If you haven’t had an opportunity to do so, I urge you to read John Perkins’ book entitled “Confessions of an Economic Hitman”.“Economic Hit Men are highly paid professionals who cheat countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars. They funnel World Bank, US government, and other foreign ‘aid’ funds into the coffers of international businesses and the pockets of a few wealthy families who control the planet’s natural resources. Their tools include fraudulent financial reports, rigged elections, payoffs, extortion, and murder. They play a game as old as Empire but one that has taken on new and terrifying dimensions during this time of globalization. ‘I should know; I was one’, Perkins writes.While telling his tale of the years that he spent working for a U.S. based, international consulting firm, Perkins sheds light on the absolute power of large U.S. corporations such as Halliburton and Bechtel.While the tales told in CEH may lead one to believe that nothing can be done to reign in the powerful elite, times have changed and an optimist would say that through education and mobilization, citizens can and will put an end to the abuses laid bare in the book.Having represented whistleblowers in a various contexts involving several different industries including government/military contractors, pharmaceutical companies, and international telecommunications, it is clear that taxpayers’ utilization of the whistleblower provisions of the False Claims Act, IRS Whistleblower Program and the new SEC Whistleblower Program can help to shed light on large-scale abusive practices that lead to the siphoning off of scare public funds.For example, as detailed in CEH, Perkins describes at length how over the course of the last 50 years numerous multinational corporations have abused the public trust by conspiring to use U.S. tax dollars in efforts to expand their reach while causing less affluent nations to become dependent on powers that control these same companies.In the process, a small group of elite Americans reap the substantial financial rewards through a wide web of false pretenses and other forms of deceit. As I was reading the book, I was reminded that whistleblowers are not only courageous, but critical to uncovering truly bad behavior that causes our country to be weaker and less safe over time.Of course, for this to be true our government must be willing to investigate and prosecute these cases without political interference.Unfortunately, that is not an easy task.We can only hope that the announcement of more and more substantial whistleblower settlements against large corporate defendants will serve to lessen the political barriers over time.
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Young Law Group is a nationwide leader in whistleblower representation and has successfully represented numerous clients in some of the nation’s largest qui tam cases for over a decade. For a free confidential consultation, please call Eric L. Young, Esquire at (800) 590-4116 or complete our online form.