Courtesy of Pam Martens
Tom Mueller, Author of Crisis of Conscience: Whistleblowing in an Age of Fraud
Tom Mueller’s new book, Crisis of Conscience: Whistleblowing in an Age of Fraud is being released today by Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House. It’s packed with seven years of research and inspiring personal interviews.
Despite its initially intimidating 600-page heft, it’s an enticing read as it connects the dots to how a country like the United States, founded on the premise of “equal justice under law,” as engraved on the front of the U.S. Supreme Court, has become a “banana republic” with only whistleblowers’ pockets stuffed with crinkled documents or secret tape recordings all that stand between resuscitating our democracy or a complete collapse into oligarchy.
Mueller builds an incontrovertible case that the United States has become a dystopian society where almost every government entity that a citizen would typically turn to for redress over a lawless act has been corrupted by greed, pay to play, revolving doors, political bribes, or self-dealing. Adding poignant authenticity to this premise, the book arrives at a time when the highest elected official (President Donald Trump) and the highest law enforcement officer (Attorney General William Barr) are under a serious House of Representatives inquiry based on documents provided by a whistleblower.
Many of the courageous whistleblowers who experienced hardships and made great personal sacrifices to expose insidious corruption within the leadership of Wall Street’s top cop, the Securities and Exchange Commission, make an appearance in Mueller’s book. Those include SEC attorneys Gary Aguirre, Darcy Flynn, and James Kidney. Dick Bowen’s whistleblowing role at Citigroup is also insightfully covered.
But this is not a book just about the insidious, serial, criminal enterprises on Wall Street, where the Justice Department prosecutes the low-hanging fruit while leaving the top bank executives unharmed. This book shows that from our appellate court judges to the executive suites of our largest corporations to the U.S. Attorney General’s office, fraud is now being rationalized as simply part of the profit-seeking business model.
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