Women! They do have this whistle-blowing hang-up about anarchic incompetence and homicidal

[Joe Chi Minh]

recklessness, don't they? tee hee

They're like terriers. Like a dog with a bone. Like the widow in the parable of the Unjust Judge.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/oct/27/glaxosmithkline-whistleblower-wins-61m

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

1. I fail to grasp how the presence of a Y chromosome inhibits whistleblower tendencies in a person.

:shrug:

[SharonAnn]

2. Me neither, but most of the whistleblowers (nearly all) have been women.

Remember the Time magazine cover a couple of years ago with:
Female FBI agent in Minnesota
Sherron ? from Enron
And a third whom I can't remember?

Whistleblowers all.

[Joe Chi Minh]

3. Precisely. Nothing more. Nothing less. I can''t remember the particulars,

but the list seems to get bigger and bigger. I think the last time I read of a male whistle-blower was a Swiss guy, who was imprisoned for doing so, to the obvious detriment of another pharmaceutical company, I believe.

Here is an extract from a fascinating article by Michael Lewis, published in portfolio.com and elsewhere, I believe, in which he relates how another female whistle-blower made a significant impact:

"At some point, I gave up waiting for the end. There was no scandal or reversal, I assumed, that could sink the system.

Then came Meredith Whitney with news. Whitney was an obscure analyst of financial firms for Oppenheimer Securities who, on October 31, 2007, ceased to be obscure. On that day, she predicted that Citigroup had so mismanaged its affairs that it would need to slash its dividend or go bust. It’s never entirely clear on any given day what causes what in the stock market, but it was pretty obvious that on October 31, Meredith Whitney caused the market in financial stocks to crash. By the end of the trading day, a woman whom basically no one had ever heard of had shaved $369 billion off the value of financial firms in the market. Four days later, Citigroup’s C.E.O., Chuck Prince, resigned. In January, Citigroup slashed its dividend.

From that moment, Whitney became E.F. Hutton: When she spoke, people listened. Her message was clear. If you want to know what these Wall Street firms are really worth, take a hard look at the crappy assets they bought with huge sums of ­borrowed money, and imagine what they’d fetch in a fire sale. The vast assemblages of highly paid people inside the firms were essentially worth nothing. For better than a year now, Whitney has responded to the claims by bankers and brokers that they had put their problems behind them with this write-down or that capital raise with a claim of her own: You’re wrong. You’re still not facing up to how badly you have mismanaged your business."


Read more: http://www.portfolio.com/news-markets/national-news/portfolio/2008/11/11/The-End-of-Wall-Streets-Boom/index1.html#ixzz13hEwWb1a

[Joe Chi Minh]

4. I wonder if maybe one significant reason is that women tend to go by the rules

in their career, right from the start. They know they have to do so, in order to advance their career, even while the World tends to be run by louts. That was something they accommodated themselves to at an early age, simply another aspect of the world not seeming that fair to women.

So, to a considerable extent, they factored in the loutishness and stupidity; but nothing in their upbringing prepared them for the corporate and governmental criminals who exceed the normal institutionalised criminality of the World, in an increasingly degenerate and out-of-control society. So, they do what a woman has to do, it seems. Well, they probably just get so exasperated, they have to say, "Enough's enough. I've had it with you lot!"

[some guy]

5. these

L-R: Cynthia Cooper, WorldCom; Coleen Rowley, the FBI; and Sherron Watkins, Enron