi atrocities and the US murder of civilians in Vietnam, or to understand that both were often the direct result of geopolitical policy." [mijn nadruk] (186)

"Ron Ridenhour had recognized a fundamental aspect of human behavior that lies at the heart of organized criminality. In theory, we say that people are responsible for their acts, and that orders from above are no excuse for evildoing. In practice, most of us act as if such orders absolved us of responsibility."(188)

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Vervolgens het verhaal over Ralph Nader die de veiligheid van auto's tot een thema maakte.

"Ralph Nader had been thinking about car safety since his teens, after several high school and college friends were killed or maimed in car accidents."(189)

"Against the car makers’ contention that accidents were caused by driver error or poor highway conditions, Nader argued that companies that manufactured faulty or dangerous vehicles should themselves be held responsible for damages."(190)

"Nader denounced the President’s Committee for Traffic Safety and the National Safety Council, two quasi-governmental bodies, as industry-funded front groups that papered over problems and perpetuated driver injuries and fatalities. Nader said that insurance executives, automotive repairmen and police, far from fighting traffic accidents, earned their living from them, and had become “a service industry” to injury and death. Government regulators, automotive engineers, doctors and lawyers, by ignoring the predictable carnage, were violating the basic ethical codes of their professions."(191)

[Wauw, dat is midden in de roos! ]

" ... he wrote in Unsafe at Any Speed. “A great problem of contemporary life is how to control the power of economic interests which ignore the harmful effects of their applied science and technology.” Much of Nader’s future work would be devoted to forging and using these new instruments of civic action, with fervor and ingenuity." [mijn nadruk] (192)

[Prachtige uitspraak.]

"Soon Nader went a step further, and became what might be called a “meta-whistleblower” — a megaphone, consultant and advocate for whistleblowers everywhere."(193)

" .. they [Nader's Raiders - GdG] produced seventeen detailed reports/exposés, which revealed that the FTC, the FDA, the USDA and other agencies suffered widespread corruption, excessive secrecy, toxic partisan politics, and regulatory capture by the industries they were tasked with policing. Time and again Nader demonstrated his central thesis: that large corporations, with their vast wealth and political power, were single-mindedly growing their profits at the expense of the well-being of American citizens." [mijn nadruk] (195)

"Ralph Nader saw how bureaucratic practices at the major car manufacturers could dull individual morality, particularly after Robert McNamara, together with the other nine Air Force Whiz Kids, was hired to remake an ailing Ford Motor Company. McNamara and his team were pioneers of managerialism, a movement rooted in the Industrial Revolution that had taken on new rigor at Harvard Business School in the 1930s. Managerialism arose from the twin convictions that organizations should be run according to scientific, quantitative principles, and that professional managers skilled in these principles were the best leaders for any large organization, whether a corporation, a hospital, a university, an NGO or an army. “Management is, in the end, the most creative of all arts—for its medium is human talent itself,” McNamara said in a 1967 college convocation address." [mijn nadruk] (198)

"In the opening address to his landmark 1971 conference, Nader linked whistleblowing to the courageous rejection of British tyranny and oppression by the Founders, and to the triumph of individual conscience over arbitrary government action. This same resolve was now needed, he said, to free America from new forms of tyranny and oppression by large organizations. Nader argued that the best way to fight organizational wrongdoing was from within."(204)

"Corporate America was alarmed by Nader’s initiatives. Soon after the Conference on Professional Responsibility, James Roche, the CEO of General Motors, denounced both Nader and his whistleblowers as anti-American subversives."(207)

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Over naar Daniel Elsberg, de man van de Pentagon Papers.

"As Nader, Fitzgerald and the other participants at the Conference on Professional Responsibility were discussing the theory of whistleblowing in Washington, a senior military analyst on the other coast, in Santa Monica, California, was putting it into practice, in one of history’s highest-stakes whistleblowing acts. Daniel Ellsberg had already made multiple copies of a massive, top-secret study of the Vietnam War, which came to be known as the Pentagon Papers. In November 1969, he began to release it, first to five members of Congress, and then, when the congressmen balked at revealing the explosive data, to the press."

"One of RAND’s approaches to the problem of nuclear brinksmanship was game theory, a method of determining ideal outcomes in uncertain contests invented by brilliant Hungarian polymath John von Neumann. Best known in one of its thought problems, the prisoner’s dilemma, game theory generally implied a model of mankind as totally rational, selfish, suspicious, cynical, ambitious and greedy — beings who always seek to extract the greatest personal advantage from any competitive situation. Though many theorists recognized this was a simplified model of the human mind, they found it a useful representation of the minds of Americans and Soviets in a nuclear showdown." [mijn nadruk] (211)

[Wat een typische mensvisie is dat toch. Vast ontstaan door achterliggende protestantse religies.]

"By late 1968, the project was completed, in forty-seven volumes. Ellsberg, one of only three people to have access to all seven thousand pages of the study, had read them by the middle of 1969. He later called the Pentagon Papers “a continuous record of governmental deception and fatally unwise decision-making, cloaked by secrecy, under four presidents.”"(215)

"With this abrupt conclusion, the Ellsberg trial left unresolved several critical questions concerning his whistleblowing. How far was the US government entitled to commit crimes, carry on illicit domestic surveillance, even wage wars, in secret? Did an individual have the right, or even a duty, to violate that secrecy, in order to inform the public of illegal acts by their own leaders? In later years, Ellsberg was increasingly recognized as a hero and a prototypical whistleblower: someone willing to risk his job, his family’s well-being and his freedom to end an unjust war."(230)

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Een en ander leidde ook tot de Watergate-schandalen onder Nixon. De klokkenluider hier was 'Deep throat', later werd pas duidelijk dat het ging om een senior medewerker van de FBI W. Mark Felt.

"How did the president of the United States and his most senior aides lose sight of basic ethics and their sworn duty to defend the Constitution, in a downward spiral of criminality? How did a group of highly trained yet otherwise ordinary Americans lose their grip on morality at My Lai? How could automotive engineers coolly tally up the number of future burn victims their cars would produce? Why did top military and civilian leaders systematically lie to the nation about the horror and futility of the Vietnam War? And why, in all of these cases, did so many insiders and onlookers remain silent? These questions of early 1970s America echoed those that the world had asked itself insistently since World War II. The savage genocides by the Imperial Japanese Army in China and the Pacific; the purges, pogroms and forced relocations ordered by Stalin and Mao; and the Allied slaughter of German and Japanese civilians with incendiary and nuclear bombs—all brought into focus how easily individuals could lose their humanity and sense of justice under the intense pressures of loyalty and hierarchy. Above all, the horrors of the Holocaust showed age-old virtues in a grim new light: Nazis in the dock at Nuremberg justified their various atrocities as obedience to their commanders and the rule of law, devotion to their supreme leader and patriotic allegiance to their fatherland. The tribunal rejected their arguments, later termed the “Nuremberg” or “superior orders” defense, by affirming the abiding responsibility of every individual to live by his or her own personal morality, even in the face of coercion by peers, authorities or the state.(...) Yet as we’ve seen, responsibility within a group is evanescent, often adhering to no one individual." [mijn nadruk] (251)

"Disobedience and public denunciation seem the only moral choice. Yet time and again, in actual instances of group wrongdoing, dissenters are rare or absent: most group members suppress their personal values and participate in the crime more or less willingly. Society routinely accepts, sometimes even commends, those who comply with such acts — seeing them as the “good soldiers” who stick with their comrades and make the best of a dirty job — while condemning as traitors those few who publicly condemn the wrongdoing." [mijn nadruk] (252)

Onderzoekers stortten zich op die kwesties na WO II: Solomon Asch, Henri Tajfel, Irving Janis, Theodor Adorno (over de autoritaire persoonlijkheid), Stanley Milgram (van de shock-experimenten), Hannah Arendt (van het Eichmannproces).

"Milgram concluded that humans have a powerful instinct to obey orders, Eichmann-like, which often overcomes their personal morality."(258)

[Zo'n algemene conclusie kun je helemaal niet afleiden uit dat experiment.]

"Authorization, according to Milgram, is the process by which an individual accepts the legitimacy, power and expertise of an authority, and agrees to perform tasks at the authority’s command. The authority almost always justifies these tasks by linking them to a higher ideological mission, such as the furtherance of science or national security, and uses rewards and punishments to compel compliance by its subordinates. Once individuals accept this relationship, Milgram explained, they transfer judgments of right and wrong to the authority figure, and their sense of personal responsibility for their actions fades." [mijn nadruk] (260)

"A third psychological process revealed by Milgram’s experiment is routinization, by which members of organizations break down large activities into a series of discrete steps, which they perform almost automatically. Routinization employs euphemisms to shield people from the moral implication of their acts, reframing their choices as professional rather than personal or moral—“just business.” As a result, the individual’s attention shifts from an ethical assessment of the work to how efficiently they perform it; terms like “loyalty,” “duty” and “discipline” are defined with reference to the organization rather than to society, humanity or the environment." [mijn nadruk] (262)

"The fourth mechanism that Milgram observed, both in his experiments and in several widely known crimes of obedience, is the dehumanization or derogation of the victim."(263)

"Though the overwhelming majority of participants in Milgram’s experiment gave in to authority and obeyed harmful orders, a few Teachers followed their conscience instead."(265)

"Herbert Kelman, who coined the term “crimes of obedience,” draws broader conclusions about why certain people are able to escape the twin pulls of obedience and groupthink."(268)

"Many of the whistleblowers we have encountered have, through circumstance or genetic disposition, disabled the mechanisms that their organizations relied on to enforce obedience."(269)

"Franz Gayl talks the way very few whistleblowers ever can. Yet he can hardly be happy with the ultimate outcome of his acts. He successfully revealed mismanagement in the MRAP program, but the root causes of that mismanagement—the conflicts of interest, the revolving door and the disproportionate economic and political power of the major defense contractors—remain. Even when their efforts fix specific problems, most whistleblowers are forced to acknowledge that the underlying abuses still occur."(272)

"After a series of consolidations in the 1990s urged and facilitated by Bill Clinton, defense giants like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman now exert more power than ever over the government. Lockheed, Ernie Fitzgerald’s old nemesis, is the world’s leading arms maker, with revenue of $39 billion from government contracts in 2018 alone — 70 percent of the firm’s sales. (The top five contractors consumed about 110 billion tax dollars in 2018.)"(275)

"In return, contractors spend uncounted millions a year on Congress, in campaign contributions and lobbying. Some payments seem open bribes."(276)

"It’s the same old story as in Ernie Fitzgerald’s day: while soldiers die and taxpayers lose, Lockheed and its military minders keep their money machine humming."(277)

"In 2007, a stunning thirty-four of thirty-nine retiring senior generals and admirals immediately joined defense companies."(280)

"Despite all the waste and the fraud, despite the endless, illegitimate, losing wars that have bled the nation’s economy dry, Americans remain obedient to military authority."(283)

(284) Chapter 3 - The Money Dance

Begint met Elin Baklid-Kunz die als klokkenluider financiële malversaties in een non-for-profit ziekenhuis in Halifax aan de kaak stelde. Ze schakelde daarbij Marlan Wilbanks in, een procureur die voor klokkenluiders werkte.

"Ultimately, Wilbanks believes, the government’s stance puts the interests of major corporations ahead of the welfare of ordinary citizens. “They know that taxpayers are being ripped off, yet they’re also worried that innocent stockholders or employees will be hurt if they hit a company hard. Or in healthcare, that patients will suffer. But hold up a minute! Should a company’s massive illegal profits be a defense of their acts of fraud? (...) The DOJ’s [Department of Justice - GdG] softness on corporate criminals is often matched by its harshness toward whistleblowers." [mijn nadruk] (324)

"Money, then, is a highly psychoactive substance. Using it as an organizational principle for society seems a risky strategy. Yet over the past four decades of market triumphalism, the accepted wisdom among conservatives and market-friendly liberals alike has increasingly been that markets are the path to social well-being, that private wealth is identical with public good, and that freedom from government regulation and social obligation are the only authentic freedoms. At the same time, long-standing ethical prohibitions against commodification have lost their normative edge. The result is that money has unparalleled significance in today’s society, not only as the fuel of markets, but as the measure of human success and fulfillment." [mijn nadruk] (335)

"Sandel argues that the intrusion of money into realms where a deeper human morality is actually paramount — sexuality and reproduction, child rearing, education, medicine, criminal justice and the environment, for example — is not progress, but corruption. Yet it is a corruption we often seem powerless to define, and therefore to prevent, as formerly widespread conceptions of virtue and human dignity on the one hand, and of the intrinsic tawdriness of cash on the other, lose force. Thanks to a half century of intellectual groundwork laid by economists and lawyers, the proposition that human behavior is, at some level, best understood as a cost-benefit analysis holds sway with legislators, judges, public policy experts and financiers, who have helped to create a world in which money is considered unambiguously good. Earning money for shareholders is put forward as the supreme obligation and statutory responsibility of all public corporations. Laws and legal penalties are widely viewed as mere economic strictures, with no inherent moral force. The Supreme Court asserts that cash is equivalent to free speech, and the medium through which corporations exercise their First Amendment rights." [mijn nadruk] (337)

"In principle, the compliance department is an institutionalized whistleblowing body within an organization, like the inspector general’s offices instituted in many government agencies a few years earlier. In practice, compliance programs often become an elaborate game that a company plays with itself, while proceeding toward its real goal of making as much money as possible. This shouldn’t surprise us. In sports, after all, players are told to follow the rules and to exhibit good sportsmanship, but umpires remain on the field to blow the whistle on every foul. In business, by contrast, most of the referees have been sent home. Compliance is now a multibillion-dollar industry whose members run research institutes, organize worldwide conferences, publish best practice guidelines and design specialized software. Despite these efforts, corporate crime has continued unabated; by many measures, it has grown.(...) Generally, what the company really expects is profits: bonuses and promotions usually depend on revenue, not on honesty or integrity." [mijn nadruk] (343)

"Ultimately, compliance departments and ethics training, like their guiding philosophy of self-policing, are based on the false assumption that people are fully aware of ethical dilemmas whenever they encounter them, and consciously decide whether to behave ethically or unethically. This idea contradicts the work of Stanley Milgram, Solomon Asch and other groundbreaking social psychologists, who proved that bad behavior is caused less by bad morals than by the pressures of authority, group conformity and self-interest."(345)

"In short, compliance can serve as a façade that conceals an organization’s wrongdoing from outsiders and insiders alike."(346)

[Het ergste is nog dat na een veroordeling of regeling alle corrupte betrokkenen geen persoonlijke verantwoordelijkheid hoeven te dragen voor hun corruptie en een uitstekende loopbaan behouden met promoties, bonussen en at niet, terwijl de klokkenluider allerlei verwijten en problemen tegemoet kan zien. Het is schokkend: van de ene kant gestraft worden omdat je het goede doet, van de andere kant beloond worden voor immoreel en hebzuchtig gedrag. Bijvoorbeeld:]

"Meantime she feels like a pariah in her own community, where she’s widely blamed for harming the hospital by causing it to spend more than $120 million in attorney expenses and settlements. To make up this shortfall, the hospital took on debt, announced a round of layoffs, and defunded the employee pension plan, converting it to a cash-balance account similar to a 401(k). “People think they lost their pensions because of me,” Baklid-Kunz says. The executive pension plan remained intact, however, and most senior executives during her tenure have continued to prosper at the hospital. Arvin Lewis is now senior vice president and chief revenue officer, and Shelly Shiflet, associate counsel during Baklid-Kunz’s tenure, was promoted to vice president and chief compliance officer in 2015. Even the registered nurse who did the alleged illicit rounding on behalf of Dr. Federico Vinas was promoted, and nominated for employee of the month. Drs. Khanna, Kuhn and Vinas, who have since left Halifax, were never accused of any wrongdoing, and all remain practicing neurosurgeons in good standing with the medical profession. Eric Peburn, who as CFO had ultimate responsibility for certifying that its cost reports were truthful, correct, complete, and did not violate any laws, was recognized by a major healthcare trade publication as a standout financial manager, as was Jeff Feasel, who remains president and CEO. Both Feasel and former Florida governor Rick Scott, healthcare entrepreneur and erstwhile CEO of the fraud empire that was Columbia/HCA, were recently honored by Daytona Beach’s Bethune-Cookman University for their services to the community. As governor, Scott appointed all members of Halifax’s seven-member board."(352)

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Over Roy Poses, een dokter die als Nader het klokkenluiden begon te organiseren.

"Poses has used his experiences during a forty-one-year career in medicine to create Health Care Renewal, an erudite, sharp-tongued blog that is a sweeping indictment of healthcare in America. Poses’s blog helps explain how the money dance came to Halifax Health, and why Elin Baklid-Kunz and so many other healthcare professionals end up blowing the whistle on their organizations."(357)

" ... he found the same widening gulf between the values of medicine and the methods of hospital leaders, most of whom were skilled in capital rather than health."(359)

"The triumph of managerialism in medicine is part of the broader rise of a professional management class that began in the early 1900s, with Frederick Taylor’s groundbreaking studies in productivity, and accelerated after World War II as economists and accountants like Robert McNamara, possessing new quantitative skills rather than expertise in any particular field, began to move freely among leadership positions in government, industry, business schools and international financial institutions. The result was a new breed of generic executives who, as business historian H. Thomas Johnson writes, “believed they could make decisions without knowing the company’s products, technologies, or customers. They had only to understand the intricacies of financial reporting.”" [mijn nadruk] (359)

"Having abandoned the ethical high ground, the AMA rapidly moved from a grudging acknowledgment to an eager embrace of corporate money in medicine; today the organization lobbies for major healthcare firms and frequently criticizes whistleblower laws designed to combat wrongdoing by those firms.
In 1980, the Bayh-Dole Act allowed universities to patent inventions discovered in federally funded research, which had previously belonged to the government, and the Supreme Court ruled in Diamond v. Chakrabarty that genetically modified bacteria, and by extension any living organism, could be patented. Fields like pharmaceuticals and biotechnology were deregulated and became enormously profitable; they demanded new research—and were willing to pay academics handsomely to perform it. These developments vastly increased the flow of corporate dollars to medical schools and university science programs; at the same time, public funding to higher education entered a decline that grew steeper after the mid-1990s, and became a plunge after the 2008 Great Recession. To compensate for this lost income, universities began to accept more corporate money, to enter into joint-venture agreements with industry, to open intellectual property offices, and to encourage their faculties to launch for-profit enterprises. Whereas researchers had previously tried to keep their distance from industry, fearing that such cooperation would shift their attention from basic research to the more short-term—and marketable—problems of applied research and would also inhibit the free flow of scientific information in academia, now industry funding, collaboration and confidentiality became the norm. What a previous generation of researchers had considered selling out came to seem necessary, sensible, even shrewd. Researchers became entrepreneurs, as biochemists and geneticists launched biotech ventures or joined the boards of pharmaceutical corporations, just as economists opened their own investment vehicles and academics in other fields spun off consultancies and startups. Research in the public interest morphed into a search for private (and personal) gain. “It was once considered unseemly for a medical or science researcher to be thinking about some kind of commercial enterprise while at the same time doing basic research,” says bioethicist Sheldon Krimsky. “The two didn’t seem to mix. But as the leading figures began intensively finding commercial outlets and get-rich-quick schemes, they helped to change the ethos of the field. Now it is the multivested scientists who have the prestige.”
As universities, medical schools and academic health centers felt these pressures to engage with industry, the managerial revolution arrived in academia. A growing class of professional university administrators, with MBAs rather than PhDs or MDs, assumed leadership roles in many parts of the academic world, much as they were doing in hospitals. They encouraged university researchers to welcome rather than to mistrust collaboration with industry, and declared that potential conflicts of interest could be managed as they were in business: with self-regulation." [mijn nadruk] (363)

"Salaries of top hospital management, which had been modest when doctors were in charge, rose like the pay packages of senior executives at publicly traded enterprises in other industries."(365)

"After the 2008 economic crisis, Poses realized that the dysfunctions that were rampant in healthcare also pervaded many other industries, government sectors and areas of American society. “I began to see that the takeover by mission-hostile financial managers and the false assumptions of neoliberal economics, especially free-market fundamentalism, had created the same kinds of corruption and immoral behavior in finance, academia, government and many other places.” He came to understand these concerns as new manifestations of moral and ethical dilemmas that have plagued people forever. “It’s actually an age-old problem. The first books of the Old Testament, the Jewish Torah, were written to establish rules and laws that would prevent wealth from corrupting the way we treat others.” Age-old, perhaps, but Poses’s blog chronicles how Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential victory has ushered in a Golden Age of fraud. By calling out healthcare corruption and challenging doctors, healthcare workers and common citizens to do the same, Poses seems determined to make this a Golden Age of truth telling and principled dissent as well." [mijn nadruk] (393)

"Each year since 1992, for example, pharmaceutical companies have supplied half to three-quarters of the operating budget of the FDA. Similar financial conflicts of interest exist in banking, energy, telecommunications and other industries."(402)

"A third reason for the rise of whistleblowing is the spread of secrecy, whistleblowing’s nemesis. When crimes occur within an organization that is hermetically sealed by confidentiality, its members are trapped on the inside with burning information they know is invisible to regulators, prosecutors, politicians and the press. A few of these insiders feel an overwhelming need to reveal it. And despite universal recognition that transparency breeds accountability, and that secrecy fosters misconduct and a sense of impunity, secrecy has become an increasingly accepted standard for running corporations, government agencies, NGOs, universities, and many other organizations, spreading Roy Poses’s “anechoic effect” throughout society. Corporations routinely hide their activities behind walls of confidentiality, invoking attorney-client privilege or expansive protections of proprietary and competitive information, just as they conceal their financial dealings within labyrinths of anonymous shell corporations and offshore tax vehicles. (The Tax Justice Network’s Financial Secrecy Index identifies the United States as the world’s second most secretive jurisdiction, just behind Switzerland, and well ahead of tax havens like the Cayman Islands, Dubai, Guernsey and Panama.) Organizations often force their employees to sign nondisclosure agreements to prevent them from blowing the whistle on wrongdoing, and compel them to conduct all labor disputes in secret arbitration tribunals rather than in public courts of law." [mijn nadruk] (404)

"Journalistic freedom in the United States, once a beacon of free expression, has declined: Reporters Without Borders ranks the United States in forty-fifth place, behind Surinam, Burkina Faso and Romania."(407)

"Taken together, secrecy, public-private interpenetration and pervasive fraud corrode public trust. They create a strong though opaque sense of an economic and political “rigged game” engineered by corporations and financial elites, of stark inequities built into our society, and the suspicion that the basic tenets of American society — equal opportunity and equal justice, truly free markets, and the social contract itself — are being subverted. This, in turn, creates a devastating sense of impotence, a fear that individuals are losing their voice — that We the People are being shut out of our own commonwealth." [mijn nadruk] (407)

[Heel goed geformuleerd.]

(410) Chapter 4 - Blood Ivory Towers

De ervaringen van Lynn Stout aan de UCLA law school met de donatie aan het instituut van 10 miljoen dollar van de kant van Lowell Milken, de broeer van de speculant, iemand zonder enige verdienste die ineens door de UCLA opgehemeld werd om het geld.

"In her public denunciations, Stout was blowing the whistle not only on her university, but also on her colleagues who went along with the deal. “It was remarkable how frightened, how terrified they were of raising any questions. And I’m not even talking about publicly raising questions, but of rocking the boat in any way. Which, given that they all had tenure, I found shocking. . . . They really seemed to believe that if it was good for UCLA and the law school in the short run, then it was morally acceptable, and there was no need to think about the social consequences or the nature of what the Milkens had done.” She believes their stance reflects a broad decline in academic ethics over the last several decades, for which she proposes several possible causes."(422)

De Chicago-ideologie over mens en economie.

"The view of human nature was often deeply pessimistic, which contributed to homo economicus.(...) This became a central part of the US Cold War ideology: the free market as a vital precondition of human freedom, set against the grim, state-dominated slavery of Soviet socialism. This strong ideological polarity helps to explain the near-religious fervor with which key exponents of the Chicago School proselytized their views, a fervor often, as in religion, inversely proportional to the amount of concrete evidence available to support their contentions.(...) Homo economicus is a living cost-benefit analysis, whose behavior is sharply divorced from hazy questions of right and wrong."(427-428)

"By explicitly excluding matters of morality from their analyses, proponents of the rational self-maximizer model often appear to condone, even to celebrate, behavior that most non-economists would call unethical.(434)"

"Since corporations are economic agents in their own right, composed of a number of homines economici, Chicago School economists and law and economics proponents hold that they too should behave without regard to morality."(438)

"“A lot of recent behavioral research shows that the subconscious lessons associated with the homo economicus approach to human nature have a degrading effect on conscience,” Stout says. “We’re teaching people that they don’t owe anybody anything, and we’re teaching them that the ruthless pursuit of their own self-interest makes society a better place, and we’re talking about other people as if they were selfish, untrustworthy social actors. And those are the Big 3 social cues for triggering the purely selfish parts of our personalities. It’s a self-reinforcing downward spiral, because the more people behave like this, the more people think it’s normal, the more we think that other people have no sense of obligation to us, and we are entitled to manipulate or abuse them any way we like. Homo economicus is literally a psychopath — he fits the DSM-5 designation. So when you tell people and businesses that that’s how they’re supposed to behave, you shouldn’t be surprised to get psychopathic behavior.”"(442)

"Ultimately, the psychological mechanisms that trigger whistleblowing — which Lynn Stout calls character and integrity, and others would refer to as morality or justice — arise from human evolution, and the ways in which our struggle to survive has molded our biology and neurology, our instincts and our minds. (...) The deep evolutionary roots of human justice and morality on the one hand, and of loyalty and obedience on the other, help explain the explosive emotions that often arise in whistleblowing cases."(451-455)

[Hm, ik geloof niet zo in dat soort evolutionaire verklaringen. En "we" / "our" is generaliserend. Waar zijn de oorzaak-gevolg-relaties? Jammer. Een smet op het boek. Ik hou ook niet van het gebruiken van 'bewust' en 'onbewust', met het idee dat veel mensen zonder het te weten corrupt worden door de context. Is dat niet een veel te gemakkelijke benadering waarin je mensen niet ter verantwoording roept? Uiteraard zijn er structurele oorzaken waardoor mensen corrupt kunnen worden - het neoliberale kapitalisme alleen al -, maar moet ik nu denken dat allerlei betrokkenen het niet konden helpen? Is dat geen beloning voor naïviteit en denkluiheid?]

"A few academics, like some on the payroll of the tobacco, fast-food or hedge fund industries, may be consciously corrupt, and may intentionally shape their results to please their paymasters. More often, however, basically honest researchers are unknowingly corrupted by the conditions under which they work, and respond in highly predictable, human but ultimately distorting ways to the invisible pull of their sponsors’ money. In fact, for all its aura of objectivity, science, like finance, involves countless subjective choices where invisible biases can germinate." [mijn nadruk] (470)

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Over Janine Wedel.

"She began to denounce the lucrative, often hypocritical, and sometimes deeply harmful industry of US foreign aid in Central and Eastern Europe, and to condemn by name a number of Western insiders, many of them fellow academics, who were engaged in it."(483)

"“The watchwords were always ‘deregulation,’ ‘privatization,’ ‘free markets’ and ‘democracy,’” she says. “They were repeated with ideological zeal, almost obsessively, by reformers from the East and the West. But behind the rhetoric, on the ground in each country, something very different was happening. Insiders with massive, hidden conflicts of interest were making sure that a great deal of property and information stayed in private hands — their hands — through means that were anything but free-market or democratic.”"(485)

"The law and economics movement had minimized the role of regulations, essentially saying you don’t need them.” As elsewhere in the East, Wedel saw how Western financial aid and high-speed privatization created vast wealth and influence for a small number of Russians who managed to gain control of the process."(487)

"The same seven or eight people cropped up as the formal or informal heads of each organization. Some were members of the Chubais clan, including Dmitry Vasiliev, Maxim Boycko and Anatoly Chubais himself. Others worked for the Harvard Institute for International Development, as part of a program, widely known as the “Harvard Project,” that aimed to help Russia transition from state socialism to a free-market capitalism by privatizing Russian companies, reforming laws, building a capital market, and facilitating other structural changes. Jonathan Hay, it turned out, was the Moscow-based general director/field coordinator and second-in-command of the Harvard Project. Hay reported to project director and principal investigator Andrei Shleifer, the Russian-born wunderkind economist who earned tenure at Harvard at age thirty.
Shleifer’s plan for full-speed Russian privatization matched his avid, Milton Friedman–style neoliberalism and jibed with the theories of his Harvard teacher and patron, Lawrence Summers. The Harvard Project, far from being an ivory tower experiment, was operating almost as an arm of the US government. USAID, a federal entity that administered civilian aid in foreign countries, had basically delegated its economic reform operations in Russia to the project, funding it directly with over 40 million tax dollars and making it the gatekeeper to hundreds of millions more." [mijn nadruk] (490)

"Together with Alan Greenspan, Rubin and Summers had spread the triumphant doctrine of deregulation, privatization and free-market economics throughout the US economy, Eastern Europe, Asia and beyond."(493)

"In 1996, in the diminutive scholarly journal Demokratizatsiya, Wedel blew the whistle on the Harvard-Chubais network, describing how its members had contributed to the rape of Russia."(494)

"Like Lynn Stout, Wedel believes that the tenure system tends to reward people who avoid taking strong intellectual or ethical positions."(508)

"After sounding the alarm in Demokratizatsiya, Wedel continued over the next decade to tell the Harvard-Chubais story in ever richer detail, in a series of scholarly articles and news stories, and a book, Collision and Collusion. Her analysis grew into a broader kind of whistleblowing, in which she denounced not only a handful of dubious actors in Russia but numerous other scholars who spread neoliberal economic theory and generous dollops of Western aid money throughout Central and Eastern Europe, frequently doing great harm. Like Lynn Stout, she came to see neoliberal economics as a massive intellectual shortcut, which oversimplifies and often misjudges the social, historical and psychological realities of individual nations. Yet the ascendancy of economic theory over real-world experience has continued, she says. “Analysis by numbers is taking over analysis by words. This process is the result of digitization and several generations of economists and social scientists who believe that all you need to do is perform a lot of sophisticated statistics and regression analysis on data from a lot of different countries, without any sense of where this data came from, what it really means, or what’s actually happening on the ground in those countries. You don’t actually have to know anything.” Data enjoys what mathematician Cathy O’Neil, an expert in algorithms, has called “the authority of the inscrutable.”" [mijn nadruk] (510)

"Wedel left Eastern Europe with her eyes opened to the existence of flexians, and promptly began to see this same form of corruption back in the United States, where stateside flexians added new elements to her model. Her latest books, Shadow Elite and Unaccountable, capture their escapades and modus operandi."(513)

"Wedel notes how American flexians tend to turn conflict of interest on its head, and present their many overlapping roles as beneficial rather than harmful."(519)

"Here is another common trait of Wedel’s flexians: despite their claims that their own conflicting roles are beneficial, they typically conceal these conflicts by identifying themselves only with their most impartial-appearing, balanced-sounding jobs, omitting others that might raise eyebrows among people not properly versed in the flexian credo."(521)

"Perhaps the most striking common denominator among Wedel’s flexians is what she calls “failing up”: their ability to ride out wrongdoing, if it’s discovered at all, with impunity, and to move swiftly on to new and greater heights."(524)

"While Shleifer, Summers, and Rubin fell upward, the rest of us were left to deal with the problems that US meddling in Russia helped to create. The rise to power of Vladimir Putin, now the unchallenged head of a sprawling kleptocracy that is aggressively hostile to Western democracies, was facilitated by the Chubais clan, with whom Putin had been deeply intertwined since the early 1990s."(527)

"Noxious, perhaps, but the oligarchs had amassed their wealth according to the same neoliberal playbook — rapid privatization and deregulation, unlimited corporate payments to politicians, the fiduciary responsibility to evade taxes, the virtue of conflicting interests, and the pure self-justificatory power of money — that US officials themselves had applied in Russia in the 1990s." [mijn nadruk] (529)

"Several of the clearest-sighted critics of elite wrongdoing in America, including Matt Taibbi, Gillian Tett and Anne Williamson, were working in Russia in the 1990s, where they witnessed flexian behavior firsthand. Like Wedel, they returned to the United States with expatriate eyes, and saw what many other Americans missed."(531)

"The fact is, the games played by insiders can produce real victims, which the insiders find ways not to see: the patients behind the spreadsheets at Halifax Health, the reform school kids and asylum-dwellers being medicated according to the Gospel of Risperdal, the Marines incinerated in their lightly armored Humvees. Perhaps only those who remain outsiders at heart retain the empathy and independence of mind to see the faces of those victims. Outsiders alone retain the freedom of spirit to recognize, and sometimes to renounce, corruption concealed beneath the mantle of authority, status, wealth."(533)

(533) Chapter 5 - Reaping the Nuclear Harvest

Over de opwerkreactoren en -fabrieken van Hanford aan de Columbia-rivier.

"Every gram of plutonium extracted at Hanford entailed the production of tons of high-level nuclear waste and toxic chemicals. For Hanford’s first forty years, during World War II and the subsequent arms race, the site’s overwhelming priority was to turn out as much weapons-grade plutonium as possible, in order to avert the threat of Soviet invasion." [mijn nadruk] (538)

Volgt een beschrijving van al het nucleaire afval en de gevaren van dat afval.

[Om misselijk van te worden.]

"Why doesn’t everyone in America know about the Hanford Nuclear Reservation and its enormous risks?"(547)

"The combination of national security, industrial secrecy and relentless hit-the-numbers urgency has always set the tone at Hanford. (...) As Hanford was a hub of the Manhattan Project, its security classification was higher than Operation Overlord, the Normandy invasion.(...) World War II ended, but the urgency, secrecy and strict authoritarianism continued at Hanford, during the long, enervating decades of the Cold War."(547-549)

"The plant’s pollution was itself a secret: military and corporate leaders worried not only that the quantity and nature of the waste might tip the Russians off to how many bombs America possessed, but also that workers and the general public might panic at news of all the radioactivity they were breathing, drinking and eating. Hanford leadership repeatedly stated that “not one atom” had escaped the facility, and that Hanford was “as safe as mother’s milk.”"(551)

"Some nuclear researchers at Hanford performed more or less intentional human experiments."(552)

"The general public didn’t start to learn about the sixteen thousand human guinea pigs until late 1993, when investigative journalist Eileen Welsome published the first of a series of three articles in the Albuquerque Tribune, which helped force a formal government investigation, and extensive reports/confessions published by the DOE, the DOD and other agencies in subsequent years. Likewise, it wasn’t until 2000 that the DOE admitted that its own workers, at Hanford and other nuclear weapons facilities, had been exposed to radiation and chemicals that cause cancer and death. As far as we know, human radiation experiments ended in the mid-1970s."(556)

"Plutonium hasn’t been produced at Hanford since 1987, and attention there has shifted from building nuclear weapons to cleaning up after them. Yet the atmosphere of secrecy and government-corporate control remains. Today it serves mainly to keep Hanford’s abuses—the vast environmental damage and risk of nuclear disaster, the widespread and ongoing harm to Hanford workers, the decades of staggering mismanagement and repeated, colossal thefts of taxpayer dollars—from coming to light. Hanford is a textbook case in how corporate short-termism and profit motive, regulatory capture and fraud as a business model can be concealed from the general public, for decades, behind the gleaming but by now irrelevant shield of national security."(556)

"Historically, nuclear energy has been a hotbed for whistleblowing, because it exhibits many of the key whistleblowing triggers: the same cult of secrecy and security that exists in its close cousin, nuclear weapons; an enormous potential for public harm; and plentiful public funds at high risk of fraud and abuse."(557)

"Hanford, the biggest nuclear facility in America, has produced more whistleblowers than any other site on earth."(562)

"Over the decades, the DOE and the series of contractors in charge of managing the tank farm have consistently denied any causal link between tank farm vapors and the medical harm that workers have suffered. They claim that their own measurements of the chemicals in the tank farm atmosphere have shown that the air is safe to breathe, and that workers are feigning their injuries, perhaps at the instigation of groups like Hanford Challenge. This position is getting harder and harder to maintain. Tallying the number of workers affected is complicated, of course, by the sweeping governmental and corporate secrecy at Hanford, but several authoritative reports agree that the number of workers affected is in the hundreds."(578)

"Many workers have probably been harmed by vapors but have chosen not to report them. Workers who complain of health problems are often branded as malingerers, both by management and by their own coworkers, and are denied the overtime pay that many depend on."(579)

"In their classic study The Whistleblowers, sociologist Myron Glazer and historian Penina Glazer examined the lives and careers of sixty-four whistleblowers and found that most were conservative people devoted to their work and their organizations, who had happily followed familiar bureaucratic protocols until the day that their superiors asked them to violate their own professional or ethical standards."(590)

"This is the quintessence of financialism: managers assuming control of a vastly complex technical project and turning it into a high-pressure, money-fueled race against the clock. But sometimes good science doesn’t respect timetables."(601)

"Hanford is the perfect crime, a self-licking ice cream cone of military-industrial-congressional corruption, a fraud so immaculate that the regulators help you to commit it, the taxpayers pay your legal bills, and the DOJ is on your side. Hanford showcases all of the dynamics of corruption that we’ve observed, grown rank in the hothouse of Cold War secrecy that’s been obsolete for thirty years. Here we see financial managers who hold sway over nuclear scientists and engineers, gobbling up milestone payments rather than doing the work right, or doing the work at all. We see hundreds of human lives harmed in the tank farms, human lives endangered in the millions by the threat of a nuclear disaster that could taint the whole upper left-hand corner of the United States. Yet despite decades of human harm, waste, fraud and abuse, Hanford’s culture of impunity remains intact, because the would-be regulators at the DOE and the EPA, but also at the state and local levels, are part of the game, and look silently away as the billions roll into the Tri-Cities, a river of money as broad and deep as the Columbia, flowing into an ocean of taxpayer trillions swallowed by the Bechtels and the Lockheeds of our land year on year, decade after decade. Our trillions, that should be spent to clean up the waste at Hanford, but also to cure our sick, teach our children, feed our hungry, pave our streets. Trillions that slip, instead, into the pockets of corrupt contractor millionaires and their government accomplices, because there are too many deal makers and team players and too few whistleblowers, too many wolves and sheep and not enough sheepdogs.
The same ugly pattern has recurred at Hanford for generations, and when a rare whistleblower dares to name it, the contractors lie to the press about him, lie to investigators, lie under oath to the courts and to Congress, knowing that the DOE and the DOJ have their backs, nobody will check their lies, and even if they do, ultimately nobody will punish them. They lie and they lie, until, at a silent signal that all players in the game understand, they settle the charges, cut a check, and move on, writing off the settlement charge against their taxes and billing legal costs to the government, or building it all into their next fraudulent government contract. Because one thing is certain: the fraud will go on. The DOE will continue to sign contracts with the same contractors and do their bidding, pretending to regulate while aiding and abetting, swearing zero tolerance for whistleblower retaliation while whispering their names to the contractors, laughing behind their hands while whistleblowers twist in the wind. Congress holds hearings, shows its outrage at the behavior of the contractors and their government facilitators, yet Congress continues to send them our billions, because a goodly portion of those billions are kicked back to Congress as campaign contributions, votes, nuclear pork."(636-638)

"Beginning in 2004, under the administration of contracting and outsourcing promoter George W. Bush, America’s nuclear weapons research and production complex, which in addition to Hanford includes three national laboratories (Los Alamos National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories) and weapon production and testing facilities (Savannah River Site, Y-12 National Security Complex, Pantex, Kansas City Plant and the Nevada National Security Site), was privatized, shifting decades of scientific research and countless billions of dollars of public resources into corporate hands. Like Hanford, these facilities became “GoCos” — government owned, contractor run. At each site, the contractors who assumed control promised that their private management would significantly reduce costs and improve efficiency. The results, as at Hanford, have been the reverse. And no wonder. Each of the contractors in charge — Bechtel, Aecom, CH2M Hill, Fluor, Lockheed, Northrop Grumman, Honeywell and Babcock & Wilcox — has a long history of defrauding the DOE and looting tax dollars.(...) Nevertheless, the DOE, the department’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), Congress and the American people continue to allow these corporations to run these vital, valuable, extremely dangerous facilities, where they transparently pursue not the national interest but their own profit."(648-649)

"Contractors caused a massive radiation accident through gross error, which harmed workers and will cost taxpayers at least half a billion dollars to fix. So why is the DOE still paying them? Why not charge them the $550 million repair costs instead, and add a massive fine for misconduct? What about investigating them criminally and civilly, and throwing the responsible managers in jail? But this is not the department’s style."(652)

"Of the many contractors in the nuclear power, weapons and cleanup business that dupe the US government, the DOE and the American taxpayer, Bechtel is the most experienced. What Walt Tamosaitis and Donna Busche saw the company do, and what the company did to them, it has done many times before in its storied history, at Hanford and elsewhere.
To see just how well established the routine of financialism, contract “nourishment” and whistleblower retaliation is at Bechtel, and how the three processes reinforce one another, let’s return to March 28, 1979, and America’s first major nuclear accident, the partial meltdown of a reactor at Three Mile Island."(654)

"In Moral Mazes, his classic analysis of the corporate and bureaucratic mind, sociologist Robert Jackall explains that the Three Mile Island cleanup ended in wrongdoing because, at the highest levels, managerialism had trumped science, and bureaucracy had overwhelmed ethics."(665)

"Corporate crimes are often considered “victimless,” but this is inaccurate. Air and water pollution, mine safety violations, overmedication with opioids and unnecessary spinal surgeries all have explicit victims. More broadly, crimes that siphon off public funds, particularly in times of financial duress, make victims of us all, harming everyone who suffers from the resulting shortfall in taxpayer dollars—everyone who dies in an overcrowded ER waiting for treatment, drinks lead in water or dies in a bridge collapse. As Edwin Sutherland pointed out, such crimes harm not just individuals but nations as a whole, because they destroy our trust in equal justice and opportunity, and in the social contract itself. Despite Sutherland’s warnings, we persist in viewing corporate crime as an inevitable part of the financial news, and increasingly idolize its perpetrators. Our ability to see executives as dangerous offenders is often diminished by their glamour, to which judges, prosecutors, journalists and others charged with detecting and punishing their crimes are not immune. Over time, many of us stop seeing much financial wrongdoing as wrong at all, shrugging it off as part of the corporate game. In fact, as we’ve observed, some distinguished economists, policy makers and business school professors actually try to argue corporate crime out of existence. At the same time, the Supreme Court has steadily reduced the set of corporate acts that can be considered illegal."(668-669)

"So it’s official: the US government’s day-to-day operations are now on sale to the highest bidder, because any other approach would interfere with democracy in America. This is naturally welcome news to corporations, which no longer have to disguise their donations, but can make them overtly. In this environment, employees of corporations would be forgiven for finding moral behavior to be unnecessary, maudlin or downright immoral in many business contexts. If all this has an Orwellian ring, it’s because corporations, in the gulf between their publicly stated missions and their real agendas, often create a distinctly Orwellian atmosphere."(672)

"Top managers, Jackall writes, must be adept at doublethink and doublespeak and learn to treat morality, like truth itself, not as an absolute, but as socially constructed. “What is right in the corporation is not what is right in a man’s home or in his church,” the business executive told him, but “what the guy above you wants from you.” Corporate bureaucracies, Jackall explains, tend to diminish a sense of individual responsibility for wrongdoing, particularly among higher-level executives, who are carefully shielded from blame."(674)

"Chuck Spinney, like many experienced defense analysts, sees the growing influence of arms makers and their allies on American defense policy and foreign policies as a serious threat to world peace. “As more and more money flows into nuclear modernization, members of the military-industrial-congressional complex will have more power in shaping official threat assessments, alliances, treaties and US force deployments."(688)

(703) Chapter 6 - Money Makes the World Go Round

De waarschuwingen van Richard Bowen, de bail-out van Citibank en de financiële crisis van 2008.

"At last count, the 2008 financial crisis has cost American citizens and taxpayers some $24 trillion. Tens of millions of Americans lost their jobs, and many remain out of work or chronically underemployed. Tens of millions lost their homes and automobiles in foreclosure, saw their household finances and home equity ravaged and their retirement savings disappear. In some municipalities that invested heavily in the toxic financial products at the heart of the crisis, schools, hospitals, roads and other basic infrastructure were crippled and entire neighborhoods were largely abandoned. Homelessness, drug abuse and suicide spiked; in some parts of the nation, average life expectancy fell below that of Bangladesh. A cloud of hopelessness and impending disaster still hangs over many communities. The 2008 financial crisis was, in many ways, a far more devastating attack on the American homeland than 9/11."(705)

"The Federal Reserve pumped a staggering $2.5 trillion in near-zero-interest loans into the bank between 2007 and 2010 — an operation that remained secret until journalists at Bloomberg forced the Fed to reveal it with FOIA lawsuits. This was the largest bank bailout in US history. American citizens paid with their tax dollars for the excesses, willful blindness and malfeasance of Chuck Prince, Robert Rubin and the other heads of Citigroup. The US government, which now owned 36 percent of Citi’s common stock, was firmly focused on the expectations market — propping up public confidence in the bank and shoring up its share price."(719)

"In May 2009, Congress formed the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC), a panel of ten politicians, attorneys, economists and public servants charged with identifying the root causes of the 2008 collapse. The FCIC was created on the model of the Pecora Committee, formed in 1932 by Congress to investigate the origins of the Great Depression and named after its leader, New York prosecutor Ferdinand “Ferd” Pecora, whose relentless grilling of the leading bankers of the Gilded Age laid bare the wrongdoing by Wall Street banks that had triggered the crash of 1929, crippled the US economy, and put a quarter of American workers out of their jobs. Pecora’s hearings popularized the term “banksters” to describe the financial gangsters of Wall Street who had robbed the American people through their tax-evasion schemes, lavish paychecks and sales of dubious securities to unsuspecting investors. Senior government officials, including the newly elected president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, championed Main Street over Wall Street. In June 1933, the cigar-chomping Pecora appeared on the cover of Time; in his memoir, Wall Street Under Oath, he wrote that dragging the banksters’ secret deeds into the sunlight was the best way to halt them: “Legal chicanery and beneficent darkness were the banker’s stoutest allies.”
The Pecora Committee’s public censure of venerated financiers led to the rapid passage of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act, which separated commercial and investment banking, and to the formation of the SEC to serve, in Pecora’s words, as the policeman at the corner of Wall Street. Now, in February 2010, Pecora’s would-be successors interviewed Bowen by phone and asked if he would testify about his experiences. He knew this would mean direct conflict with Citigroup and its army of lawyers." [mijn nadruk] (721)

"Despite all the uncertainty, two points are clear. First, no senior official, at Citi or any other major Wall Street bank, was ever prosecuted for the massive wrongdoing that caused the 2008 financial crisis. And second, in a related vein, five years — the period of time for which Bowen’s original testimony was kept confidential in the National Archives—is the statute of limitations for fraud under SOX. Other government agencies have likewise appeared to put Citi’s interests over those of the general public." [mijn nadruk] (737)

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Volgt een dergelijk verhaal over Bill Black.

"Like Bowen, Black recognized that financial fraud was spreading like Ebola through the thrift system, while countless other people ignored the disease, denied its existence or celebrated it as a visionary business practice. Unlike Bowen, however, Black was able, through determined and sometimes audacious whistleblowing, to teach key Washington lawmakers and the general public how this fraud worked, and why it threatened the economy. The popular understanding and outrage created by Black and his allies forced politicians, regulators and prosecutors to intervene: hundreds of bankrupt thrifts were shut down, and over a thousand crooked bankers were convicted on felony fraud charges. These decisive actions vastly reduced the harm that taxpayers ultimately suffered in the S&L crisis. Black is still amazed by the contrast with the aftermath of 2008, when the economy was brought to its knees, taxpayers paid tens of billions to bail out miscreant banks, and no senior banker was prosecuted."(742)

"Finance is whistleblowing’s new frontier. Over the last fifteen years, more major whistleblower laws have been written in finance than in any other industry. Insiders are essential to unmasking wrongdoing in the highly technical and secretive world of banks, hedge funds and other financial institutions."(744)

"These bank cartels were thumbing the scales at the very time that millions of American families, businesses and communities were already reeling from the 2008 financial crisis that those same banks had helped to create. And their market rigging is ongoing. Most big banks engage in high-frequency algorithmic trading and participate in vast, secret exchanges known as “dark pools,” two practices that effectively make stock trading by individuals obsolete. These massive manipulations reveal the absurdity of the dogma of perfect markets, transparent competition and free enterprise that banks and their lobbyists invoke to argue against government regulation of their industry." [mijn nadruk] (753)

"The wrongdoing of the major banks is massive and repeated — and the bankers often seem to revel in it."(756)

"But who can blame bankers for behaving as if they can’t be touched, when the evidence is they won’t be?"(757)

"If the chief prosecutor of the United States says that he can’t or won’t prosecute big banks, he has not only acquiesced to bank fraud but also tacitly admitted the failure of “equal justice under law” as a premise of American democracy."(762)

"Whistleblower denunciations have helped the US government to reach scores of legal settlements, including some of the largest in history, to resolve charges of various flavors of mortgage fraud committed before, during and after the financial crisis. Wells Fargo paid $2.1 billion to the US government, Morgan Stanley paid $3.2 billion, Goldman Sachs paid $5.1 billion, Credit Suisse paid $5.3 billion, Citigroup paid $7 billion, Deutsche Bank paid $7.2 billion, JPMorgan paid $13 billion and Bank of America paid $16.7 billion. Though the banks were routinely able, in their settlement agreements, to purchase the right to deny wrongdoing, it’s safe to assume that enormous banks defended by armies of top lawyers would not part with record amounts of their own money without having been caught committing record amounts of fraud. But again, none of the bank executives who drove this fraud were ever charged, or lost a dollar of the bonuses they received for carrying it out. Many, in fact, were promoted or, at worst, began a prosperous retirement. Icons of the 2008 collapse like Angelo Mozilo of Countrywide and Dick Fuld of Lehman Brothers, who as CEOs drove their firms straight to cataclysmic bankruptcy that crushed their investors, their clients and the economy, left banking with substantial personal fortunes, and their hubris intact." [mijn nadruk] (766)

"If C-suite managers unencumbered by basic ethics are able to earn large bonuses based on the volume rather than the quality of their business, Black explains, their short-term personal financial incentives are often diametrically opposed to the long-term health of their banks. Countless S&L executives he examined had transmuted their apparently legitimate — and often illustrious — enterprises into fraud vehicles, and enriched themselves while destroying their firms. Black terms this practice “control fraud.”"(775)

"With free-market fundamentalism increasingly influential among Democrats as well as Republicans, Bill Black’s victories during the S&L crisis proved short-lived, and the lessons of that crisis were lost. The relative independence of the Bank Board, which had enabled Black and his colleagues to fight crucial political and economic battles, was lost when George H. W. Bush disbanded the board and folded it into the Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS), part of the Treasury. Bill Clinton cemented the alliance between the Democratic Party and Wall Street by making former Goldman Sachs cochairman Robert Rubin his Treasury secretary. A remarkable number of prominent economists, business school professors, financiers, CEOs, regulators, officials at the Treasury and the Federal Reserve, and politicians of both parties ignored the lessons of the S&L crisis, denied the existence of control fraud, and maintained that self-regulating free markets operating with efficient contracts and peopled by rational self-maximizers would prevent serious future economic shocks.
Alan Greenspan, true to his neoliberal roots and the libertarian dogma of his close personal friend Ayn Rand, remained violently opposed to financial regulation, and his nomination by Ronald Reagan to head of the Federal Reserve — reconfirmed by George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush — gave him a powerful new platform for his deregulatory zeal.(...) Seven years later, the still more self-assured Maestro told Brooksley Born, the chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, that since markets self-corrected to prevent fraud, antifraud laws were unnecessary. He reputedly browbeat any member of his Federal Reserve Bank staff who disagreed." [mijn nadruk] (793-794)

"The Fed, under Greenspan and his protégé Ben Bernanke, was, as Black says, “so passionate in its hatred for regulation, supervision, enforcement, and prosecution, and so dogmatic in its faith in ‘markets’ and the inherent sainthood of financial CEOs, that it fought an unholy war against its own supervisors.” Mortgage fraud investigators were hampered by funding cuts and staffing reductions. The FBI, for instance, had only 120 agents detailed to mortgage fraud investigations, and Swecker’s repeated requests for additional funding were refused or obstructed by superiors at the FBI, the DOJ, or by the White House Office of Management and Budget."(800)

"Without this popular understanding, he says, politicians who protected the interests of the financial industry—modern-day equivalents of the Keating Five—continued, and continue to this day, to side with the perpetrators (who typically contribute generously to their campaigns), instead of helping the millions of Americans whose lives were devastated by the crisis."(804)

"The transformation of many major US banks from aggressive, self-serving but basically conservative organizations to the reckless speculators and recidivist fraud vehicles they are today began in the early 1990s, and accelerated with the repeal of Glass-Steagall in 1999. Over this period, the activities and ethical norms of Wall Street banks changed, in ways that both reflected and contributed to broader social shifts toward the short-termism, amorality and winner-take-all mentality that are implicit in modern neoliberalism."(808)

"Traders are living examples of homo economicus, embodiments of the chill, numeric, often predatory agent who, according to the neoliberal worldview, populates competitive markets. Money, the universal fuel of markets, is their sole metric of success.(... In this landscape of vanishingly short time horizons and every man for himself, traders feel no social responsibility.)"(816)

"The repeal of Glass-Steagall, and the breakdown of the firewalls between commercial and investment banking, not only allowed traders to make speculative bets with government-guaranteed depositor money, but soon infected the staid, conservative world of commercial banks with the risk-loving habits of Wall Street traders."(818)

"But I also knew that many of the traders involved never thought about the money as having come from real people. They’d seen these transactions as numbers on a screen, successive rushes of free-market adrenaline, poker chips in the high-stakes game to which they’d reduced the world . . . a game that they were winning."(822)

"Secrecy surrounding data, client information and proprietary financial schemes, as well as the extensive use of nondisclosure agreements and confidentiality policies to prevent employees from revealing wrongdoing, can create an atmosphere where fraud thrives. The sense shared by many Wall Street denizens of being part of an elite team, a Band of Brothers who can do no wrong, accentuates this criminogenic atmosphere. And since money is a perilously psychoactive substance, it’s hardly surprising that in finance, where money is the primum mobile and raison d’être, the temptation to cheat is strong, especially as short-termism and the cult of money grow and counterweights to wrongdoing, like devotion to clients and professional ethics, melt away."(826)

"Stock buybacks have become a pandemic. Until 1982, the SEC prohibited them as a form of market manipulation by corporate insiders. But then Ronald Reagan appointed stockbroker John Shad to lead the SEC—the first Wall Street executive to head the commission since it was founded in 1934—and Shad obligingly legalized buybacks." [mijn nadruk] (830)

"Share compensation packages and ballooning stock prices, bolstered by buybacks, have created an enormous gulf between CEO and average worker pay, as money flows out of productive enterprises and into a few pockets. To finance those share buybacks and C-suite pay packages, companies shed jobs, and cut training and opportunities for the workers who remain. Wages for the top 1 percent of earners have soared 157 percent since 1979, and for the top 0.1 percent a staggering 343 percent, while the bottom 90 percent has grown just 22 percent. (The top 0.1 percent now owns as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent.) (...) The division of the spoils is the same on the stock market: stocks have been on the rise for ten years, the longest bull market in US history, but the $20 trillion in value this has created has gone disproportionately to the top 10 percent of wealthy Americans, who own 84 percent of all shares." [mijn nadruk] (831)

"Americans and their government, together with Nobel Prize–winning economists and Federal Reserve pundits, continue to accept the “cult of finance” and the “faith in free financial markets” as essential to US growth and prosperity."(833)

"Wall Street impunity causes harm far beyond the economy, eroding trust in politics and the judicial system, and undermining the feeling among many citizens that they are taking part in a shared national project. Wall Street’s extralegal status has deepened the widespread popular perception of the rigged game, as it accelerated long-term trends that distanced rich from poor, leaving most wealthy people untouched by the 2008 crisis in the medium term — their financial assets regained value — while less wealthy Americans were out of a job, a house, a life."(835)

"It’s as if we have come to accept in our society the existence of an aristocratic class that is fundamentally at odds with the traditions of American egalitarianism. Abroad, we stigmatize the lawless, cronyistic abusers of the common good in Russia as “oligarchs,” but at home we idolize them as “billionaires,” acquiescing in their power to shape laws, regulations, the tax system, and countless aspects of our society."(840)

Over Gary Aguirre en handelen met voorkennis.

"He showed how hedge funds were engaged in systematic illegal activity like insider trading and market manipulation; he pointed out the weakness and subservience of the SEC to Wall Street; and he argued, quoting Pecora, that the SEC’s failure to enforce securities laws was allowing Wall Street to re-create the conditions that had caused the 1929 crash. In late 2007, he predicted that the excessive leverage and runaway fraud in the banking sector, if not halted, would cause another global financial crisis. One month before the collapse of Bear Stearns, the first major casualty of the crisis, he warned that the nation’s banks, especially Bear Stearns, were at severe risk because of their massive off-balance-sheet exposure to subprime debt and credit default swaps. After the financial crisis hit and TARP was being debated in Congress, Aguirre wrote senior congressmen to denounce the bailout as “Main Street’s gift to Wall Street”; his projections of the staggering costs of the operation were cited on the floor of the House."(871)

"Other SEC officials agree that the SEC has an absurd dual standard of justice. In his retirement speech on April 2014, longtime SEC trial lawyer James Kidney condemned the commission for “picking on the little guys.” It “polices the broken windows on the street level and rarely goes to the penthouse floors,” he said."(873)

"The SEC, in Aguirre and Kidney’s time and to this day, exhibits many of the symptoms of a regulator captured by the industry it’s meant to police. Its lax oversight of Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, and Merrill Lynch, whose 2008 collapse fueled the financial crisis, and its failure to recognize mammoth fraud schemes by Bernard Madoff and Allen Stanford, raised serious questions about how cozy the commission had gotten with the banks. The commission’s settlements have been widely criticized as inadequate, obliging to the wrongdoers and uninformative to the general public."(887)

"The senior attorneys who move around the table, one day defending banks and the next “regulating” them, are classic examples of Janine Wedel’s flexians, those amphibious beings that swim freely between public and private sectors and ultimately transcend both, because their final allegiance is unswervingly to themselves, their careers and the fellow flexians in their networks."(892)

"All this revolving and posturing is part of a larger theater of justice played out between the government and large corporations, which Patrick Burns, former executive director of Taxpayers Against Fraud, calls “the Big Wink.” “You see it in finance, in healthcare, in defense, in countless other industries. The US government routinely hammers local grifters, while giving the high sign to corporate predators who steal thousands of times more. Perversely, the more they steal, the less likely any individual is to be prosecuted. If a dentist in Waco, Texas, rips off Medicaid for a million dollars’ worth of work he never did, he may be excluded from billing Medicaid for a decade, be fined millions of dollars, lose his home, and get a three-year prison sentence. But if a major pharmaceutical company robs a billion from the state of Texas, through off-label sales of unnecessary, dangerous drugs to children and the elderly, they get the Big Wink from prosecutors and regulators. No one loses their beach house or their freedom, no one loses their job. The only people who are fired when these big cases come down are the whistleblowers who revealed the fraud.” In fact, whistleblowers are one of the few real threats to this closed-circuit game."(903)

"They needn’t have worried. Self-regulation being the gospel in public and private spheres alike, the SEC, like the DOJ, often allows companies to carry out internal investigations of wrongdoing, including those prompted by whistleblower revelations, and then uses the results of those investigations themselves."(909)

"Until we start to see this flexian, revolving-door behavior among regulators, prosecutors and the white-collar defense bar for what it really is — not merely ambitious or clever careerism, but corruption, plain and simple — we will never unrig the financial markets, or root out corporate crime. Bank whistleblowers like Aguirre, Black and Bowen are right: unless we can restore basic ethics to the banking industry, the next financial crisis is inevitable — and our democracy itself is at risk."(911)

"Winston’s odyssey illustrates several common patterns in whistleblower litigation. Academic studies point to a consistent bias against plaintiffs among appeals court justices, who often pare back damage awards or overturn jury verdicts entirely. “Almost any punitive damage verdict gets reduced,” says Cliff Palefsky. Furthermore, appellate justices show a marked bias against whistleblowers."(925)

"Justices at many levels have repeatedly removed legal protections from large populations of whistleblowers—protections that were explicitly written to shield them. Federal district courts have ruled that federal employees don’t qualify for the antiretaliation protections of the False Claims Act, despite the act’s clear reference to “any employee.” Similarly, the Supreme Court pronounced that public servants who made statements in the course of their official duties were not speaking as citizens, and therefore did not enjoy First Amendment protections against disciplinary action by their employers. Continual amendments to whistleblower laws by Congress have been required to correct such judicial misinterpretations."(926)

"If the rise of mandatory arbitration and administrative judicial proceedings is bad news for employees and citizens in general, it’s a disaster for whistleblowers, for whom access to a jury of their peers is often decisive."(933)

(938) Chapter 7 - Ministries of Truth

Over Edward Snowden. Obama maakte zijn verkiezingsbeloften over transparantie en het belang van klokkenluiders niet waar. Integendeel.

"Obama seemed unable to conceptualize disclosures about wrongdoing in intelligence and the military — at least those he himself hadn’t condoned — as anything but betrayal. “Exposing ‘waste, fraud and abuse’ is considered to be whistle-blowing,” Downie wrote. “But exposing questionable government policies and actions, even if they could be illegal or unconstitutional, is often considered to be leaking that must be stopped and punished.” (...) His [Obama's - GdG] DOJ consistently investigated, indicted and prosecuted them under the Espionage Act, denying them the identity of whistleblowers and the chance to explain their motives to a jury."(943-944)

"This wasn’t the first time that someone with access to secret intelligence had assured me they had seen proof of the immense damage Snowden had done — proof they unfortunately couldn’t share."(946)

[De grote smoes van 'nationale veiligheid' en zo.]

"Why on earth, after the events of the last quarter century, should we trust our government?"(947)

Over het zwaar gecensureerde IG-rapport waarin de NSA werd aangeklaagd door een aantal klokkenluiders:

"The removal of so much unclassified material suggests an abuse of the redaction system. A former CIA military imagery analyst who read the original, unredacted IG report told me the vast majority of these redactions had been made not to shield legitimate national security secrets, but to avoid embarrassing senior NSA management, and especially its director, Michael Hayden."(952)

"The brutal treatment these five people received after they blew the whistle convinced Edward Snowden to make his own disclosures about national security wrongdoing not through official channels as they had done, but to the press. The IG report also suggests how the failure of the whistleblower protection system in US national security contributed to the success of the terror attacks on September 11, 2001. " [mijn nadruk] (953)

Over William Edward Binney:

"Binney described how the United States lost control of its national security establishment."(954)

"His distinguished thirty-four-year career ended in October 2001, one month after 9/11, when he resigned from the agency in disgust."(957)

"Throughout his intelligence career, Binney championed open, interdisciplinary work environments against a steady trend toward secrecy and compartmentalization, which he felt impeded creativity."(963)

"The most serious bar to creativity and efficient problem solving in US intelligence, according to Binney, was the growing influence of corporate contractors, who performed an increasing percentage of the NSA’s work. He saw existing contracts gain their own inertia, and managers strive to keep even useless projects alive because of the money they brought in."(964)

"Bill Binney summed up the mentality succinctly: “Keep the problem going, to keep the money flowing.”"(966)

"In 1999, as Binney and his colleagues neared the completion of ThinThread, the process of corporatization and compartmentalization of the NSA accelerated with the arrival of a new director, Michael Hayden, who later became Janine Wedel’s colleague at George Mason University. Hayden, a former Air Force general who has subsequently woven his work in public service, private corporations, academia, think tanks and the media into a flourishing flexian career, was a military managerialist in the Robert McNamara mold.(...) “Less Making, More Buying” became the official policy of the agency."(968)

"But the signature program at Hayden’s new NSA was Trailblazer, which he described in internal memoranda as “the prototype of our future,” and “the core of our strategy to exploit the global digital net and to transform how we satisfy our customers’ information needs.” From the outset, Trailblazer was to be developed primarily by external contractors, not NSA employees.(...) The battle between Trailblazer and ThinThread, Binney says, not only led to the predictable triumph of the big-money contract over the frugal in-house program, but actually helped ensure the success of the 9/11 attacks."(972)

"In the weeks following 9/11, one of ThinThread’s core elements, Mainway, was swiftly stripped of its filtering and encryption and used to create StellarWind, a sweeping new program that the agency used to wiretap Americans without warrants."(980)

"When President Bush ordered a major investigation into the sources behind scathing press about the NSA, it appeared that someone at the DOD IG had handed their names to the prosecutors, despite all assurances of anonymity. The office that was created to serve as a haven for whistleblowers had become a whistleblower trap. We have a good idea who at the IG revealed the names, thanks to three other national security whistleblowers."(993)

"Secrecy, Eddington says, is the main problem with US intelligence today. “Secrecy gives you the ability to effectively conceal waste, fraud, abuse and criminal conduct of every description—and for me, secrecy more often than not is in fact used for precisely that purpose. It is used to try to conceal conduct that people at senior levels of government don’t want you to know about.”"(1029)

"Ultimately, Eddington blames Congress for accepting secrecy and lack of accountability among the intelligence agencies as well as the military, both because they have been cowed by the executive branch, and for fear of being branded “soft on terror” by voters. He is particularly critical of the House and Senate intelligence committees, which in his view have become far more lapdogs than watchdogs."(1031)

"Nowhere is the human harm of white-collar crime greater than in what we call “national security,” which has become a misnomer. Since 9/11, millions of Americans have been spied on, and the nation’s fundamental civil liberties have been blighted. After 9/11, on the basis of invented weapons of mass destruction, the US government embarked on a series of immoral and unwinnable wars that have bled the country dry, morally as well as financially, and further destabilized the Middle East. In our name, the United States government instituted a program of systematic torture of detainees — torture that was then and remains now illegal, and which has widely been agreed to have produced little or no useful information. In our name, it participated in the kidnapping, extradition and killing of purported terrorists, some of whom later proved innocent. It created its own version of extraordinary rendition in Guantánamo Bay, where time-honored legal guarantees like habeas corpus and right to a fair trial have been denied to prisoners for over sixteen years. In our name, it instituted and continues a vast program of extrajudicial killings by unmanned drones.
In our name, yet without our consent, in strictest secrecy, justified by secret legal opinions and blessed by secret courts — a secrecy that in most instances has no operational justification, and merely serves to conceal abuses that would cause public outcry if widely known. Even more than in other fields, whistleblowers are essential in national defense, because the factors that facilitate fraud — secrecy, the sense of mission and mystique, the culture of impunity, and the flow of Other People’s Money — are more extreme. As the executive branch urges the “national security” agenda, Congress and the courts have become impotent or complicit, subverting the main checks to militarism. Here is the mortal threat to democracy that is eternal war, which the Founders saw during the Revolution, and Eisenhower warned against during the Cold War. Their message has been taken up by a handful of whistleblowers within the hermetically sealed realm of the national security apparatus, who have the nerve to announce to us, aloud, what our government is actually doing, to others and to us."(1038)

(1070) Epilogue - The Banana Republic Wasn’t Built in a Day

Over de leugens van Donals Trump.

"Having sealed the biggest deal of his life and become the United States’ forty-fifth president, however, Trump proceeded as anyone with even a passing knowledge of his past should have expected. He put Big Pharma in charge of healthcare and the FDA, and Goldman Sachs and other banks in all important financial roles, and handed the Pentagon even more money to continue the killing in the Middle East. Corporate lobbyists and CEOs run many departments, where deregulation, de-penalization and de-supervision are their creed. Trump transacts much of his presidential business at Mar-a-Lago, his golf resort in Florida, and at other Trump-branded properties. His daughter and son-in-law have assumed outsize roles in running the country, while retaining their interest in the Trump Organization — an almost unimaginable conflict of interest.
When Americans encounter such behavior in foreign lands, most call it corruption. When they see fabulously wealthy foreigners assuming state powers to enrich themselves and their inner circle, placing their offspring in positions of unwarranted authority, they brand these people oligarchs or dictators, and their children princelings. Yet in Trump’s America — in our America over the last quarter century—this same behavior has routinely been justified with pragmatic talk of free markets, deregulation, costs and benefits, and of running government like a business. We’ve dubbed our homegrown oligarchs billionaires, and now name buildings and libraries after them, let them secrete their wealth in offshore tax havens, allow them to pay politicians unlimited funds to buy access and push through the fiscal “reforms” and government downsizing they cherish, to buy sports teams for which they build new stadiums with taxpayer money, complete with sky boxes from which they can look down upon the taxpaying multitudes. And many of us revere these homegrown oligarchs as paragons of the American Dream." [mijn nadruk] (1075)

"Donald J. Trump’s victory has revealed how hollow the edifice of American democracy has become, how insubstantial its checks and balances, after decades of self-interested chiseling, reaming, drilling and blasting by various experts and insiders — the lawyers, soldiers, scholars, financiers, think tankers and policy makers who have probed deep into every crevice of the body politic from which tax dollars could be extracted. Many Americans standing at the gates for the last two decades and looking in at this merry banquet, with its swirl of public and private players, its bewildering disappearing and reappearing acts, the vast sums of money carried in and consumed, believed that government in the United States — that democracy itself — was broken."(1077)

"Whatever help the Russians gave Trump in the 2016 elections, and whatever blackmail leverage Putin may have on Trump after decades of shadowy business deals in Russia, the two men have gravitated together because they share a worldview: the attitude of a czar over his serfs, not an elected ruler among his fellow citizens."(1085)

"In response to the unprecedented surge in unauthorized disclosures that began with his election, Trump has imposed gag orders and anti-leak training on government departments, and has forced senior White House staff to sign lifetime nondisclosure agreements — moves that violate whistleblower law."(1088)

"Whistleblowers strip away absurd euphemisms, revealing bedrock meanings: that corporations are not people, any more than dollars are speech; that “campaign contribution” has become shorthand for “bribe,” and “legal settlement” for hush money; and that “deregulation,” like “privatization,” usually translates into generous gains for the few at great cost to the many. At the same time, whistleblowers reveal the dark side of loyalty, patriotism, and devotion to the team, and show that other words, however debased by cynicism, still have a substance that we long for: honor, duty, justice, virtue, truth."(1098)