Year: 2013

A reader writes:

Rewards to whistleblowers who report fraud against the government?  That’s what I do; I’m an attorney specializing in representing whistleblowers under the federal False Claims Act.  The FCA allows private citizens to bring a lawsuit on behalf of the federal government against those who commit fraud against government programs – Medicare fraud, defense program fraud, and many more.  The Act makes defendants liable for triple the actual damages and – critically – provides that the whistleblowers who bring successful cases can be awarded 15-30% of the amount recovered.

According to the organization Taxpayers Against Fraud, since 1987, False Claims Act lawsuits have resulted in recovery of over $40 billion from fraudfeasors.  The False Claims Act is a critical piece of combating waste, fraud and abuse in government contracting and grants, and has generally enjoyed bipartisan support in Congress.  Many states have their own false claims acts, modeled after the federal act.

The federal government has more recently enacted other whistleblower reward programs (tax fraud and securities law, for example).

Unfortunately, the procedures for these programs, including provisions for the protection, involvement, and payment of whistleblowers, are not as strong, and they have not (yet) been as effective as the FCA.  There are many reasons these newer laws depart from the proven model of the FCA, but much of it has to do with successful lobbying by large corporate defendants, who work to demonize whistleblowers they label as “opportunistic,” and the lawyers who represent them. Never mind that the FCA has strong provisions to bar claims brought by me-too whistleblowers who don’t bring anything new to the table, once the boogeyman of “Plaintiffs’ Lawyers” has been identified, some lawmakers are scared off.

I should add, government employees are generally barred from acting as whistleblowers and receiving rewards under the FCA with respect to fraud they discover in the course of performing their official duties.  Why?  Because we’re already paying them to discover and stop fraud.

The FCA does not, however, help the Snowdens of the world, because he is not reporting monetary losses.  However, the FCA clearly teaches that financial incentives matter.  As Taxpayers Against Fraud puts it:

Incentivized whistleblower laws work because whistleblowers bring hidden information to the government’s attention and their lawyers act as ‘force multipliers’ when cases are investigated and prosecuted.  Because successful whistleblowers [under the FCA] are awarded 10 to 30 percent of the sum recovered, whistleblowers and their lawyers are incentivized to investigate frauds in a timely manner, to find as much fraud as possible, and to present evidence of fraud to the government in way in which it can be easily understood and prosecuted.

In a long essay on the ethics of eating animals, Namit Arora explains the intellectual and cultural backdrop to the West’s comparative indifference and even cruelty to the creatures we raise for food:

What might have arrested this decline in the fortunes of farm animals are big cultural ideas, both religious and secular, that for whatever reasons opposed killing animals. But those did not arise in the West as they did, for example, in India. Depending on whom you ask, Western monotheistic religions, while seeing humankind as God’s special creation, ranged in attitude from passive disaffection to active malice towards animals. Christian doctrine has practically no injunctions against treating animals as a means to human ends, so no sin is committed when mistreating or killing animals. Rather, animals were declared vastly inferior, incapable of possessing souls, and created for the use of humans, who stood right below the angels. And so Western monotheisms have long seen animals as dispensable for human interests, desires, and whims. (This is also true for the “Confucian zone” of East Asia.)

In the modern age, even secular humanism, with its nearly exclusive focus on humans, has shown little regard for the treatment of animals.

“In the West,” writes Mary Midgley in Animals and Why They Matter (1998), “both the religious and the secular moral traditions have, till lately, scarcely attended to any non-human species.” With notable exceptions like Jacques Rousseau, Jeremy Bentham, Arthur Schopenhauer, and contemporary animal welfare organizations like the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA), the dominant strands of Western culture have remained heavily invested in denying moral consideration to animals. Rather conveniently, animals are presumed to lack feelings, thoughts, emotions, memory, reason, intelligence, sense of time, language, consciousness, or autonomy. Until the 1980s scientists entertained the idea that animals do not feel pain. Such self-serving presumptions, enabled by our estrangement from farm animals, certainly made our consciences rest easier. This helps explain why the animal rights movement focuses so hard on demonstrating many of these capacities in animals (sometimes overstating their case). So tenacious can our habits of life and mind be that even today, despite everything we know and the genuine alternatives we have for a nutritious diet, less than 1 percent of U.S. adults have turned away from factory-farmed meat for ethical reasons.

William Brennan asserts that Skyler White “is the best character on Breaking Bad“:

Yes, Jesse’s as smart and loveable as a newborn baby dolphin, and Mike seemed at times a vision of what an older, more sympathetic Walt might have been had things gone differently—we sensed his sense of rules and limitations, however deformed it was. But Skyler is the best character on the show because she’s the one who reminds us that it’s necessary to loathe Walt. She is our moral grounding. “People are griping about Skyler White being too much of a killjoy to her meth-cooking, murdering husband?” Vince Gilligan, the show’s creator, said in an interview this March with Vulture. “She’s telling him not to be a murderer and a guy who cooks drugs for kids. How could you have a problem with that?”

Laura Bennett also focuses on Skyler:

The question of likeability for fictional protagonists has always seemed beside the point. The issue, when it comes to assessing fiction, is not whether we like this person but whether we can identify some psychic strain of ourselves refracted through them, however ugly and small.

That’s what makes Tony [Soprano] and Don [Draper], even in their awful selfishness, even as show creators dared viewers to empathize with them, such good protagonists. Walt no longer offers us such complex psychological grist. He is less tortured evildoer than mythic bad guy, his ambition amplified and motives blurred beyond recognition. Instead of a jumble of lethal insecurities and urges he is all monstrous, abstract greed. Hank is a straightforward hero, easy to root for. Jesse is the adorable underdog, running frantically on the hamster wheel of his conscience. But Skyler—brash, self-righteous, unsure of what it means to do the right thing—is a messier case. And even at her least likeable, she is key to what makes this show overall so compelling: its moral prickliness, the way its view of good and evil can seem at once so twisted and so stark.

Enten argues that Obama’s falling polling numbers can’t be blamed on racism:

The greatest fall for Obama isn’t among whites in the south; it’s in the northeast – you know that region that was on the correct side of the Civil War. Obama went from winning northern whites by 10pt in the election to a -12 net approval now. The next greatest drop is in the west where Obama fought to a near-tie in the election, but now has a net approval of nearly -20 among white voters. Close is his 14pt drop in the midwest where Obama’s net approval is now a measly -23pt.

The one place where Obama’s support among whites hasn’t fallen sharply is in the south. Obama’s net approval there is only a statistically insignificant 3pt lower than it was before the election. In other words, it’s likely he completely bottomed out in that region. Lack of white support for Obama hasn’t bottomed out in other regions.

Nate Cohn believes that, unless Democrats win more white Texans, the Lone Star State won’t be turning blue any time soon:

[I]n a state where half of whites are evangelicals, there’s only so much room for Democrats to improve—at least if they keep nominating progressives.

The point isn’t that Democrats can’t do better among Texas whites. Maybe the next wave of young Texans will get more Democratic. Maybe the next wave of migrants will be more Democratic. Maybe Democrats will nominate a relatively conservative southerner. It’s all possible. The point is that they must if they intend to win any time soon. The growing Hispanic share of the population won’t be enough. And so far, there aren’t any signs of Democrats making big inroads among Texas whites. It might come some day, but it hasn’t; and there are plenty of reasons to question whether it will.