You are a dedicated civil servant and you have loyally performed your job for years, but suddenly you are confronted with tasks and policies that horrify you. Should you carry on, or should you quit?
This unusual question is presenting itself with urgent regularity as President Trump tries to overturn a wide array of sensible policies in his drive to implement a far-right agenda, including a chaotic travel ban aimed at Muslim immigrants. Yet it’s a familiar question to a particular species of government official: those who have resigned to protest deplorable initiatives they disagreed with. The last time it happened on a significant scale was in the early 1990s, and George Kenney was at the epicenter.
Kenney joined the State Department in 1988, and after serving overseas, he took a post in Washington as the deputy chief of Yugoslav affairs. He managed day-to-day policy on the region and pored over intelligence reports as well as news articles. He disagreed with the U.S. policy of standing aside as Serbian fighters seized large parts of Bosnia in a conflict that involved ethnic cleansing and siege warfare. As the author of the first drafts of State Department position papers, Kenney saw his strong language watered down by layers of higher officials who sought to minimize the justification for U.S. intervention. Six months after the war began in 1992, he quit.
“I can no longer in clear conscience support the administration’s ineffective, indeed, counterproductive handling of the Yugoslav crisis,” he wrote in his letter of resignation, which was front-page news.
Four State Department officials quit over Bosnia policy in the early 1990s, and their actions are newly relevant as the Trump era gets underway. “All over the nation’s capital, panicked job searches are underway,” noted a Washington Post story about bureaucrats looking for escape hatches in advance of what they fear will be a reversal of key policies on law enforcement, reproductive rights, and national security. The Environmental Protection Agency is on a virtual lockdown, with a freeze in its grant programs and a gag order on any of its employees talking with outsiders about what’s going on. A temporary ban has been instituted that prohibits a broad swath of refugees and green card holders from entering the United States. And there’s even a war over things that in ordinary times would be innocuous, such as social media postings by national parks.
What should a frustrated civil servant do? In recent weeks, The Intercept interviewed Kenney and the other officials who quit over Bosnia, and to a surprising degree, they generally agreed that dissenting officials should stay in their jobs as long as possible in the Trump administration, working inside the always-powerful machinery of bureaucracy to keep destructive policies from being implemented.
“My advice would be to throw sand in the gears,” said Kenney, who was the first State Department official to resign over Bosnia. “You’re not going to do anybody any good by leaving. Nobody is going to listen to you. If you work in the EPA and think the Trump people are the devil, you and every mid-level person who can, mount an internal resistance. There should be opportunities for people who are smart to act in a classic bureaucratic passive-aggressive manner and just be obstructionist. It’s a situation that lends itself to creative opposition from within.”
Kenney’s advice tracks the parting words of at least one of the Obama-era political appointees who had to step down in recent weeks — Vanita Gupta, head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, which is expected to follow a discernably different agenda in the Trump era. “My ask of you today is that I need you to keep pushing,” Gupta told her career staff on her last day at work. “Even when it’s hard, I need every single one of you to keep pushing, because there are too many people in this country who are depending on us.”
Kenney’s public resignation shocked Washington, as did the ones that followed. Marshall Harris was next, then Jon Western, then Stephen Walker — all of them 30-something diplomats who publicly turned their backs on secure lives working for the U.S. government. The unique “Saturday Night Massacre” in 1973 notwithstanding — when Attorney General Elliot Richardson resigned and his deputy, William Ruckelshaus, was dismissed after President Richard Nixon demanded they fire Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox — the last wave of resignations-in-principle was among officials who opposed the invasion of Cambodia during the Vietnam War. But those resignations, in 1970, were quiet and unnoticed. When Anthony Lake and three other mid-level aides quit the staff of National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, they did not publicize their reasons.
“We never should have heard of them,” noted a 1993 story in the Washington Post about the Bosnia dissenters. “They were mid-level bureaucrats, dots in the State Department matrix. But they’ve gone and done something extraordinary in Washington: They quit their jobs on moral grounds.”
Kenney said his views were shaped by a seminal text he read as a graduate student at the University of Chicago. Written by economist Albert Hirschman, the book was called “Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations and States,” and it examined the choices that confronted dissatisfied consumers and officials. “Exit” was a euphemism for going elsewhere, “Voice” meant speaking up from the inside, and “Loyalty” meant staying silent. Hirschman, whose work is regarded as path-breaking, explained in a later essay that his original analysis of the efficacy of voice had been “too timid.” He noted the candidacies of George McGovern and Barry Goldwater — outsiders within their respective parties who rather than quitting or staying silent kept fighting and eventually won their parties’ presidential nominations.
“My point,” Hirschman wrote, “was of course that power grows not only out of the ability to exit, but also out of voice, and that voice will be wielded with special energy and dedication by those who have nowhere to exit to.”
Hirschman, who died in 2012, was speaking directly to the dilemma of federal workers who at this moment might feel a bit like Hamlet — “to resign or not to resign?” For Hirschman, doubt was not paralyzing but liberating, leading to action of some sort — he described it as proving Hamlet wrong. Hirschman’s own life was an example. Before becoming an academic, he fought in the Spanish civil war against Franco, with the French in their (very short) battle against invading Germans at the start of World War II, and he stayed in France during the German occupation and perilously helped several thousand refugees escape, including Hannah Arendt and Marc Chagall.
But how much can an oppositional bureaucrat accomplish in the Trump era? One of the State Department officials who resigned in 1993, Jon Western, noted that particularly in the first months of a new administration, bureaucrats possess an unusual amount of influence because many appointees who are supposed to call the policy shots have not started their jobs. Political appointees are not just the brand names who lead the various agencies and departments of government. In every one of them, there are as many as five layers of political appointees, and it can be months or more before they are in place. Many of them have to be confirmed by Congress and obtain security clearances, some haven’t lived in Washington D.C. and must arrange to move there, while others are so new to their jobs that they don’t yet know enough to question the civil servants under them.
Western, now a professor of international relations and dean of faculty at Mount Holyoke College, recalled that when Bill Clinton took office in early 1993, an immediate policy review was ordered for Bosnia. Clinton became president after four years of George H.W. Bush and eight years of Ronald Reagan, so the exodus of political appointees was particularly deep — few Republicans wanted to stay on to help the other side, and the other side didn’t want them to stay. “None of the third, fourth or fifth layer people were in place,” Western recalled. The review was largely carried out by career civil servants who had helped design and execute the do-nothing policy that was under review. The White House “was left with a report that said there’s not a whole lot you can do,” Western recalled. “The bureaucracy can really slow things down. At the end of the day, policy has to be implemented by people on the ground, and for people on the ground to get their instructions, it has to go through a pretty cumbersome process.”
The number of federal career employees is 2.1 million, which is separate from the 3.7 million people who work as federal contractors. The growth of the government workforce since World War II has inevitably spawned a cascade of academic studies of bureaucratic politics, with a foundational text written by a Harvard professor, Graham Allison, whose 1971 book on the Cuban missile crisis examined three models for understanding how and why the crisis unfolded the way it did. Allison drew attention to what at the time was a relatively new model for making sense of how a state acts: the behind-the-scenes struggles of bureaucrats and bureaucracies. Allison compared it to a chess match in which the moves of one side are determined not by a single player (the president) or by a predictable strategy that is planned in advance, but by several bureaucratic players with distinct interests and strategies who battle each other over each move.
Even in the age of Twitter and stream-of-consciousness edicts from the commander-in-chief, “It’s not as though the president picks up the phone and says ‘This has to be done,’ and immediately things will be done,” Western said.
On January 24, 1993, the New York Times published a story based on a leaked intelligence assessment that Serbian forces operated 135 prison camps, months after they had promised to shut down all of their camps. Western, who was an intelligence analyst at the State Department at the time, was surprised to read about it in the Times because he had written the classified assessment just a day earlier. Someone else had slipped it to the Times — “I wouldn’t have felt comfortable” disclosing it, Western said — but he was glad it had been done.
Leaking to journalists is another way that civil servants can perform their jobs in the public interest, Western and the other Bosnia dissenters agreed. With Congress and the White House controlled by a political party that prefers “alternative facts,” the truth of what the government knows is less likely to see the light of day unless it is leaked. Even Western, who describes himself as “not a big fan” of the massive leaks of Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning, notes that without leaks the American public wouldn’t know about the Pentagon Papers and other truths the government did not want to share with the American public. “Leaking is part of the process of making sure information gets out,” he said.
During the run-up to the Iraq war, when senior officials in the George W. Bush administration falsely claimed that intelligence assessments confirmed Saddam Hussein’s regime was building weapons of mass destruction, the messier truth made its way into the public realm only because mid-level officials talked to journalists about the absence of hard evidence to back up the administration’s erroneous claims. By staying on the inside, midlevel bureaucrats can function as the fact-checkers of senior-level spin.
Stephen Walker, who was the fourth and final State Department official to resign over Bosnia, recalled in an interview that after Secretary of State Warren Christopher refused to say in 1993 that Serbian forces were systemically killing Muslims in Bosnia, somebody leaked a classified State Department memo that said the exact opposite. This was an example, Walker said, of a leak being the best and perhaps only way to present evidence that a senior official was lying about what the government knew. “While I never would have leaked myself, I’m glad people did it,” said Walker. “I’m glad that the things that got leaked at that time got leaked, because they were important documents that needed to be in the public domain and didn’t involve sources and methods.”
Of course a key difference between then and now is that unauthorized leaks are investigated far more aggressively than before, and the consequences of being caught are more severe. The Obama administration prosecuted more leakers and whistleblowers under the Espionage Act than all previous administrations combined, and the Trump administration, with its ingrained hostility toward the major media, is expected to continue the crackdown, if not intensify it.
When Marshall Harris began working at the State Department in 1985, he had to attend a six-week orientation course known as A-100, the department’s version of basic training. There were about 60 youthful diplomats in the course, and each day they received instruction in everything they would need to know as they started their careers — such as security protocols, how to write cables, the structure of the department, the do’s and don’ts of public speaking and negotiating.
One day, a lecturer told a story about a diplomat who disagreed with U.S. policy and resigned on principle. The punch line was that the righteous diplomat couldn’t find a job on the outside — his skills were so impractical that he ended up pumping gas in northern Virginia. The story might sound a bit apocryphal but the point it conveyed to Harris and his young colleagues-in-diplomacy was clear — if you resign, you will forever lose the prestige and security you enjoyed as a Foreign Service Officer. Don’t do it.
Just a few years later, Harris ignored that advice. He was a Bosnia specialist in the State Department and disagreed with the U.S. policy of looking the other way as genocide occurred. In 1993, after failing to change the policy, Harris decided to resign. “I can no longer serve in a Department of State that accepts the forceful dismemberment of a European state and that will not act against genocide and the Serbian officials who perpetrate it,” he wrote in his resignation letter, which quickly got into the hands of reporters.
For him and the three other Bosnia dissenters, resignation was a last resort that for each of them turned out to attract far more attention than they expected. Kenney, the first to quit, became an influential voice at the outset of the Bosnian conflict (though his views changed after a few years and he eventually expressed doubts about the scale of killings in Bosnia). Harris, after leaving the State Department, worked for a congressman, the late Frank McCloskey, who was a leading figure on Bosnia, and then he helped form a pro-Bosnia advocacy group with Walker. Western took a slightly different path, speaking out less than the others and going into the academic world (Walker is now a high school teacher, while Western is a professor).
The Bosnia dissenters, while not regretting their choices, recognize that the media landscape has shifted since their resignations catapulted them to durable perches in the public eye. When they resigned, the web was just a few years old, not much of a platform for public debate. The velocity of today’s news cycle is radically quicker. Harris recalled that when he resigned, “everyone wanted to talk to me,” so he did frequent television interviews that were serious and respectful. When I spoke with Harris on the phone earlier this month, he mentioned that on the previous night he had watched CNN’s Anderson Cooper show and the panel discussion included eight participants who competed for precious airtime for their seconds-long sound bites.
“Back in my day, you had a one-on-one interview,” Harris said. “But in a heartbeat today, you can get 50 people on a panel.”
The warning Harris received as a diplomat-in-training remains painfully relevant. Although some things have changed in a good way — Harris notes there are now more career opportunities outside government for people who resign — in general, leakers and whistleblowers tend to be shunned and punished by the institutions they leak against, even if the public welcomes their disclosures. While there is little hard data, a 1975 study looked at the resignations of high-level officials between 1900 and 1970. Only 34 of those resignations involved a public protest of some sort, and only one of the officials who resigned in public eventually returned to an equivalent or higher post in government.
“If you want somebody to stand up and say no and be noticed, you can’t have somebody like me, who was midlevel,” Kenny said. “You have to have someone quite senior to throw themselves on the barbed wire. But I’m not sure anyone who is in a position to be listened to would want to do it.”
For information on contacting The Intercept anonymously via SecureDrop, instructions are here: https://theintercept.com/leak/
Correction: January 29, 2017
This story has been updated to reflect that Stephen Walker formed a Bosnia advocacy group with Marshall Harris.
Illustration: Vivienne Flesher for The Intercept
Didn’t we have a group of government officials resign in the Bush Administration over the rush to war in Iraq? (John Brady Kiesling was the most prominent of them.)
The employment of bureaucratic methods to impede implementation of policies is practically ubiquitous in the governments of all large nations. All workers need to do is to act with all deliberate speed, within their chain of command. Our civil servants might well recall the words of Harry Truman: “I say, ‘Do this!’ ‘Do that!’ And nothing happens.”
The letter R: Resist! By any means necessary.
On the other hand, Peter … “I have heard, That guilty creatures sitting at a play
Have by the very cunning of the scene Been struck so to the soul that presently They have proclaimed their malefactions …” *nobody out-Hamlets me.
Border agents defy courts on Trump travel ban, congressmen and lawyers say
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jan/29/customs-border-protection-agents-trump-muslim-country-travel-ban
“We have a constitutional crisis today,”
We have had a Constitutional crisis for DECADES. Bush and Obama just “smother” than Trump. Hillary also would have been smooth in her sedition. We now have a real Constitutional conversation about immigration, thanks to President Trump. May or may not be part of his plan/deal but it has been effective and the blowback might precipitate some reasonable immigration legislation? Now if we can do this on war, surveillance and other Constitutional issues Trump could be a great president incidental or planned, who cares. Protesters stay with it and defenders stay with it we are talking seriously for a change about our Constitution. I am all in on that!
…appreciate the beautiful and powerful graphics and your highly informative, seminal, article. quibling comments aside ( RR :} )
thank you
P
Agree, and thanks, the illustrations by Vivienne Flesher are outstanding.
The sentence in this article about political appointees in “the various agencies and departments of government” perhaps could have been written more clearly. You write “In every one of them, there are as many as five layers of political appointees”. But many agencies have far fewer than five layers of political appointees, like the Federal Service System, the Selective Service System, or the National Archives and Records Administration (check the Plum Book). So saying that “every” agency has as many as five layers gives a misleading impression, and at best requires some strained parsing.
that should be the Federal Reserve System, not the Federal Service System — sorry for my error.
I see what you’re saying, if I was writing it now I’d choose slightly different words, but I think it’s correct, though could be more precise.
@WakeUpAmerica and @barabbas – The Intercept’s paragraph, “… During the run-up to the Iraq war, when senior officials in the George W. Bush administration falsely claimed…” omitted the fact that the insiders that leaked information to the journalists, were actually prescribed leaks in retribution toward Joseph Wilson’s op-ed printed in the NY Times:
“After President George W. Bush stated that ‘Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa’ during the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Wilson published a July 2003 op-ed in The New York Times stating his doubts during the mission that any such transaction with Iraq had taken place. A week after Wilson’s op-ed was published, Novak published a column which mentioned claims from ‘two senior administration officials’ that Plame had been the one to suggest sending her husband. Novak had learned of Plame’s employment, which was classified information, from State Department official Richard Armitage. David Corn and others suggested that Armitage and other officials had leaked the information as political retribution for Wilson’s article. The scandal led to a criminal investigation; no one was charged for the leak itself. Scooter Libby was convicted of lying to investigators. His prison sentence was ultimately commuted by President Bush.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plame_affair
I should clarify that the Intercept’s paragraph is correct as written and referenced, but it was Wilson’s op-ed that first brought scrutiny of the WMD-uranium claims, which escalated with the leaks of classified information, leading to hearings. This was the ground-zero of doubt toward the Bush administration’s claims against Saddam Hussein. Journalists found it easier after this incident to question the administration’s rhetoric.
i didnt get into it but i do also acknowledge your take on the prescribed leaks which then becomes a point of contest – which is i why i actually oppose all this govvie secrecy crap.
One quibble – Hirschman’s “loyalty” did not mean “saying nothing”. It meant that instead of exercising the option of “exit”, one had the option of staying and exercising “voice”. You can remain loyal and yet provide corrective feedback. Here’s to hoping that many of the good employees do so.
“Voice” only works when others are receptive to hearing it, otherwise “Voice” is usually heard as antagonism and criticism against the team. I suspect most individuals resign, because they have exercised their “Voice” and found the experience detrimental to their career.
Perhaps true, but you don’t know for sure until/unless you exercise your voice, and I think the batting average of voice is above 000, so probably worth trying.
“I can no longer in clear conscience support the administration’s ineffective, indeed, counterproductive handling of the Yugoslav crisis”
Waiting for crimes against Humanity to be committed that would vindicate our intervention… Where had we heard that before ? “The handling” wasn’t ineffective; it was calculated.
“The bureaucracy can really slow things down. At the end of the day, policy has to be implemented by people on the ground, and for people on the ground to get their instructions, it has to go through a pretty cumbersome process.”
A call to the Deep State ?
Here’s someone believes your article timely and important, Peter. I don’t know if it sounds entirely logical except to those feeling trapped inside some of those consequences you describe, but you’re right on target. I had a rather self-serving label for that guilty feeling of wanting to do anything else – but unable to deny the con$equence$ of stepping through that door. And I actually tried walking away once, not out of protest though, but surrendered and returned for those easy/lucrative defense wages after just couple years of putting my family in poverty. Voluntarily being poor isn’t always well understood by one’s kids.
Oh yeah, my self-serving label: “golden-handcuffs.”
I’m reminded of Colin Powell presenting the WMD “evidence” to the U.N. I have never believed that he believed, and I kept yelling at the TV “Resign! Resign!” A resignation at that level would have made a difference; could have changed the course of history; would have made Colin Powell a national hero.
At the lower levels of the bureaucracy, by all means “throw sand in the gears” and whistle blow, but I would go a step further–ethical young people who might normally shun jobs under this administration should be entering the bureaucracy in droves. Patience. Patience. Do your job. Climb their hierarchy. Learn their language and their ways. Wear their costumes. Plot your escape. Then, when you’ve got something tectonic, whistle-blow them to smithereens.
Yes, whistle-blow them to smithereens, then spend the rest of your life in prison or exile, labelled as a traitor.
As I said, Plot your escape.
Oona Hathaway from Yale made this point, her article is worth reading. https://www.justsecurity.org/36420/dissenting-trump-administration/
A lot of words, and not much was said in this article. It doesn’t appear from the outside that a president like Trump is engaging with the bureaucracy, instead he’s acting much on his own (with the addition of a few people in his inner circle). Those points of resistance are likely ineffectual simply because they will not be accessed; why consult the career bureaucrats when Trump already knows what he wants to do? Does anyone think he actually consulted mid and low-level bureaucrats when he signed the executive order for the ban?
Of course Trump isn’t going to consult “career bureaucrats”–Jesus! Trump has no fucking idea what he’s going to do from one minute to the next. Did you read the article? You apparently do not understand what huge bureaucracies are, and how they work.
My feeling is that bureaucracy may not be consulted in some or many cases by Trump, but parts of his policies have to be implemented by bureaucracies. And it will be interesting to see in the coming days, weeks, months, years, whether Trump can succeed in declaring policies without real input (or resistance) from bureaucracies.
Very enlightening. Thanks much.
This pretty much says why you should not quit. The every day employees in the US WANT TO BE AND REMAIN HONEST.
Here is another example. Just the other day.
http://thehill.com/news/house/316634-gabbard-allies-rush-to-her-defense-after-assad-meeting The dumb&dumbers at the top who lie to all Americans dont want the truth out. So, they classify everything! But here is a brief classified leak on the state of American govt has mutated into.
source: me. Truth leads you to goodness. But the elected dumb&dumbers are not of that cloth. They dont mind lying even if it bankrupts you, or the country, or gets you killed, or gets your family killed.
Lying never leads you anywhere but disaster and hell. The imbeciles who get elected who lie to the public are of the cloth who belong in prisons for the criminally insane. There is not a federal prosecutor who would take that case nor any member of the dumb&dumbers to pass such a needed law. This is another reason why America is doomed.
I don’t know what to make of what happened in Yugoslavia in that time period. When the “West” declares someone pure evil it’s hard to believe it for various reasons.
Peter, I think it is the duty of officials to resign when presidents go off the deep end. I would have resigned after Obama armed Nazi groups in the Ukraine, or after he armed jihadists in Syria, or maybe earlier, when he transferred trillions to Wall Street, or maybe his expansion of drone wars and terror Tuesdays would have compelled me to resign.
Of course these individuals in the State Department have left because their efforts to start a new cold war with Russia, promote corporate trade deals, and to drum up support for more war in Syria — have failed.
Peter, I am surprised you didn’t mention the The National Humnit Collection Directive by SOS Hillary Clinton, ordering State officials to steal credit card and even DNA information from diplomats:
“Incredibly, beyond the simple collection of secret information about officials including UN chief Ban Ki-moon, the directive also calls for State Department officials to try to steal credit card data from a number of top officials, as well as passwords and personal encryption keys. They also sought to collect DNA samples from UN members.”
http://news.antiwar.com/2010/11/28/hillary-clinton-ordered-diplomats-to-steal-un-officials-credit-card-numbers/
Moral of the story: Liberals don’t care about Malfeasance and corruption in government. If Trump’s SOS had ordered this, the media would be having 24/7 teach-ins and would be demanding the resignation or impeachment of Trump. Pundits would proclaim that the sky is falling. Yet now we have the Intercept in full hypocrisy mode, not even willing to point out that these hero’s (war-criminals) in State have two sets of very loose standards.
A corollary (moral) of this and other stories is that most Americans identifying themselves as politically ‘center’, ‘liberal’, and ‘libertarian’ are actually illiberal and reactionary.
For example: Edward Snowden, a hero to millions of so-called liberals — despite delivering his NSA doc trove to private business interests and profiting by refusing to help more than five pampered surveillance targets — allowed Ayn Rand and adolescent computer games to shape his world view and political convictions.
Despite the unoriginality and popularity of his views, they are reprehensible. They inspired him to join the US military to destroy Iraq and butcher Iraqis for no reason at all, and failing that, join various US Stasi organizations playing the role of data supplier to a vast American Torture and Kill Complex. His views have slightly matured from the experience of shifting from most blunt to a sharper end, but he is quite comfortable, safe, and wealthy, and he still refuses to acknowledge personal responsibility for attacks on US torture subjects during his employment in the Stasi, or pressure the current proprietors of those NSA docs to provide any relief to US torture subjects.
Even Americans held up as paradigms of civil courage are rotten to the core. That’s how low you’ve sunk, Americans.
I agree with you that the actions of America are usually illiberal and reactionary. But why be so down on Snowden? Marx would constantly take relevant information by both left and right sources. I don’t think reading Rand or playing video games disqualifies him. Marx urged his contemporaries to support all workers regardless of their ideology.
Jamie, have you ever been tortured by moronic, deplorable members of the US Stasi? I think I know the answer to that question.
And the Marx reference… was that an attempt at clever insinuation or just clunky red-baiting?
Believing and mouthing internalized libertarian and ‘liberal’ BS does not disqualify them. Words don’t disqualify them; action, inaction, and consequences do disqualify them. And since when did Snowden give a shit about workers?
surely you jest
One man with courage is a majority.
Thomas Jefferson
Whistle-blowers are needed now more than ever, a free republic depends on it !
John Kiriakou, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, Tom Drake, Jeffrey Sterling, and Stephen Kim,
are such men & let us not forget a woman Diane Rourk !
Courage is contagious. When a brave man takes a stand, the spines of others are often stiffened. Billy Graham
https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/b/billygraha113622.html
So where are the white faces of the moral majority in this protest against President Trumps raciest policies !
As we must account for every idle word, so must we account for every idle silence.
Benjamin Franklin
Misaligned ethics is a concern for anyone in the workforce, whether government or private. I resigned from a position in protest of, what I considered to be, improper corporate ethics, but I did so without raising a stink, as I didn’t want a bad reference. In the long-run, I only hurt myself financially, but I was proud of my action and conviction. I’m often bewildered that so many corporations are incredibly self-serving, such as Wells Fargo Bank (or most financial institutions!), yet seem to have minimal problems retaining employees. For most individuals caught-up in a moral and-or ethical dilemma, the golden handcuffs usually wins. Morals and ethics are qualitative at best, as so many Trump supporters have shown, fawning over every foul action Trump implements.
The frequency with which people in a “capitalist” system are faced with moral/ethical dilemmas is a big part of why I will never consider myself a capitalist and actively work against capitalism.
The system itself is immoral. It should be unsurprising to anyone that it constantly creates moral/ethical dilemmas for the average person pitting their personal values against being able to put food on the table for their families and children.
Short of fraud, embezzlement, theft, knowing or intentional violation of law while acting as an employee or catastrophic failure in the tasks an employee was hired to do, it should be the law that no employee can fail to give a dismissed, resigned or otherwise terminated employee a poor reference.
I resigned from a position and did raise “a stink” as in writing a letter explaining to the partners exactly why I was resigning. Knowing full well that it was a direct indictment of their personal ethics and that I would likely never be given anything but at best a neutral reference from them, which in my profession is basically a death sentence.
And the reason I made it a point to write that letter, was that I couldn’t get my moral and ethical brain wrapped around the idea I was doing the “right thing”, resigning from a position I was good at and liked, by being true my ethics and morals, but that if it was so important to stand up for those values in the first instance, I wouldn’t actually do it openly just so I could “trade on,” for my personal benefit, a future good recommendation from an employer I wanted nothing to do with because of its actions and values.
That struck me as backward in the extreme. In exactly the same way a corporation needs to me informed why it is you are refusing to buy or condone the sale of their products or services (a boycott) how does it help to change corporate behavior if its employees refuse to be honest about why they are resigning or leaving the company? Simply fact of the matter is it doesn’t, and it doesn’t help advance those personal values that caused us to resign in the first place–it just buries it.
And that’s why you get this dynamic in the capitalist workplace:
Because capitalism creates frightened human wage slaves willing to betray their morals and ethics every single day for fear of starvation, lack of health care and homelessness. That’s not a moral system in the first instance–that’s a terroristic one and/or an extortionate one. And that’s what needs to be fought against in solidarity. The right to not be punished for being honest with an employer as to why you can no longer work for them without sugar coating it.
Sorry for typo.
“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.” Henry David Thoreau, Walden & Civil Disobedience
The reason this is a difficult choice for people to make has to do with the common practice of “blacklisting”:
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/blacklisted-james-poulter-192
Over and over, you’ll hear people saying “Don’t raise a stink if you’re stuck in an unethical position, just resign quietly and find a better job with another corporation/government agency/academic institution.”
The code word for this is “team player” – team players don’t expose fraud, corruption, sloppiness, stupidity etc. on their own team. So when you see something like this mass exodus of State Department officials – well, they’re still being “team players”, they’re just on a different team.
How do we know this? Well, they haven’t taken stacks of embarassing and incriminating documents with them to hand out to reporters – now, that would be betrayal of the team and they’d end up blacklisted and forced to work low-level menial jobs, or be sent to prison, as with all the other whistleblowers targeted by the Obama and Bush administrations.
Blacklisting is a big issue in academics as well. Google [ blacklisting academics ] – more proof that the United States has become something rather like the old USSR. Don’t critize public-private corporate partnerships; don’t support boycotts of Saudi Arabia or Israel; don’t expose fraudulent research at your institution; be a good little cog in the machine and you’ll get to keep your job.
I just posted this on Biddle’s latest – it seems to fit here:
Just another example of the inevitable downward spiral and undermining of basic human rights that neoliberal policies have been responsible for for decades:
Prior to getting my ass handed to me in the 1990’s for daring to speak out in support of treating everyone pretty much the same with regards to meeting basic needs (the same health care coverage everyone else had, a living wage, reasonable employment assurances, etc…) our union members attempted to defend an example of what the agency I worked for considered an independent contractor.
We finally argued in front of an administrative law judge that a person who had to show up and work and stay at work at the employers address, use the employers tools, saw only the employers clients, and could not reasonably work for anyone else in the capacity assigned should not be considered an independent contractor, and should be afforded the same benefits as regular employees are; among them insurance coverage and the ability to participate in a pension plan and a union.
The ALJ decided for the employer and against the “independent contractor,” and, remarkable at the time, the statewide union representing the opposing position decided not to contest.
I din’t know at the time, but this was the shape of things to come.
This was the first step in that union abandoning its more rural chapters; deciding instead to save it’s resources and energy for more densely populated urban centers.
While there’s some merit to that argument, it underlies the real problem that pervades America here: when agencies and groups designed to protect and enhance basic human rights decide to abandon core principles and not enforce them everywhere (in any urban area they would have fought, and did, tooth and nail to protect against these types of gross violations) you inevitably end up weakening your entire group.
One can easily see how this applies to where we are now as a country, and how the Democrats, en masse, have slowly allowed the whittling away of core principles in regions of the country and among demographics that don’t negatively affect a large percentage of their members immediately and directly, to the detriment of us all.
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Thank you, photo and rrheard – excellent commentary.
Thank you for your testimony.
Thanks for your fight. I have followed this course and true to form, the lawyers in the D&D club have once again managed to split hairs with the now all too common
The lack of consistency of classifications agencies requiring reporting to is the fertilisation of corruption and is a trap for simple persons in business who actually attempt to follow the law.
This became brazenly evident in the late 90’s when a company selling internet business opportunities filed different classes to local state and federal agencies to dodge taxes and consumer obligations – and this was also a publicly traded company.
thank you for your courage
Today the US faces a situation where corruption is so bad new persons entering jobs are going to need to see this in advance to not fall into traps where they can be prosecuted, imprisoned, or otherwise have their lives ruined – and it is the CEO responsibility to see that corruption is eliminated. However the criminal minds that are cultivated today – the hand me down greed and selfishness of wallstreet demands – has fairly ruined the country.
TIME FOR SOME NEW LAWS.
Need aware employees more than new laws. In my career I got a couple “bad orders” that would have put me out on a limb measured for the saw. A pleasant smile and can I have that in writing ends the conversation but makes you no friends. If I go out on a limb it will be one of my own choosing.
Another thing: it’s Trump’s domestic policies that are the problem, not his foreign policies which are far more reasonable and less dangerous than Hillary Clinton’s would have been. Despite his idiotic policies on energy and the environment and public health and immigration (all domestic policies), his moves on trade and reducing tensions with Russia are laudable.
Trump talks to Putin, other world leaders about security threats, Reuters Jan 28 2017
Hillary Clinton would have been implementing a no-fly zone over Syria about now and risking World War III with Russia in pursuit of her rabid neoliberal imperial agenda. On the foreign policy front, she and her cohort were clearly the greater evil.
So why focus on the State Department? If anyone should be resigning in protest over Trump policies, it’s members of the Department of Homeland Security; the Department of Energy; the Environmental Protection Agency; the Centers for Disease Control; the Department of Education; and the Border Patrol. But it’s doubtful they’d land jobs with corporate think tanks if they did so; I’d guess most large U.S. corporations generally support Donald Trump’s domestic agenda: deregulation, privatization, etc. which are more in line with the Clinton Democrats on these issues.
Their rogue Twitter approach (rogueEPA, rogueDOE, etc.) is nice to see, however – but I bet Trump is demanding that the NSA track down those Twitter accounts and tie them to names so he can go on a firing binge – which is helped by Obama’s recent expansion of domestic mass surveillance, right?
The story focused on the State officials because they were the last group to resign in protest from any government agency or department. But the story was meant to address all government officials. Kenney talked in his first quote about the EPA, and the opening section referenced other agencies etc. Story not meant to just be about the dilemmas of people in State right now.
What about the Wall? I know it will be in domestic territory since Mexico isn’t going to provide any real estate unless we go occupy it, but then they will be paying serious pesos for it.
Muslims don’t yet know what their fate would have been had Trump lost the election. That they can reach our airports at all is thanks the the person they are vilifying.
I agree. All O’Bomba and all DoubleCrap and any Bubba appointed officials still left rotting at the State should resign immediately. Considering the trillions wasted, the mountain of corpses, the oceans of blood and seas of tears they are responsible for, they should all be marching straight into Hell.
I find this entire argument by Peter Maas to be disingenously deceptive, as it ignores certain historical facts about the Yugoslav conflict and its eerie similarities to the Syrian conflict – i.e. it smears a veneer of “humanitarian values” over neoliberal agendas that are all about control of resources. But explaining this will require more than a tweet.
First, consider Syria. Recall all those State Department officials who sent their “letter of protest” to the Obama Administration over the lack of a NATO attack on Syrian government and infrastructure?
But what was the real agenda there? Protecting human rights and preventing genocide? Or promoting a neocolonial agenda aimed at controlling a key pipeline route? See these State Department cables leaked by Manning, as evidence of the real concerns over Syria – an Iran-Syrian pipeline corridor to Europe, along with close economic cooperation between Russia, Iran and Syria:
Thanks to Chelsea Manning, we have this record of internal State Department concerns and focus – no, it wasn’t about “humanitarian issues”, just look at the Saudis for proof of that, it was about control of the region – i.e. neocolonialism and dirty wars, covert and overt regime change, destabilization and destruction in the name of greater profits.
Second, the Yugoslav situation was much like this, closely related to control of an energy corridor into Europe – the trans-AMBO pipeline – to be overseen by American military power – in the form of Camp Bondsteel, the large military base set up by the US in the wake of the war. There are numerous articles discussing this, but perhaps the most convincing is George Monbiot in the Guardian, 2001:
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2001/feb/15/oil.georgemonbiot
There are other discussions of this, more comprehensive and speculative, such as Pepe Escobar’s “the long road from Kosovo to Kurdistan”, if you want to Google it.
Another issue is that George Kenny, quoted in this article as a State Department “humanitarian protester” who was calling for more military intervention in Yugoslavia, went on from his public protest to a job at one of America’s biggest pro-intervention think tanks, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace – which indicates that it was all part of a coordinated push to expand American influence into the Balkans and Caspian region, in the name of “energy security” – i.e. quite similar to the State Department’s objectives in Syria, using very similar tactics. Not that there was much of an Internet in the early 1990s, so they were able to get away with it more easily.
In reality, anyone who resigns in protest against Deep State agendas doesn’t get cushy jobs at think tanks devoted to Deep State agendas, or with defense contractors, or with lobbying and legal firms in Washington. That’s not how the revolving door works. Brookings or Carnegie are not going to be giving Chelsea Manning a job after she’s released, for example. Victoria Nuland, however? She’ll get a fat cat position, you can bet on that.
much thanks
i would like all Americans to view your observations and analysis for every msm lie and i am something enuf to believe this is doable.
The difference between Sir Donald Quixote and Mr Donald Trump is Twitter.
Sir Don did not have Twitter to broadcast his many exploits to save humanity. He had to depend on rogue story-tellers like Cervantes to make fun of his bravery and intent in his battlefields.
Mr Don has Twitter with which he can bypass the entire media and reach out to all of us and demonstrate his administrative skills and enormous heart to help people. So we know what a great leader he is just like Sir Don whose exploits were portrayed in jest but whose intent was equally praiseworthy.
Not only should the “officials” resign, but the general populace as well.
Starve the beast.
America is now well beyond righting its self with quick fixes by simplistic right or left economic ideologies of either cut or spend and must most wisely and skillfully both save for and buy the future to succeed. Both the judicious application of power taxes/funding and fuel conservation by lighting the load of expenditures will be needed to fly out of this crash.
You make it sound like a remake of Flight of the Phoenix.
A bit extreme but not a bad analogy. Any good pilot knows both power and weight effect lift , especially in rotor-craft which I use to fly. It will take a good pilot to restore balanced budgets and a Constitutional Republic without crashing America
Now I’m reminded of Being There.
I suppose I must admire your optimism. Sharing it is too much to ask.
About every generation we hit crisis and get a great president Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, T & F Roosevelts. I am 68 and watching and waiting, we are in crisis and for sure need a great pilot. Obama had a great chance and blew it and Trump has his chance and probably will do the same?,I am hopeful for 2020, hope springs eternal or at least you fight to the last.
While I’m sure it’s just an oversight, your short list of great presidents leaves more than a few recent generations without their respective pilots.
Nice Shakespearean reference with the new title of the piece, BTW.
A few were good, but none in my life time were great. Of course on the bright side we have not had a revolutionary war, civil war or WWII. Crisis or change can demand greatness, hope we get just change.
Should I stay or should I go? The question permeates all levels and types of public service to include science, even Nixon resigned. I worked for the Government 31 years with 3 breaks in service. First military service 3 years, left to return to school. Next I was hired by the National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health with a four year degree as a lab technician. Over 5 years at considerable risk to my career I developed an immunotherapy drug Staphylococcus Protein A bacterial Fc receptor mimic that might be used to treat cancer and many other diseases. This work resulted in peer reviewed publications and a US patent.
I had supporters within my research group; however, the Institutes response was “You are a laboratory technician not employed to make discovery or improve art”, know your place, know your station. My solution GO, I filed a patent separation using their words to justify it, receive it and walked out the door with the technology. Worked for private industry a couple of years returned to Government service Department of Defense, where the money was, and demonstrated the same inflammatory mechanisms seen in cancer came into play for chemical toxicity. This implicating use of common anti-inflammatory drug protocols for many defense and clinical pathology. In my 23 years at DOD I oscillated between valued employee and “bad apple” as views on new ideas changed with Command structure. Finally just over a decade ago you could no longer be a Public Servant just a servant, time to GO, retire.
I had many exciting adventures at public expense, a good career and made contributions none of which could happen today. Whether it is the war on terror, poverty, drugs or cancer, originality is unwelcome and threatens established thought and more of the same failure fund lines. I have stayed active in the field own time own dime. In research you do sign your name to your work. You may judge me to see if you as tax payers got your money’s worth. Article reviews much of my life’s work.
https://authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S1726-4901(16)30184-8
No good deed goes unpunished, Fred.
Congratulations on your endurance in bucking the hierarchy and daring to achieve.
I must give some thanks to the system many good folks help me some because I pushed for new ideas when dogma did not serve. Also my couple of years on Army Special Forces A Team taught me “quantum management” and the Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) training was a real plus. My civilian employer for 23 years was Department of Army. Some Commanders totally supported and some disrupted questioning dogma. I could write the book on way research costs so much and yields so little but it has been done see “The Truth in Small Doses: Why We’re Losing the War on Cancer–and How to Win It”. Clifton Leaf https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/review-the-truth-in-small-doses/
I play to win this angers some that think research is all baby-steps to the next little answer, I move at double time. Every concept I have put forth Fc receptors as drugs or inflammation as a major driver of chemical agent toxicity has in time proven true, not clairvoyant just get off what is not working and on to what does.
How many decades can pass before US voters and USG officials realize they went crazy?
Until something REAL bad happens that effects enough people and awakens the Nation. We are over due?
I think the recent immigration foul-up was a perfect example of how low-level government officials have power. Trump wrote his order, DHS interpreted it to say permanent residents were allowed home, then Trump’s ideologues say “decide on a case by case basis”. Obviously the person actually there deciding had a lot of power. It was the same throughout that – agencies surprised with an order they had no warning about, individuals making decisions with no coordination. Which means, individual bureaucrats with power, for good or bad.
Yes, interesting point. Though I imagine there’s always the concern of being fired by a supervisor, so the question for some low-level officials might be, What is the most effective way for me to oppose this beyond what I might do today? Are you playing the long game or the short game? Either is reasonable, I think. One of the things the Bosnian dissienters agreed on, that I didn’t delve into, is that resigning is a very personal decision that each person has to make. They wouldn’t tell anyone they should or should not resign.
“Are you playing the long game or the short game? Either is reasonable, I think. One of the things the Bosnian dissienters agreed on, that I didn’t delve into, is that resigning is a very personal decision that each person has to make. They wouldn’t tell anyone they should or should not resign.”
Exactly, in my 31 years in Government I was often the “ode man out” questioning dogma and pushing more creative and effective solutions. For most of this time I had no wife and never had children. I could be less risk adverse. Lighting rod it a tough job position.
The economics of resigning are paramount, and understandably so. Easier to take the risk of quitting if you don’t have a family to support. One thing the Bosnia dissenters noted, if you plan to resign, have a post-resignation plan, with respect to employment and/or activism.
The tone of your observations indicated the ebb and flow and slowly rising resistance and “sand in the gears of government”.
Under “normal conditions” and by this I mean governments where leaders fear their citizens this will work, but I think we should acknowledge the possibility that thing may have changed.
Absolute control will not tolerate anyone even thinking about sanding the gears. Have we arrived at a point where someone believes absolute control is not only possible, but required?
What the current leadership does next will be all important in answering this question.
“Have we arrived at a point where someone believes absolute control is not only possible, but required?”
We passed the point of starting to converting Public Servants to servant under Bush, Obama accelerated the process, “insider threat program”. Looks like Trump does not take descent well in public, probably not in private either?
Government officials shouldn’t do anything which might endanger their pension. To assuage their consciences, they could refuse to work, or at least do as little possible. In other words, continue in their normal routines.
Anybody who works in the civil service knows that government periodically goes crazy. The Trump administration is only the latest example. However, such governments are always eventually defeated by bureaucratic complacency and incompetency, as envisaged by the founders when they created government to be as inefficient and unworkable as possible. The three branches of government, each designed to undermine and thwart the other, was a brilliant stroke and ensures that Americans will always retain at least a sliver of freedom.