Here’s What It’s Like to Be a Whistleblower

While I’ve been watching the Peter Strzok hearing, I’ve also been reading David Dayen’s long piece at HuffPost about Mike Picarella, a Wall Street banker who took a high-ranking sales job in 2011 with HSBC, one of the world’s largest banks. As it happens, HSBC is also one of the most corrupt banks in the world: “In 2012,” Dayen writes, “the head of the Justice Department’s criminal division, Lanny Breuer, admitted that if the government pressed charges, HSBC would have ‘almost certainly’ lost its banking license in the U.S.”

But that’s not all. HSBC was also, perhaps unsurprisingly, a hotbed of sexual harassment. For example, here’s an internal message between Eileen Hedges and another manager about an attractive junior colleague:

Ha ha ha. That’s hilarious.

This is the start of Dayen’s story. It ends a few thousand words later with Picarella reporting various cases of sexual harassment to HR and then going to court when he got fired shortly thereafter. If you want to know how it ends, just click the link.

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THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

If you can afford to part with a few bucks, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones with a much-needed year-end donation. And please do it now, while you’re thinking about it—with fewer people paying attention to the news like you are, we need everyone with us to get there.

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