COVID-19 and Governmental Crime, Whistleblowing
COVID-19 AND GOVERNMENTAL CRIME
Main theme: Understanding failed pandemic responses as state crimes, specifically governmental crime.
Reference: Catello, R. (2022) ‘Exposing the Crimes of the Neoliberal State in the Governance of COVID-19’, State Crime Journal, 11(2), pp.285-315.
Abstract
Two promising developments from failed attempts to contain infectious disease outbreaks since the WHO declared the novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) a pandemic on January 23, 2020:
Acceleration of the critique of neoliberalism.
Reinvigoration of the state crime vocabulary.
The pandemic exposed “the plague of neoliberalism” (Henry Giroux, 2020).
State crime vocabulary has the terminological and conceptual capacity to make sense of the crisis.
Academic literature on state criminality can complement critiques of the global neoliberal order in the context of the failed governance of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Keywords: austerity, COVID-19, neoliberalism, public health, state crime, structural violence
COVID, STATE CRIME, AND NEOLIBERALISM
Aim: Investigating the nexus between:
Public health crises.
Failed neoliberal governance.
State crime.
Approach: Merging critiques and vocabularies.
Literature on healthcare crises under neoliberalism
State crime scholarship
Main Argument: Neoliberalism is responsible for exacerbating the public health crisis.
A form of state crime, i.e., crime by the Capitalist State.
ON NEOLIBERALISM
The most popular macro-economic doctrine of today.
Thatcherism in the UK.
Reaganism in the US.
Neoliberalism’s mottos:
“There is no such thing as society, only individuals”.
“Government is the problem, not the solution”.
Individual responsibility + leave it to the market philosophy.
ON NEOLIBERALISM (cont)
A minimalist, non-interventionist conception of the (capitalist) state replaced the welfare state in the last quarter of the 20th Century.
A system of policies centered around:
Liberalization, financialization, deregulation, and privatization.
Restructuring relationships between individuals and the state to facilitate “governing at a distance”.
Promotes a view of health and well-being as individual responsibilities and private commodities rather than rights and public goods.
Neoliberalism’s long history of obstructing the state’s provision of health rights over the past four decades has severely undermined public health in various countries, limiting the capacity of states to provide adequate health and care services during the COVID-19 pandemic (p.289).
THE POLITICS OF UNCARING
Neoliberalism is incapable of handling public health crises.
Eviscerating public services (NHS) (cuts and austerity).
Privatizing healthcare (profits before people).
My health, my responsibility (herd immunity).
Self-governance and de-responsibilisation.
Disdain for public sector workers, delaying lockdown measures, letting the virus circulate freely and “letting the bodies pile high”, personal choice, not attending to the needs of vulnerable groups, etc.
LEVELS OF ANALYSIS
Political economy and macro-sociology
Critical epidemiology
Comparative analysis
Public policy
COVID AS NEOLIBERAL SYMPTOM
COVID-19 is not the ‘real’ disease but a symptom of a pathological political system.
The COVID crisis resulted from decades of exploitation of nature and human beings linked to neoliberal globalization.
4 major global public health crises in 40 years (Ebola, SARS, MERS, COVID-19).
The pandemic as a crisis of neoliberalism.
Healthcare crises = neoliberal co-pathologies.
The pandemic as healthconomic crisis.
Austere neoliberalism as a pre-existing condition.
Global inequalities turned into public health risks.
‘COVID AS SYMPTOM’ IN ENGLAND
Neoliberalism is largely responsible for:
Turning England into the sick man, woman, and child of Europe even before the pandemic.
Making the country unprepared for infectious disease outbreaks by demolishing the country’s public health system and running down the country’s public health defenses.
Providing ideological legitimacy to the austerity policies that, since 2008, have led to widely documented detrimental effects on health and well-being (i.e., life expectancy).
Delaying the first lockdown, leading to thousands of preventable deaths (128,000 excess deaths in England between March 2020 and December 2021), and then offering refuge in appeals to “free-market common-sense” as a way of deflecting attention from mass harm.
Privatizing the NHS, negatively impacting the working lives of health and care workers and causing the PPE fiasco.
Depleting state capacities in the name of the ‘superior efficiency’ of the market and creating multiple “depletion zones”, with the long-term care sector and its residential and nursing homes being impacted the most.
Leaving the most vulnerable groups behind.
NEOLIBERALISING PANDEMIC RESPONSES
Neoliberal policies are partly responsible for poor health outcomes during the pandemic.
Strong government intervention and welfare expansion can ameliorate health inequalities during health crises and produce better outcomes in the long run, which is why:
Countries ravaged by neoliberal economic deregulation and austerity are more prone to health vulnerabilities (US, Italy, Spain, Canada, Australia).
Counties with high-performing public health systems are more prepared to deal with COVID (Japan, China, Hong Kong, Singapore).
Neoliberal countries that de-neoliberalised their pandemic response did well (New Zealand).
England's COVID figures were among the worst in Europe.
AUSTERITY: COVID’S LITTLE HELPER
The COVID-19 Marmot Review highlights that austerity is a primary cause behind England’s disastrous COVID-19 figures.
Created high levels of poverty à entire segments of the population suffering from ill-health
Harmed public health by prioritizing repaying the debt over taking care of people’s needs.
Led to the country entering the pandemic with depleted public services and a weakened population à increased the lethality of the pandemic.
England’s early attempts to respond to the pandemic through a neoliberally-minded policy of herd immunity made matters decisively worse.
NEOLIBERALISM AS STRUCTURAL VIOLENCE
Is the neoliberal state’s inability to serve and care for its people (i.e., the politics of austerity) simply an instance of bad politics?
No, it is a form of structural violence.
A system that, by design, disproportionally hurts and harms the poor, deprived, disadvantaged, and vulnerable.
An elitist political ideology that leaves entire groups of people behind.
An abusive form of governance that abandons the ‘Other’ who falls outside neoliberal normativity.
Austerity as a manifestation of state criminality.
THE STRUCTURAL VIOLENCE OF THE PANDEMIC (cont)
Structural violence à state violence à state criminality.
Austerity is official state policy.
Institutionalized violence (political will, mens rea).
State-sanctioned violence causing mass harm (political violence, actus reus).
Structural violence (political enemy, clear victims).
Austerity = government under-reach = criminal policy.
Technically legal but leading to mass harm and suffering.
Neoliberal policy-making as warfare against political enemies of the status quo.
ENGLAND’S PANDEMIC RESPONSE
Herd immunity plans and delayed lockdowns:
Neoliberalism 101 (Self-governance and de-responsibilisation).
A (criminal) experiment in epidemiological neoliberalism.
Biological warfare against the poor, vulnerable, disadvantaged, etc.
Organizational deviance and state-sanctioned structural violence.
Governance without government.
Johnson personifying the neoliberal ethos: press conference 18/3/2020.
The UK is “a land of freedom”, i.e., emphasizing the limited role of the state and the need to avoid a “police state” in response to the pandemic.
Neoliberal rationality is taken to its extreme of laissez-faire social Darwinism.
POLICY FAILURES OR CRIMES?
Austerity and herd immunity are not just neoliberal failures.
Deliberate attempts to neglect health and well-being.
An abdication of duty to protect and care.
Neglect/negligence institutionalized and turned into state policy.
Some possibilities:
Gov under-reach, social murder, social death, democide, politicide, genocide, crime against humanity, necropolitics.
Crime in the name of the neoliberal state.
SOCIAL MURDER AND DEATH
Social Murder (SM): A form of structural violence first theorized by Engels.
Forcing segments of the population to endure social conditions which inevitably generate avoidable, premature deaths.
In this context: A lack of political attention to social determinants and inequities that exacerbate the pandemic.
“When politicians and experts say that they are willing to allow tens of thousands of premature deaths for the sake of population immunity or in the hope of propping up the economy, is that not premeditated and reckless indifference to human life?”
Social Death (SD): When policies result in a group being ‘dead to the rest of society’.
DEMOCIDE
Technically refers to mass killings by governments (i.e., govs exterminating their own citizens).
Do 175,000 COVID-19 fatalities in England (as of September 2022) amount to extermination?
No, but many of them classify as deaths by government.
The kind of “killing” in question cannot easily be categorized as a “purposive act” or “purposive policy” expressly designed to cause death.
But the Gov’s failed response to the pandemic has led to unnecessary deaths through reckless indifference to human life.
Johnson’s infamous claim that he would rather see “bodies pile high” than declaring a third lockdown = an example of neoliberally inspired democidal thinking.
Implementing herd immunity plans early in the pandemic = a result of neoliberalism’s democidal and pathological willingness to sacrifice human life for the sake of the economy.
POLITICIDE AND NECROPOLITICS
Politicide is defined as:
The promotion and execution of policies by a state which.
Result in the deaths of a significant portion of a group and whose victims are defined.
In terms of their hierarchical position or political opposition to the regime or dominant groups.
Poor, disadvantaged, vulnerable groups as political enemies of the neoliberal state.
Democidal and politicidal tendencies at the political intersection of disaster capitalism, emergency capitalism, and neoliberalism have led to:
Necropolitics (politics of death) and necrocapitalism (death and dying as commodities).
GENOCIDE
More relevant in neoliberal countries with large non-white and Indigenous populations like the US and Brazil.
It highlights the sheer neglect of such populations by governments during the pandemic.
But it is hard to show an intent to exterminate.
In settler-colonial societies, it is more feasible to speak of a continuation of colonial logics of elimination.
SELF-CRITIQUE
Problem 1:
Crimes in the name of the state.
Solution: in the name of neoliberalism.
Problem 2:
No national or international statutes on public health crimes.
Possible solutions:
Introducing such statutes (i.e., adding to ICC’s list of international crimes).
Expanding public health rights.
Applying a zemiological lens.
REFERENCES
Catello, R. (2022) ‘Exposing the Crimes of the Neoliberal State in the Governance of COVID-19’, State Crime Journal, 11(2), pp.285-315.
WHISTLEBLOWING
TODAY’S SESSION
Whistleblowing as investigative method in Critical Criminology.
Historicising and defining whistleblowing.
Ethical dilemmas: heroes or traitors?
The age of whistleblowers? Assange & Co.
WHISTLEBLOWING AND CRIMINOLOGY
Whistleblowing is not a common topic in criminology, but…
Interest developed while researching offshore immigration detention in AUS.
Exposé criminology: exposing CofP, corporate, state(organised), war crimes, HR violations.
A Critical Criminology investigative tool.
Most countries still fail to provide adequate legal protections for whistleblowers – i.e., fits CC’s concern for vulnerable groups and their relation to state power, law, justice, etc.
Romanticising offenders? Or: who are the good and the bad guys?
One of the most high-profile criminal prosecutions of our times: Assange.
WHAT IS WHISTLEBLOWING?
“While simple in theory, the definition of whistleblowing is complex in practice” (Brown & Donkin, 2008, p.9).
In essence, deliberately leaking secret information in the public’s interest.
The term derives from English policemen blowing their whistles to alert the public and other police to criminal acts.
The term was first used in 1963 to describe a US State Department employee (Otto Otopeka) giving classified documents about security risks to the Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security (Hersh, 2001).
Prior to this, commonly used terms: ‘conscientious objector’, ‘rat’, ‘mole’, ‘informer’ (Warren, 1998, p.372).
MODERN ORIGINS
The contemporary connotation of the term is usually traced back to Ralph Nader’s consumer protection campaigns in the 1960s.
A call for the implementation of whistleblowing as a means to stem organizational wrongdoing.
“an act of a man or woman who believing that the public interest overrides the interest of the organization he serves, publically blows the whistle if the organization is involved in corrupt, illegal, fraudulent, or harmful activity” (Nader, 1972, ‘An Anatomy of Whistle Blowing’).
But ‘blowing the whistle’ is an old practice.
Mostly to protect the state rather than consumers or citizens.
i.e., Venice’s medieval lion mouths and Lincoln Laws in the US.
HISTORICAL PRECEDENT
The city-state of Venice instituted whistleblowing to fight corruption, avert coups, and encourage citizens’ participation in the government.
‘Lion mouths’ were first erected in 1310 after an attempted coup against the state.
Used to make secret complaints about various crimes (inc. blasphemy, tax evasion, treason, conspiracy against the State).
HISTORICAL PRECEDENT (Cont)
The US government encouraged whistleblowing in 1863 through ‘false claims laws.’
The False Claims Act (‘Lincoln’s law’) is a whistleblowing law passed in the US during the Civil War to supplement governmental resources in combatting fraud.
The Act:
Dealt with fraudulent contract claims during the Civil War.
Offered incentives to individuals who reported corps. and individuals defrauding the gov.
Sales of fake gunpowder to the Union during the war.
Contractors who provided substandard equipment, or sometimes nothing, to the Union Army.
HISTORICAL PRECEDENT (Cont)
NB some scholars wouldn’t classify these as examples of whistleblowing.
Is whistleblowing the same as snitching?
Perhaps ancestry rather than precedent (see Vaughn, 2012, pp.4-5).
Arguably, whistleblower laws are an outgrowth of labor legislation of the 1930s that protected union organizers and workers from retaliation for union activities (Westman & Modesitt, 2004).
Subsequent civil rights legislation and labor legislation adopted anti-retaliation principles.
Legislation applied to the reporting of workplace conditions or behavior prohibited by labor statutes.
WHISTLEBLOWERS AS EMPLOYEES
Following Nadar, whistleblowing today is mostly understood as employee action.
“informing on illegal and unethical practices in the workplace” (Vinten, 1994, p.3).
UK Government on whistleblowing.
“You’re a whistleblower if you’re a worker and you report certain types of wrongdoing”.
The wrongdoing you disclose must be in the public interest. This means it must affect others, i.e., the general public.
Complaints that count as whistleblowing:
A criminal offense (i.e., fraud).
Someone’s health and safety is in danger.
Risk or actual damage to the environment.
A miscarriage of justice.
The company is breaking the law (i.e., it does not have the right insurance).
You believe someone is covering up wrongdoing.
DEFINITIONS
Until recently, not a technical term with a legal def. (Latimer & Brown, 2008, p.768).
Some defs:
“attempts ‘from below’ to expose management illegality” (Lampert, 1985, p.2).
“the disclosure by organization members (former or current) of illegal, immoral, or illegitimate practices under the control of their employers, to persons or organizations that may be able to effect action” (Near & Miceli, 1985, p.4).
“the act of an individual worker or a group of workers raising a concern so as to prevent possible malpractice or dangers to the public” (Bowers, Lewis & Mitchell, 1999, p.1).
DEFINITIONS (Cont)
“Whistleblowing involves the deliberate disclosure of information about non-trivial activities which are believed to be dangerous, illegal, unethical, discriminatory or to otherwise involve wrongdoing, generally by current or former organization members” (Hersh, 2001, p.1).
“the pursuit of a concern about wrongdoing that does damage to a wider public interest” (UK Committee on Standards in Public Life, 2005, p.89).
“Whistleblowing is the exposure by people within or from outside an organization, of significant information on corruption and wrongdoing, that is in the public interest and would not otherwise be publicly available” (Bowden, 2006, p.2).
MAKING SENSE OF WHISTLEBLOWING
A form of organizational dissidence.
“a dissenting act of public accusation against an organization which necessitates being disloyal to that organization” (Jubb, 1999, p.77).
“Whistleblowing is a deliberate non-obligatory act of disclosure, which gets onto public record and is made by a person who has or had privileged access to data or information of an organization, about non-trivial illegality or other wrongdoing whether actual, suspected or anticipated which implicates and is under the control of that organization, to an external entity having potential to rectify the wrongdoing” (Jubb, 1999, p.78).
MAKING SENSE OF WB (Cont)
Often morally problematic because it involves disloyalty (Davis, 1996).
It always involves:
Revealing information that would not ordinarily be revealed (not problematic per se).
Intending to prevent something bad that would otherwise occur (not problematic per se).
Revealing information with which one is entrusted.
The organizational context: high-minded but unexcused misuse of one’s position in a generally law-abiding, morally decent organization, i.e., an organization that prima facie deserves the whistleblower’s loyalty.
HEROES OR TRAITORS?
Some regard whistleblowing as an ethical or even praiseworthy act, an act that exposes abuses and avoids moral complicity in them.
Others see whistleblowers as informers who betray colleagues and the organizations they work for.
A choice between two virtues and duties (Bowden, 2006, p.3):
Honesty.
Loyalty.
WB AS ENLIGHTENED PRACTICE
‘Blowing the whistle’ as a contemporary manifestation of Enlightenment ideals (Perry, 1998).
Individual rights, the claims of conscience, the responsibilities of citizens, the emancipatory power of reason, free speech.
Merging ‘informing’ and ‘dissenting’.
Advancing truth claims that are both cognitive (in their content) and moral (in their form).
Whistleblowing “dramatizes the very foundation of the Enlightenment project, i.e., the possibility of combining individual autonomy and social rationality, or of reconciling the claims of truth with the practice of politics”.
WB AS MULTI-FACETED PROBLEM
Whistleblowing as:
A test of values and culture (Sawyer, 2005).
A challenge to political power (Kaufman, 2017).
A problem of national security.
A problem of employment law and workers protections (Westman & M, 2004).
A problem of organizational justice and corporate governance (Dworkin & Near, 1987; Vinten, 1994; Trimmer, 2004; Seifert, et al, 2010; Near & Miceli, 2016).
THE AGE OF WHISTLEBLOWERS?
Whistleblowing today is amongst the most effective, if not the most effective, means to expose and remedy corruption, fraud, and other types of wrongdoing in the public and private sectors.
Whistleblowing’s popularity as a human right is growing worldwide, and the need for effective whistleblowing protections and laws is achieving international recognition.
From the age of dissent to the age of whistleblowing? (Delmas, 2015).
AGE OF WHISTLEBLOWERS? (Cont)
Maybe for some but not all…
Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning, who leaked over 750,000 classified documents to WikiLeaks, was sentenced to 35 years in prison (served from 2010 until 2017 when her sentence was commuted by President Obama).
WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange is being prosecuted by the Department of Justice under the Espionage Act of 1917 for publishing secret documents leaked by Manning.
Edward Snowden had to seek asylum in Russia after he blew the whistle on the National Security Agency’s massive domestic and international surveillance program.
ASSANGE’S COLLATERAL MURDER
Critics say Assange is neither a whistleblower nor a journalist.
They say he’s a criminal.
WikiLeaks: Collateral Murder (Iraq, 2007).
Video footage of a US military attack on Iraqi civilians in Baghdad in 2007 (12 civilians were killed).
Video footage from a U.S. Apache helicopter in 2007 leaked by U.S. Army intelligence analyst and whistleblower Bradley Manning to Wikileaks.
The video shows Reuters journalist Namir Noor-Eldeen, driver Saeed Chmagh, and several others as the Apache shoots and kills them in a public square in Eastern Baghdad after they are apparently assumed to be insurgents.
PROMINENT WHISTLEBLOWERS
In addition to Assange, Snowden, and Manning:
Daniel Ellsberg: The grandfather of all whistle-blowers.
He leaked the Pentagon Papers (secret history of the Vietnam War) in 1971 while working for RAND Corp.
“The mystique of secrecy in the universe of national security [makes] telling secrets appear unpatriotic, even traitorous” (Ellsberg, 2010, p.773).
Daniel Hale:
Former U.S. Air Force intelligence analyst who leaked classified info about the U.S. military assassination program (The Drone Papers) in May 2019.
Revealed that the killing of civilians was far more widespread than previously acknowledged.
Sentenced to 45 months in prison in July 2021 for violating the Espionage Act.
PROMINENT WHISTLEBLOWERS (Cont)
Reality Winner:
Former NSA contractor who leaked a report about Russian cyber-spying/interference in the U.S. presidential election (i.e., Russian hackers attacked a US voting software supplier).
Arrested in June 2017 and charged under the Espionage Act (5 years).
John Kiriakou:
Former CIA officer who gave a journalist the name of a former CIA officer alleged to have taken part in 83 instances of waterboarding against Abu Zubaydah (a suspected al-Qaeda financier).
First CIA officer to be convicted of disclosing classified info/exposing torture to a reporter.
Sentenced to 30 months in prison as part of a plea deal in which he admitted violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act.
SOME LESS CONTROVERSIAL EXAMPLES
Frank Serpico – a now retired New York City Police Office who blew the whistle on police corruption inside the NYPD.
A rat and a traitor?
Cynthia Cooper – one of the top accountants at WorldCom (a giant communications company) who exposed one of the largest corporate accounting fraud cases in US history ( billion).
An insider and informer who should be in prison?
Named one of three “People of the Year” by Time magazine in 2002, along with fellow whistleblowers Sherron Watkins and Coleen Rowley.
LESS CONTROVERSIAL Examples (Cont)
Pablo (pseudonym!), who works for a youth detention center in Argentina.
Is he an active citizen or a spy?
Ellie (pseudonym!), who worked in an off-shore immigration detention center in Australia.
Subversion or corporate citizenship?
CONCLUSION
Aren’t whistleblowers just ‘committed employees’ (Mabey & Hooker, 1994)?
Increasingly celebrated, but often legal protections are lacking – and often the law is used against them.
A range of emotions among the public – sometimes heroes, sometimes traitors.
Organizational dissidence can get you in trouble when the wrongdoer is a powerful state or organization.
The ‘age of whistleblowers’ is for some but not for all.
REFERENCES
Bowden, P. (2006) ‘A Comparative Analysis of Whistleblower Protections’, Australian Journal of Professional and Applied Ethics, 8(2), pp.1-14.
Bowers, J., Lewis, J. & Mitchell, J. (1999) Whistleblowing: The New Law. London: Sweet & Maxwell.
Bowers, J., Fodder, M., Lewis, J. & Mitchell, J. (2012) Whistleblowing: Law and Practice. 2nd edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Brown, A. J. & Donkin, M. (2008) ‘Introduction’, in A. J. Brown (ed) Whistleblowing in the Australian Public Sector: Enhancing the Theory and Practice of Internal Witness Management in Public Sector Organisations. Canberra: ANU Press, pp.1-22.
Committee on Standards in Public Life (2005) Tenth Report: Getting the Balance Right Implementing Standards of Conduct in Public Life. Presented to Parliament by the Prime Minister by Command of Her Majesty.
Davis, M. (1996) ‘Some Paradoxes of Whistleblowing’, Business & Professional Ethics Journal, Vol. 15, No. 1, pp. 3-19.
Delmas, C. (2015) ‘The Ethics of Government Whistleblowing’, Social Theory and Practice, 41(1), pp.77-105.
Dworkin, T. M and Near, J. P. (1987) ‘Whistleblowing Statutes: Are They Working?’, American Business Law Journal, 25, pp.241-264.
Ellsberg, D. (2010) ‘Secrecy and National Security Whistleblowing’, Social Research: An International Quarterly, 77(3), pp.773-804.
Hersh, M. A. (2001) ‘Whistleblowers – Heroes or Traitors?: Individual and Collective Responsibility for Ethical Behaviour’, Annual Reviews in Control, 26 (2), pp.243-262.
Jubb, P. B. (1999) ‘Whistleblowing: A Restrictive Definition and Interpretation’, Journal of Business Ethics, 21, pp.77-94.
Kaufman, M. D. (2017) ‘Woolf and Whistleblowing: From World War I to WikiLeaks’, Virginia Woolf Miscellany, 91, pp.23-24.
Lampert, N. (1985) Whistle-blowing in the Soviet Union: Complaints and Abuses Under State Socialism. London: Macmillan.
Latimer, P. & Brown, A. J. (2008) ‘Whistleblowing Laws: International Best Practice’, UNSW Law Journal, 31 (3), pp.766-794.
Mabey, C. & Hooker, C. (1994) ‘What Does It Mean to Be a Committed Employee?’, in G. Vinten (ed) Whistleblowing: Subversion or Corporate Citizenship? London: Paul Chapman Publishing, pp.42-52.
Near, J. P., & Miceli, M. P. (1985) ‘Organizational Dissidence: The Case of Whistle-blowing’, Journal of Business Ethics, 4, pp.1-16.
Near, J. P., & Miceli, M. P. (2016) ‘After the Wrongdoing: What Managers Should Know about Whistleblowing’, Business Horizons, 59, pp.105-114.
Perry, N. (1998) ‘Indecent Exposures: Theorizing Whistleblowing’, Organizational Studies, 19(2), pp.235-258.
Seifert, D. L., Sweeney J. T., Joireman, J. and Thornton, J. M. (2010) ‘The Influence of Organizational Justice on Accountant Whistleblowing’, Accounting, Organizations and Society, 35, pp.707-717.
Trimmer, A. (2004) ‘What Whistleblowing Might Mean for Incorporated Legal Practices’, Law Society Journal, 42(1), pp.66-69.
Vaughn, R. G. (2012) The Successes and Failures of Whistleblowers Laws. Northampton: Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc.
Vinten, G. (1994) ‘Whistleblowing – Fact and Fiction: An Introductory Discussion’, in G. Vinten (ed) Whistleblowing: Subversion or Corporate Citizenship? London: Paul Chapman Publishing, pp.3-20.
Warren, R.C. (1998) ‘Whistleblowing: Subversion or Corporate Citizenship?’, Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology , 71, pp.372-374.
Westman, D.P. & Modesitt, N.M. (2004) Whistleblowing: The Law of Retaliatory Discharge. Washington: Bureau of National Affairs.
EXTRA RESOURCES
WHISTLEBLOWING AND THE POLICE
The movie Serpico (1973) tells the story of Frank Serpico, who blew the whistle on police corruption inside the NYPD.
Crime + Punishment (2018) focuses on how the NYPD targeted vulnerable minority communities to meet quotas for arrests.
WHISTLEBLOWING AND WIKILEAKS
Julian Assange is the founder of WikiLeaks.
The ‘Collateral Murder’ video and other material released by WikiLeaks made him a target of Western powers who launched a legal campaign against him to protect government crimes and secrets.
WHISTLEBLOWING AND COVID-19
During the COVID-19 pandemic, whistleblowers have played a marginal role.
But the pandemic also highlighted the positive role whistleblowing plays in our lives.
Protect (2020) full report on this: THE BEST WARNING SYSTEM: WHISTLEBLOWING DURING COVID-19: An examination of the experiences of UK whistleblowers during a global pandemic.
SOME FACTS ABOUT WHISTLEBLOWING LAWS
Only a handful of national whistleblower laws existed before 1990.
Most whistleblowing laws can be found in the US.
Some date whistleblower laws from the 1863 false claims law called ‘Lincoln’s law’, while others see whistleblower laws as an outgrowth of labor legislation of the 1930s that protected union organizers and workers from retaliation for union activities.
In 1968 in Pickering v. Board of Education, the United States Supreme Court applied the First Amendment to protect public disclosures by public employees.
The Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 vindicated this constitutional ideal by creating a whistleblowing provision by statutory standards.
Subsequent amendments to the Act led to the Whistleblower Protection Act of 1989.
Under the Whistleblower Protection Act (amended in 1994), federal employees are protected from workplace retaliation when disclosing waste and fraud.
SOME FACTS ABOUT WHISTLEBLOWING LAWS (cont)
In the UK, the first time that essential protection for whistleblowers was put on a statutory footing
Main themes:
COVID-19 responses viewed as governmental crimes.
Focus on governmental crime.
Reference: Catello, R. (2022). Exposing neoliberal state crimes in COVID-19 governance.
Abstract
Developments:
Critique of neoliberalism.
Revitalization of state crime vocabulary.
Pandemic exposed neoliberalism's issues.
State crime vocabulary helps understand the crisis.
State crime literature complements critiques of neoliberalism in COVID-19 governance.
Keywords: austerity, COVID-19, neoliberalism, public health, state crime, structural violence
COVID, STATE CRIME, AND NEOLIBERALISM
Aim: Investigate the relationship between:
Public health crises.
Failed neoliberal governance.
State crime.
Approach: Merge critiques and vocabularies from healthcare crises and state crime scholarship.
Main Argument: Neoliberalism exacerbated the public health crisis, constituting state crime by the Capitalist State.
ON NEOLIBERALISM
Macro-economic doctrine, e.g., Thatcherism, Reaganism.
Mottos:
“There is no such thing as society, only individuals”.
“Government is the problem, not the solution”.
Emphasizes individual responsibility and market-based solutions.
ON NEOLIBERALISM (cont)
Minimalist state replaces the welfare state.
Policies: liberalization, financialization, deregulation, privatization.
Health as individual responsibility, not a public right.
Neoliberalism has obstructed state health provision, undermining public health during COVID-19.
THE POLITICS OF UNCARING
Neoliberalism is incapable of handling public health crises:
Eviscerating public services.
Privatizing healthcare.
Promoting individual responsibility.
Disdain for public sector workers, delaying lockdown measures, personal choice, not attending to the needs of vulnerable groups, etc.
LEVELS OF ANALYSIS
Political economy and macro-sociology
Critical epidemiology
Comparative analysis
Public policy
COVID AS NEOLIBERAL SYMPTOM
COVID-19 is a symptom of a pathological political system.
Crisis from decades of exploitation due to neoliberal globalization:
Multiple global public health crises in 40 years.
Pandemic as a crisis of neoliberalism, resulting in health and economic issues and global inequalities.
‘COVID AS SYMPTOM’ IN ENGLAND
Neoliberalism is largely responsible for:
Turning England into the sick man, woman, and child of Europe even before the pandemic.
Making the country unprepared for infectious disease outbreaks by demolishing the country’s public health system and running down the country’s public health defenses.
Providing ideological legitimacy to the austerity policies that, since 2008, have led to widely documented detrimental effects on health and well-being (i.e., life expectancy).
Delaying the first lockdown, leading to thousands of preventable deaths (128,000 excess deaths in England between March 2020 and December 2021), and then offering refuge in appeals to “free-market common-sense” as a way of deflecting attention from mass harm.
Privatizing the NHS, negatively impacting the working lives of health and care workers and causing the PPE fiasco.
Depleting state capacities in the name of the ‘superior efficiency’ of the market and creating multiple “depletion zones”, with the long-term care sector and its residential and nursing homes being impacted the most.
Leaving the most vulnerable groups behind.
NEOLIBERALISING PANDEMIC RESPONSES
Neoliberal policies worsen pandemic outcomes.
Government intervention can reduce inequalities:
Countries with deregulation are more vulnerable.
Strong public health systems better handle COVID-19.
De-neoliberalizing helps (New Zealand).
England's COVID figures were among the worst in Europe.
AUSTERITY: COVID’S LITTLE HELPER
Austerity is a primary cause behind England’s disastrous COVID-19 figures:
Created high levels of poverty à entire segments of the population suffering from ill-health
Harmed public health by prioritizing repaying the debt over taking care of people’s needs.
Led to the country entering the pandemic with depleted public services and a weakened population à increased the lethality of the pandemic.
Herd immunity worsened the situation.
NEOLIBERALISM AS STRUCTURAL VIOLENCE
Neoliberal state's failure to care for people is structural violence:
Hurts the poor and vulnerable.
Elitist ideology.
Abandons those outside neoliberal norms.
Austerity as state criminality.
THE STRUCTURAL VIOLENCE OF THE PANDEMIC (cont)
Structural violence à state violence à state criminality.
Austerity is official state policy:
Institutionalized violence.
Mass harm.
Victims are political enemies.
Austerity = government under-reach = criminal policy, leading to mass harm.
ENGLAND’S PANDEMIC RESPONSE
Herd immunity and delayed lockdowns:
Neoliberalism 101.
Experiment in epidemiological neoliberalism.
Biological warfare against vulnerable groups.
Organizational deviance.
Governance without government.
Johnson embodies neoliberal ethos, limiting state role.
POLICY FAILURES OR CRIMES?
Austerity and herd immunity are deliberate neglect and abdication of duty.
Potential classifications:
Gov under-reach, social murder, social death, democide, politicide, genocide, crime against humanity, necropolitics.
Crime in the name of the neoliberal state.
SOCIAL MURDER AND DEATH
Social Murder (SM): Structural violence causing avoidable deaths by ignoring social determinants.
Social Death (SD): Policies isolate groups, making them ‘dead to society’.
DEMOCIDE
Mass killings by governments.
COVID-19 fatalities may classify as deaths by government due to reckless indifference.
Herd immunity plans = democidal and pathological willingness to sacrifice human life for the sake of the economy.
POLITICIDE AND NECROPOLITICS
Politicide: Policies leading to deaths of a group based on hierarchy or opposition.
Intersection of disaster capitalism and neoliberalism leads to necropolitics and necrocapitalism.