Books and Games for whistleblowers

Yes: Books and Games

Yes there are games for whistleblowers teaching you what to watch for, how to respond to immediate threats and with incentives during and after the game-assuming you survive. 

Incentives??

If you are a US citizen, it is wise to clue into the relevant legislation:

Sarbanes Oxley Act of 2002 (the first to encourage whistleblower activity)

Dodd Frank Wall Street Reform (the first to propose whistleblower protection)

Consumer Protection Act 2010 (the first to propose whistleblower incentives).

The Bothwell Law Group has a good article expanding on all this.

whistleblowerlaw.com/game-changer-for-whistleblowers

Not surprisingly, they recommend that you engage a lawyer BEFORE you launch into your actions, just for protection. 

It is sage counsel.

Craig Deitrich has some excellent resources to view in the area of corporate social responsibility.
craigdietrich.com

His game, in development, is Whistleblower: The Game. The enemy is the military industrial complex. 

Watch for this one!
whistleblower.games

Another game- is Outlast: Whistleblower by Red Barrels.This can be downloaded to your PC or purchased through PlayStation and Xbox. 

The player is Waylon Park a software engineer under contract to Murkoff. His task to alert journalists around the world about the malfeasance of profit oriented doctors and scientists, doing irresponsible psychiatric experiments on the patients at Mount Massive Asylum. 

For a real life adventure, you may want to read these books.

1) Extraordinary Circumstances : The Journey of a Corporate Whistleblower

The author is Cynthia Cooper, who was Worldcom's Chief Audit Officer. She was responsible for exposing the largest fraud in Corporate history. It reads like a whodunit-which I suppose it is. 

• who could she trust with her findings?
• how might she deal with her own job loss?
• how do you protect yourself when you are being physically threated?

2) Exposure : Inside the Olympus Scandal: How I went from CEO to Whistleblower

The author, Michael Woodford, describes his journey from an ambitious manager on the rise in the corporate world, to the senior executive with the unenviable task of calling out his Board of Directors. For those who wish to study this in a more classical business case study, the case can be downloaded from the University of Western Ontario B-School site. (Ivey School of Business)
ivey.uwo.ca
or directly to its case catalogue
iveycases.com

These 2 cases have much in common with the movie, the Insider, cited in my last posting.

• who do you trust with your findings?
• how do you deal with job loss and, effectively career ruination?
• how do you protect yourself against physical and psychological threats? 

Journalists are coming under increasing scrutiny and are being increasingly threatened by the Trumpty Dumpty White House. Fear of exposure is a remarkable sensation and quite often results in the guilty trying to cover up malfeasance and treason (likely in this case). The next blog submission with focus on the role portrayed by journalists as whistleblowers in film adaptations. 

Still wondering what employer I was referencing?
Check back in a week and all will be revealed!!

Activist Whistleblowers

Activists are driven

If you are going to be a whistleblower, you must be driven by the cause you are advocating and by the wrong you are trying to expose. You are an activist.
An activist is:

• an especially vigorous advocate of a cause or;
• a person who campaigns to bring about social or political change (attribution Wikipedia)

Some activists are well insulated from institutional reprisal. Take, for example, Media Matters and its role in attacking the non response of Murdoch Enterprises to the culture of sexism and sexual harassment at Fox News through their advertisers.  Had it not been for this whistleblower organization, would Bill OReilley still be there? Would Sean Hannity still be running his ugly mouth?Would those advertisers, outed by Media Matters still be advertising? 

Being an activist is not for the faint of heart-as I have pointed out before.
If you want to take a look at perhaps the top ten whistleblower movies go to 

toptenz.net/top-10-whistle-blowers.php

My favourites include:

1) The Insider

with Russell Crowe and Al Pacino. Its the story of how Jeffrey Wizard exposed the cigarette industry for the criminal purveyors of poison that it is. The lengths that the separate cigarette companies went to to shut him up will shock you.

youtube.com/watch?v=5rkvxi5hdbA

2) Silkwood

set at a plutonium processing plant, where a worker is purposely contaminated, psychologically tortured and possibly murdered to prevent her from exposing worker safety violations.

youtube.com/watch?v=1KGmkaoIbQo

3) The Most Dangerous Man in America

The story of Daniel Ellsberg, a Pentagon insider, and his efforts to expose the fraud of the War in Vietnam and the complicity of successive US Presidents in perpetrating that fraud. Dynamite!

Both President Johnson and  Secretary McNamara accused leakers as being un-American and seditious.  
Sound familiar? 
Sound like something going on today??
And yet, had Ellsberg not leaked Pentagon information to the media, it is unlikely that the US public would have realized that the War being prosecuted by their government was a consequence of corruption and dishonesty at the highest levels of government and the military. 
youtube.com/watch?v=1G1SaatIp0w

4) North Country

is a fictionalized account of the first major sexual harassment case in the US. Jensen v Eveleth Mines. This one would be mind boggling if we hadn't seen what is happening at Fox News, now. Oh yes, the US citizens elected a President who bragged about sexually assaulting women and ogling teenagers dressing. 

youtube.com/watch?v=P6Wk91Om3hs

5) Erin Brockovich
is the story of a former beauty queen with no education, 3 kids by 2 different men, no job and, evidently, no future who by sheer will power convinces a small real estate law practice to take on a big corporation which is systematically poisoning a town's water supply. A whistleblower does not necessarily need to be an insider, have expertise or be well placed politically. What a whistleblower needs is a belief in a cause, a belief in oneself and grit. 

6) Semper Fi: Always Faithful
is a sleeper in this list. Its the story of a dedicated marine Corps Master Sergeant whose daughter dies of leukemia. His search for  answers leads to the discovery that the Marines were covering up the largest water contamination incidents in US history. Talk about betrayal of epic proportions. 
youtube.com/watch?v=3d532nOYjSs

Happy watching. 
The next blog will deal with some books you might want to consider at your friendly library