Crisis Of Conscience Whistleblowing In An Age Of Fraud – Tom Mueller

Plutonium hasn’t been produced at Hanford since 1987, and attention there has shifted from building nuclear weapons to cleaning up after them. Yet the atmosphere of secrecy and government-corporate control remains. Today it serves mainly to keep Hanford’s abuses—the vast environmental damage and risk of nuclear disaster, the widespread and ongoing harm to Hanford workers, the decades of staggering mismanagement and repeated, colossal thefts of taxpayer dollars—from coming to light.

Hanford is a textbook case in how corporate short-termism and profit motive, regulatory capture and fraud as a business model can be concealed from the general public, for decades, behind the gleaming but by now irrelevant shield of national security. “There’s still this attitude from the Cold War, among Hanford insiders, that we are the only people qualified to know about this stuff,” Tom Carpenter says, “and that the public shouldn’t be told—in fact that it would panic if it knew.

Well, frankly, I think people should be panicking, and it’s urgent that they know what’s happening here.” He looks out across the river at the tan landscape with its luminous gray monuments. “It’s crazy. The corporations get more and more brazen, the DOE gets more and more complacent. About $45 billion has been spent out here on cleanup, plus or minus a billion, and another $110 billion needs to be spent —though at this rate, the total is probably two or three times that, really.

The place has become an ATM in the desert, just a giant teller in the desert for corporations. When does the account run dry?” Historically, nuclear energy has been a hotbed for whistleblowing, because it exhibits many of the key whistleblowing triggers: the same cult of secrecy and security that exists in its close cousin, nuclear weapons; an enormous potential for public harm; and plentiful public funds at high risk of fraud and abuse. Some of America’s first nationally known whistleblowers worked in nuclear power.

In 1974, Karen Silkwood revealed widespread wrongdoing at the Kerr-McGee (later Cimarron) nuclear fuel plant in Oklahoma, and later died in a mysterious car accident that some observers believed was murder. In 1976, the so-called GE Three, a trio of experienced nuclear engineers at General Electric, resigned from the company in protest and denounced, to Congress and the press, how nuclear power, like nuclear weapons, represented, as one of them put it, “a serious danger to the future of all life on this planet.”

(The men served as expert consultants for the popular 1979 film The China Syndrome, which presaged with uncanny accuracy the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island that took place twelve days after the film was released.)

Copyright © 2019 by Tom Mueller Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission.

You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Mueller, Tom, 1963– author. Title: Crisis of conscience : whistleblowing in an age of fraud / Tom Mueller. Description: New York : Riverhead Books, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019016249 (print) | LCCN 2019980032 (ebook) | ISBN 9781594634437 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780698405103 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Fraud—United States. | Whistle blowing—United States. | Corporations—Corrupt practices—United States. | Administrative agencies—Corrupt practices—United States. | Political corruption—United States. | Corruption investigation—United States. Classification: LCC HV6695 .M84 2019 (print) | LCC HV6695 (ebook) | DDC 364.16/30973—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019016249 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019980032 Cover design: Oliver Munday Cover image: Bianca Grueneberg / iStock / Getty Images Plus Version_1 OceanofPDF.com Contents ALSO BY TOM MUELLER TITLE PAGE COPYRIGHT EPIGRAPH CHAPTER 1 Becoming a Whistleblower CHAPTER 2 Question Authority CHAPTER 3 The Money Dance CHAPTER 4 Blood Ivory Towers CHAPTER 5 Reaping the Nuclear Harvest CHAPTER 6 Money Makes the World Go Round CHAPTER 7 Ministries of Truth EPILOGUE The Banana Republic Wasn’t Built in a Day NOTES INDEX ABOUT THE AUTHOR OceanofPDF.com “A time comes when silence is betrayal.”

Martin Luther King Jr., “Beyond Vietnam,” a speech delivered at Riverside Church, New York City, April 4, 1967 OceanofPDF.com S CHAPTER 1 Becoming a Whistleblower Resolved, that it is the duty of all persons in the service of the United States . . . to give the earliest information to Congress or other proper authority of any misconduct, frauds or misdemeanors committed by any officers or persons in the service of these states, which may come to their knowledge.

Legislation of July 30, 1778, reprinted in Journals of the Continental Congress, 1774–1789 ome of the worst crimes, and the most wrenching tests of character, happen by slow degrees, steady as sunrise. This is the story of how Allen Jones, an investigator at the state Office of the Inspector General in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, moved in gradual, irrevocable steps to a crossroads in his life, and one day made a fateful choice. On July 23, 2002, Jones learned that a check for $2,000 had recently been deposited into an unnamed bank account used by Steven J.

Fiorello, the state’s chief pharmacist.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

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