Groups Leafleting Bank Employees in 15 Cities Nationwide
(Washington, DC) – Today, the Government Accountability Project (GAP) and several other organizations are announcing an educational campaign aimed at employees of large banks and financial institutions. The campaign, one of the first major coordinated national efforts of its kind, will inform workers of whistleblower protections that potentially apply to them, if they have witnessed wrongdoing.
“Bankers and workers at financial institutions should know that they do have rights to report corporate wrongdoing safely,” stated Louis Clark, GAP President and Corporate & Financial Accountability Director. “We want bank employees to be aware of the protections that Congress has given them. These laws are on the books for a reason.”
Leafleting is set to take place today in the Bay Area, Los Angeles, San Diego, Sacramento, Seattle, New York City, Charlotte, Atlanta, St. Louis, Chattanooga, Las Vegas, Orlando, Minneapolis, and Chicago. Primarily, the materials being distributed seek to educate employees on the whistleblower protections that were enacted by the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010, and drive them to a website (BankWhistleblower.org) and a informational number (1-855-BANK-KYR) for more information. Copies of materials that are being distributed can be found here. On both the website and phone message, employees can find additional information such as whistleblower survival tips, whistleblower protections under Sarbanes-Oxley, and tips for filing complaints with the Department of Labor.
Any civic-minded group is welcome to join in this effort and distribute flyers to Bank employees, or make workers aware of the website and phone number.
Michael Termini, GAP Corporate & Financial Accountability Deputy Director, added: “Sometimes the only individuals who can prove financial corruption are employees themselves. We’re trying to make them aware of their rights.”
Summary: The Occupational Safety and Health Administration has instituted a dispute resolution program in its Chicago and San Francisco regional offices for whistleblower complaints. The program will offer early resolution and mediation as two options for settling complaints.
Summary: As reported yesterday, Pentagon officials are praising the use of MRAPs – Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected vehicles – in the US engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan, citing that troops in those vehicles are as much as 14 times more likely to survive an IED blast than in Humvees. MRAP whistleblower and GAP client Franz Gayl, who revealed bureaucratic hold-ups in sending the machines, was one of the major catalysts in these vehicles being sent to soldiers.
Summary: Senator Daniel Akaka (D-Hawaii) is one of the authors of the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act, which passed the House by unanimous consent last week. It is expected to pass the Senate when then return in November.
Summary: This article highlights the recent whistleblower protection law enacted in Malaysia, and takes a look at the international history of whistleblower legislation.
Summary: This TIME article looks at the effectiveness vs. cost debate surrounding MRAPs – Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected vehicles – and their use in Afghanistan. The article cites MRAP whistleblower and GAP client Franz Gayl, who exposed the “bureaucratic ineptitude” that resulted in MRAPs being held up for more than a year during the War in Iraq. Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates has said that the MRAPs saved thousands of lives.
Key Quote: Still, the MRAPs couldn’t come fast enough. Franz Gayl, a Marine science adviser, blew the whistle on bureaucratic ineptitude, after requests for more than 1,000 MRAPs were held up for 19 months during the height of the Iraqi insurgency, according to theGovernment Accountability Project.
Summary: A new measure in Chicago would expand whistleblower protections for anyone experiencing retaliation for reporting wrongdoing of a city employee. However, the proposal stipulates that the whistleblower must file suit within 30 days of being aware of the wrongdoing, a period that is being criticized as too short. A city council committee endorsed the measure yesterday.
Summary: A new Senate report finds that fusion centers – big information sharing centers created by the Department of Homeland Security – are a waste of taxpayer dollars and invasive of citizens’ privacy rights. GAP National Security & Human Rights Director Jesselyn Radack explores the report and the media coverage of it in this blog post.
A Senate committee investigative report released today finds that fusion centers – massive Department of Homeland Security (DHS) undertakings touted as a solution to "information sharing" – are a colossal waste of taxpayer money and do little, if anything, to improve national security. The New York Times on the report:
The report found that the centers “forwarded intelligence of uneven quality — oftentimes shoddy, rarely timely, sometimes endangering citizens’ civil liberties and Privacy Act protections, occasionally taken from already published public sources, and more often than not unrelated to terrorism.”
The Senate report contains evidence of fusion centers' needless invasion Americans' privacy rights, useless intelligence reporting, pervasive lack of oversight, and complete inability to account for the taxpayers money. DHS can't even give a definite number about how much taxpayer money it has spent on the fusion centers, and the margin of error is way bigger than the Powerball jackpot. WaPo reported:
[the Senate report says] oversight has been so lax that department officials do not know exactly how much has been spent on the centers. The official estimates varied between $289 million and $1.4 billion.
Government could have saved American taxpayers a few hundred million by listening to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) when it warned back in 2007 that the developing fusion centers lacked proper oversight and endangered Americans' privacy rights. Five years ago, the ACLUreported that fusion centers
. . . raise very serious privacy issues . . . [and] there are serious questions about whether data fusion is an effective means of preventing terrorism in the first place, and whether funding the development of these centers is a wise investment of finite public safety resources.
Summary: In this blog, GAP Executive Director Bea Edwards takes umbrage with a New York Times’ article suggesting that the Obama administration has cracked down on corporate fraud, or that the administration has been particularly good for corporate whistleblowers.
Summary: GAP National Security & Human Rights Director Jesselyn Radack talks to RT about Bradley Manning’s case and the alleged US case against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, along with the recent passage of the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act (WPEA).Radack blogged on this appearance this morning.
Summary: More coverage of GAP’s report analyzing the internal justice system of the United Nations, specifically with regards to peacekeeping missions. Read the full report here.
Summary: The FDA has asked a judge to dismiss a lawsuit brought by current and former employees accusing the agency of spying on their personal communications as retaliation for whistleblowing. GAP condemned this surveillance by the agency shortly after the news broke this summer.
The New York Timesreported yesterday that as whistleblowers cash in on rewards programs set up by financial reform laws, the Obama administration, which “cracked down on corporate fraud” by promoting the programs, is reaping the real payoff. For-profit whistleblower lawyers, flush with their clients’ settlements, are shoveling money into the Obama campaign.
There are a couple of problems with this account of reality in the world of whistleblowing. Most importantly, Obama did not crack down on corporate fraud. Far from it. The Dodd-Frank reform, which set up the whistleblower rewards at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), is so loaded with loopholes that whistleblowers are probably the best and only hope the public has to combat corruption and fraud in banking.
First, Dodd-Frank does not make the obvious reform: break up the Too-Big-To-Fail banks.
Clearly, this needed to happen and did not. Instead we got the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC). Its Chairman is the Secretary of the Treasury (Timothy Geithner – enough said). Although the Treasury Department is happy to answer our questions about this committee and the ways in which it will protect us from future financial cataclysms, its account of itself does not inspire confidence. For example: in answer to your question, “What can the American people expect from the FSOC,” we have this response:
The FSOC can help provide a coordination role among the member agencies to help bring agencies together and to coordinate complex interagency rulemakings, where appropriate. The FSOC released an integrated roadmap following its first meeting that is based on each independent agency’s internal planning processes, which puts into the public domain timeframes statutory deadlines for key deliverables.
But under pressure of Wall Street’s lobbyists, the rule – as officially proposed last week – has morphed into almost 300 pages of regulatory mumbo-jumbo, riddled with exemptions and loopholes.
Last night I discussed a variety of whistleblower issues currently in the news:
Over the weekend, I attended a TRUTHCON event presented by the Bradley Manning Support Network and the Georgetown Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild. (Go here to support Bradley Manning now). In the coming weeks Manning's attorneys are set to argue Manning's motion to dismiss the charges based on a failure to provide Manning with a speedy trial and a motion to dismiss the charges based on unlawful pre-trial punishment, specifically allegations of Manning's torture.
(Washington, DC) – Today, the Government Accountability Project (GAP) and several other organizations are announcing an educational campaign aimed at employees of large banks and financial institutions. The campaign, one of the first major coordinated national efforts of its kind, will inform workers of whistleblower protections that potentially apply to them, if they have witnessed wrongdoing.
