Haiku: purple heart-2

Draft dodgers scramble

To insult the Vet for what?

Vindman isn’t their man.

 

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Haiku: purple heart

Is my purple heart

Badge of shame in age of fraud?

Last trump for the dead.

Benny

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From my sketchbook-lion

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Cat nap-phase 2-1997

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Cat nap in between-1- drawing 1997

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Sketch-caravenserai,incesu,Turkey

2011 sketch, incesu, Istanbul- architectural drawing-pen and wash

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Cat- charcoal drawing -1996

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Cat- sketch

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Meditations-Psalm 113- Mode of Inversion

What does the Name of God signify? For that matter,Holy is his name?

GuidetohisWord

God is Holy. It is what His name means. When Moses asked God what did He reply? “And God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM.” And He said, “Thus you shall say to the children of Israel, ‘I AM has sent me to you (Ex.3:14)”. What prompted Him to visit him in the first place was that ‘And God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob (Ex.2:24)”. God remembered His promise to Abraham. Earlier also we read from the Bible of God remembering Noah and also the creatures that were with him, “And God remembered Noah, and every living thing, and all the cattle that was with him in the ark: (Ge.8:1)” Remembering is associated with appropriate action. He sent Moses with these parting words,”This is my name for ever, and this is my memorial unto all generations”. So the…

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Whistleblowing in an age of fraud

Whistleblowing is zeroing in on corruption entrenched at national level by one man. It has nothing to do with dogwhistle which is the last refuge of one (whose conscience has been dead,) use to call attention to his color. This post is on the first and shall begin with saying whistleblowing at its best is a form of public service.

It is a phenomenon as old as the republic. It’s a particularly American invention, based on the egalitarian presumption that any citizen or employee has the right to call out their boss or their organization for malfeasance. Whistleblowing can bring out both the best and the worst in us and our institutions. Now we are wondering if it could also unravel a presidency.

So far, the new lesson is frustratingly incomplete. The Washington Post reported Sept. 18 that an unnamed official working in an intelligence agency blew the whistle on President Trump after concluding that Trump pushed the new president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, to investigate Trump’s domestic political rivals and to work with Trump’s lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani and Attorney General William P. Barr on it. We don’t know how Ukraine’s hopes for military aid from Washington might have influenced the exchange. But the whistleblower’s complaint has prompted the House to initiate an impeachment inquiry into the president.

the whistleblower who filed a complaint about Trump’s phone conversation with Zelensky belongs to a large and growing cohort of citizens who “[inform] on a person or organization regarded as engaging in an unlawful or immoral activity,” to quote the Oxford Dictionary’s succinct definition. Both authors(Mueller and Stanger)  recount the earliest recorded case of whistleblowing, from the Revolutionary War, but as Stanger discovered by researching old newspapers, the term “whistleblower” is relatively new. It began to appear regularly in leading American papers in the 1970s, in the years after Ralph Nader and Ernest Fitzgerald, a famous early Pentagon whistleblower, attracted a great deal of attention from the press.

What began in the ’70s has flourished since. Over the past four decades, Congress has repeatedly passed laws to encourage whistleblowing and protect those who engage in it, a category that seems to have grown steadily. We now have a small industry of groups and individuals who advocate whistleblowing, defend whistleblowers in court and help those who lose their jobs. Scores of regulations purport to encourage and protect whistleblowers from retaliation, in the private and public sectors. In the second decade of the 21st century, whistleblowing has become an established and effective American institution. And whistleblowers have led to the recapture of tens of billions of dollars from lawbreaking companies.

While reviewing Crisis of Conscience by Tom Mueller ( no relation of Robert Mueller) the writer points out to changes in attitudes with whistleblowing. He confronts the ugliness of the modern money culture, dating it to the Reagan era — but his criticisms are aimed at bipartisan targets, including Barack Obama and other Democrats who have normalized former public servants’ acceptance of huge speaking fees from big corporations. He suggests that the values of our modern Gilded Age have contributed to flourishing corruption, which can invite citizens who are uncomfortable with it to blow whistles.

This began in the 1980s, when rules were changed in ways that fostered a dramatic increase in inequality of income and wealth. Mueller recounts one such change that made possible the decisions of numerous corporations to use the windfall of the 2017 Trump tax cut to buy back shares in their own companies: By increasing demand for shares (however artificially), these buybacks pump up a company’s stock price, which is used by many firms to set the compensation of their executives.

Mueller notes that companies were forbidden by law to purchase their own shares until President Ronald Reagan’s Securities and Exchange Commission chairman, a former stockbroker named John Shad, orchestrated a change in the regulations. Shad was the first Wall Street executive ever to serve as SEC chairman. Since his rule change, Mueller writes, “public companies . . . have spent many trillions of dollars in share repurchases.” Just since the Trump tax cut, repurchases have exceeded $1 trillion. Proponents of the tax cut said it would lead to dramatic increases in business investment in new plants, equipment and hiring, but this hasn’t happened. And inequality has continued to grow.

Mueller’s subtitle describes the modern era as “an age of fraud,” a harsh conclusion that nevertheless isn’t easy to refute. Noting the rise of whistleblowing in recent years, he calls it “a symptom of a society in deep distress.” Revealingly, his extensive footnotes include a remarkable catalogue of books and articles that document the “increasing incidence of fraud and corruption in many parts of U.S. society.” One of the most important contributors to this literature has been Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard law professor and political agitator. Mueller quotes Lessig’s irrefutable judgment: “We have allowed core institutions of America’s economic, social, and political life to become corrupted.” The White House now appears to be one of them.

Most of Mueller’s very long book is devoted to original storytelling. His extensively reported tales of individual whistleblowers and their often cruel fates are compelling. He begins with a poignant recounting of the experience of Allen Jones, a slightly eccentric bureaucrat in the Pennsylvania state government who discovered and blew the whistle on an enormous fraud by Johnson & Johnson, which conned Pennsylvania and other states into overprescribing the drug Risperdal to hapless and often helpless residents of mental institutions and prisons. Risperdal, an “atypical antipsychotic,” was used to treat serious mental illness including bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. It was no more effective than generic antipsychotic drugs, studies had shown, but it was much more expensive — and thus more profitable for Johnson & Johnson, which persuaded many states to buy a lot of it.

Jones’s tale cannot be briefly summarized. He ended up suing the company in Texas under the state’s version of the federal False Claims Act, a law that can provide significant cash rewards to whistleblowers. After a damning week in court, Johnson & Johnson gave up and offered to settle. Jones’s share of the $157 million agreement was nearly $40 million. But he had lost a marriage and 10 years of his life. His career as a public servant was long gone. People he had worked with turned on him viciously. He lives in a cabin in the Pennsylvania woods with no hot water, though the settlement afforded updates that put in running water and a toilet. He was bitter about the fact that Johnson & Johnson never had to admit wrongdoing or reveal how many people — a high number — were hurt by the side effects of Risperdal. “It is hard to fully trust anyone or anything again,” he told Mueller, 17 years after he blew the whistle.

Postscript: where did whistleblowing act go bust from American political landscape? Impeachment of the POTUS on reasonable evidences remained only on paper. Had the Hill an iota of sagacity it was the time to remove one who was totally unfit for any office that called for honor,  common decency and not to mention common sense. Think of the millions who died  this year because of Covid-19? Hat it been under any other watch it would not have been as catastrophic as now. Every day in this time of the year citizens are dying at a rate more than deaths occurred on account of Pearl Harbor and 9/11 put together. The nation it would seem have settled on perpetuating an unjust society based on color and wealth so law makers sent to Capitol Hill are not only playing the fools themselves but also becoming crooks. Only how treasonable were they and that only time shall tell.( benny-23 Dec. 2020)

(Ack:

Robert G. Kaiser fmr.WP editor’s review of Crisis of Conscience/Tom Mueller-Sept 27, 2019 2. Whistleblowers by Allison Stanger

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