Whistleblowers: The Canaries in the Coal Mines
The canaries are calling.
Look! In the sky. It’s absurd. It’s insane. No, it’s Irony Man.
Not Iron Man — Irony Man. News junkies know him as Scott Bloch, after it was reported last week that the FBI had raided the office of Special Counsel. In the wake of the raid, the National Whistleblower Center issued this statement, hinting at Bloch’s Irony Man identity:
“In a notably ironic turn of events …Bloch — who is charged with protecting federal whistleblowers — has been under investigation for, among other things, whistleblower retaliation within his own agency. Most of the whistleblower community has been disappointed with Bloch’s tenure in office. He had no actual expertise in the field and was viewed as a patronage appointment.”
I couldn’t get in touch with Bloch, but I think he would agree with my assessment that the FBI’s timing couldn’t be better — at least for the folks organizing “Whistleblower Week” in the nation’s capital, which happens to be this week!
But I was able to catch up with the president of No Fear Institute, Dr. Marsha Coleman-Adebayo. NFI is organizing the Whistleblower Week conference.
Coleman-Adebayo was a senior Environmental Protection Agency representative to the White House under the Clinton administration. While serving on a special U.S. commission working with the South African government, she blew the whistle on the death she discovered was being wrought in South African communities where vanadium pentoxide is mined by poor villagers to supply the steel alloy America relies on for making bridges, airplanes, cars, even knives, forks and surgical instruments. Vanadium is one of the chemical compounds mixed with steel that allows it to bend and contract without breaking.
When Coleman-Adebayo found that lack of environmental regulations and labor laws in South Africa were literally killing poor miners and their families, Coleman-Adebayo tried to call attention to the silent killer. Her superiors told her to forget about it, but her refusal to forget about it led to her increasingly hostile ouster.
In August of 2000, a federal jury found the EPA guilty of violating her civil rights. Coleman-Adebayo became an activist and organized a grass-roots campaign that eventually led to the passage of the Notification of Federal Employees Anti-discrimination and Retaliation Act (the No FEAR Act), which was signed into law by President Bush in 2002.
A year later, Congress began to gut the law. Since then, Coleman-Adebayo and the rest of the whistleblower community has been working with congressional allies on new legislation. “One of the goals of Whistleblower week is to push for new legislation,” she told me on Mother’s Day.
One is called the Congressional Disclosure Protection Act, which is designed to protect workers against whistleblower retaliation if they should testify before Congress.
“Almost always, when you testify (as a whistleblower) before Congress, you are immediately retaliated against, usually fired. This Act will provide some protection when workers exercise their constitutional right to talk to Congress.”
Another law being advocated is the Civil Rights Tax Relief Act — to prevent the IRS from taxing compensatory damages awarded to whistleblowers whose civil rights were violated. When Coleman-Adebayo was compensated for the EPA’s retaliation, the IRS took half of it back in taxes! The Civil Tax Relief Act would end that foolishness.
“People don’t know it but they’ve gutted the 1964 Civil Rights Act through taxation. There are people who have gone into bankruptcy trying to get their day in court under a law that Dr. King died for.”
Then there’s No Fear Act II, designed to make No Fear I gut-proof by defining what disciplinary action must be taken by employers who violate workers civil rights in retaliation for whistle blowing, left undefined in No Fear I.
“I think it will go down as one of the most important pieces of civil rights legislation in history,” Coleman-Adebayo said.
Because she has seen corruption in federal government first hand through her experience in South Africa, Coleman-Adebayo believes “one of the most important things whoever the next president can do is to clean up the federal government.” (http://www.whistleblowers.org/html/2008_survey.html)
“We are hoping Senator Obama, Clinton or McCain will take up the mantle to clean up the corruption. Until the corruption is cleaned up, nothing the government does will work for the people. Whistleblowers are simply the canaries in the mine. We die off first — but not long after, the carbon dioxide comes out of the mines.”
“The whistleblower community is one of the most courageous communities I’ve been involved with. Through loss of jobs, families, even death, in some cases, they’ve made the decision to stand and fight. That’s what the week is all about — a community of people willing to stand up and fight for their country.”
The canaries are calling. Will you listen?
Sean Gonsalves is a columnist and assistant news editor with the Cape Cod Times. He can be reached at sgonsalves@capecodonline.com
Until the US electorate starts listening when the whistles are blown, it will only get worse.
Whistleblowers who extracted themselves from the Bush Regime, early in the first term, included Bush’s first Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill. Prior to his government service, O’Neill was a heavy hitter in the corporate world, having saved Alcoa from bankruptcy by hiring MORE US employees.
After witnessing the Bush Regime’s destructive economic policies, O’Neill resigned as Treasury Secretary and told all to the media, and the US electorate responded by bolstering their support for the Regime, its supporters and enablers.
People shoot canaries. It is easier to shoot the canary than to take the heat from the people who want things to remain how they are.
President Obama will have to spend his entire first term in office fumigating the Fascist termites that have rotted out our government.
The problem whistleblowers have is that when they blow the whistle, someone must broadcast the sound. The MSM will not touch it in most cases, or will just give it a short toot, and then move on.
Even when it gets some play, and the whistleblowers first choice is to stay anonymous, our government then goes after the journalists and puts them in jail until they sing.
Also, the judicial system is so rigged now no whistleblower can be ensured of a fair trial.
We are no longer a Democracy. The whistles blow silent or not at all.
The Fascist Termites will not allow anyone who will exterminate them in the White House, the next president will be also be Fascist Termite, pretending to not be one (remember GWB in 2000?). Welcome to the real world if you dare. But I must caution you, it’s worse than you can imagine, sleeping through whats to come might be your best option, but there will be no guarantees you will be allowed to awaken if you wait too long.
Bush’s first Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill is a good example of a Whistle blower in the first teer of power within the administration BUT because he wrote a book he was marginalized because “he did it for profit”-What! a millionaire retired from the corporate world wrote a book for a few buck profit. I told of all the stupidity within the administration but no one wanted to hear it. There have been others with similar stories but all of them were given the Rove-spin and no one listened-and still don’t listen
So the FBI didn’t shoot her down on the street, render her to a black interrogation site in Albania, put plutonium in her refrigerator, or a bomb in her car? What? Were they busy that week sodomizing tied up little boys in front of their mothers in Abu Ghraib? Oh, that’s right. We have CIA contractors for that. Everybody got their job.
Whistleblowers? Canaries? We are waaaaaay past both of those.
Now the shit starts getting real. Ya’all stocked up on lots and lots of food, right? Well, if you ain’t got a 3 year supply, you’re SOL. If you do, guard it with your life or some nice white American with a bloated gut and an automatic weapon will come with his friends and kill you and take it all.
It’s how we do things here. Why get it for yourself when you can knock them down, and take it from them? Then if you want, you can make them your slaves if you need the labor or she’s attractive. Make a White Man feel strong, like the good old days. That is how we got this country, why would we do anything different now. We haven’t changed.
But if you do see your fellow Americans coming up your street, you be careful. You’d be real lucky if those white Americans don’t rape you to death (men or women) for sport. They like that sort of thing and you’re not queer as long as you do the fucking. Says so on the box.
This is the future America wanted, right? 40 years ago when the monsters were murdering all the leaders for economic or social justice America laughed and sneered when the dissidents were ritually defamed, falsely imprisoned, or simply executed in their beds at 3am - BY THE FBI. Slogan for the FBI back to the first days of the Bureau of Investigation: “Keep the Races, the Genders, and the Classes in their place by any means necessary.”
Seig Heil babies, only a few more floors to drop in this controlled demolition. After that its nothing but jagged rocks and nasty ugly.
Bon Apetit my fellow future cannibals of America, the American Nightmare is fulfilled at last.
Hey luckylefty:
I guess that you see the glass as half empty. People do help each other, it’s not dog eat dog everwhere. There are many good people out there that wouldn’t think of stealing what’s not theirs.
Yeah I know that living in the inner-city where being a thug is cool can cause a skewed view of life, but it’s not like that everwhere. Sometimes a person should look at the good side of human nature.
Truth is that we still have the freedom to stand out in the street and shout about the need for sanity and respect and peace. …but that freedom is tenuous…I saw it disappear in Chile after their coup….It will likely disappear here too when the economic situation collapses.
United Statesians have abandoned concerted action to thwart the police state which has crept up on us all, and I blame no one. One person’s “security” is another’s “fascism”. But the overpopulation and technification has reached a point of dimishing returns, and we all saw it coming. Let’s be tolerant and serene and enjoy the dying of the monster which we allowed to grow over the past two centuries. Time to get back to the garden….and tend to our knitting…
A civilization (and those individuals within it) that punish and ridicul those who point up the errors and injustices of that civilization simply help decent people identify the enemies of civilization, while confirming the very nature of that civilization as corrupt.
We all stood by as pejoratives were applied to Save-the-Whales, Greenies, and other people who endeavored to be good human beings. Shame on us.
An advanced civilization would not treat those who tell us the truth of what they have observed in order to help us. That we do not give these courageous individuals the respect and accolades they deserve, earns us nothing more than contempt. The whistleblowers are true heroes and if this civilization actually valued truth, honesty and justice then it would protect them, and we would all be proud of them and hold them up as shining examples of what it means to be the best sort of Human Being the human race can produce, and help develop.
So this is a step in the right direction and I’m glad to see it happening at last. Been writing about and talking about this for a long time now. That said, there are many more steps to go to change the attitudes that protect the real criminals in our civilization.