whistleblowers as a dying breed

Whistleblowers are the great fear that keep our emminent corporate leaders awake at night, tortured by visions of legal inquiry into hidden business practices, exposing secret agreements contravening the law, corporate malfeasance on an epic scale...and not only the cataclysmic tumble of company shares, but titanic legal fees and even the dark specter of possible jail time. Utter ruin and shame.

For a little while, anyway.

Time has shown us that the most incriminating evidence and damning judgements of the law have little effect against a well-funded battle of lawyers against a cash-strapped state. Young men spend years in prison for selling a small bag of marajuana but CEOs who ruin the lives of tens of thousands of their employees. They can steal vast amounts of money from the state and wreak havoc on the economy in ways that only hurt about 96% of the population can take a short walk from the courthouse to an acquittal party on the lawn of a Newport mansion.

But, I digress. Let's return to the whistleblowers...the source of all this ruling class insomnia. One of these lost souls we know all got to know well is Jeffrey Wigand, the man who we all met vicariously through Russell Crowe, the high-paid scientist who brought his disgust with Brown & Williamson tobacco to a reluctant legal establishment, lost a lucrative career and his family too. For what? A pesky conscience that fed his efforts to take on one of the most powerful establishments in the corporate world: the tobacco companies...who closed ranks with the terrifying force a gargantuan steel gate slamming shut. This towering monolith of greed and power funded a small army of top-notch lawyers with their limitless war chest to rub Mr. Wigand into the dust of non-credibility, and very nearly got away with it.
The problem is that most of the time the corporate structure, which is designed with built-in safety mechanisms to project against attacks of naked truth, does get away with it. Even with the best intentions most state prosecutors (even the honest ones) just don't have the time and available funds to fight against the byzantine legal defenses raised against them.
Let's establish one point now, because I think it is important that we do so: Not all whistleblowers are squeaky clean crusaders for truth and justice. More than a few are motivated by their own greed, or vengeance, or both. Sometimes they do actually invent clever attacks purporting to have evidence which they cannot in fact produce when cross-examined. The reason this is crucial to mention here is that we must not confuse this fact with the truth. Most of the whistleblowers are not lying. They are not motivated by personal vendettas, but are acting for any number of perfectly defensible reasons. They feel an obligation to expose illicit corporate behavior which they can no longer tolerate being party to (or never knew about at all, until they stumbled upon the evidence). Of course, sometimes even if they are motivated by greed, their evidence is still genuine and the alleged malfeasance completely true.

The upshot of all this expensive honesty in the corporate world is that companies are responding. But instead of spending time and money to research more responsible methods of conducting business, most of the larger corporations in the world (see especially the tobacco industry, oil & gas, and pharmacueticals) are spending that time and money creating defenses and lobbying for legislation to protect again it happening in the first place.

The formula: don't solve the source of the problem, just hide it better. Don't eliminate corporate malpractice and criminal behavior, just create laws to prevent honest people from having any power to expose it. Make it an impossible opponen. Super-powerful connections inside the government on the local, state and federal level practically ensures that the bias of future legislation will lean their way.

If this continues, then soon no one will be able to speak out against the wealthy and powerful. The law will in fact exist solely to protect corporations against litigation of their crimes. Imagine it from this angle: what if organized crime hired a bunch of lawyers and pushed for crime-friendly legislation. Laws pushed through a crony congress to protect themselves against behing arrested when caught selling crack, murdering an adversary or knocking over a liquor store. But that wouldn't happen for the simple reason that most people seem to believe street crime is far worse than so-called "white collar" crime. They guess that purse-snatching and muggings are more likely to happen to them, so they fear it more. . This is the same kind of mentality that supports altruisms like "one death is tragedy, a million is a statistic".

Keep your eyes open, and remember that you are also a target of the increasing imperviousness of corporate America.