Opinion by Mathew Carr
Nov. 24, 2023 — Wrongdoing goes unpunished when it is the work of many: Lucan, a young Roman poet, who died in his twenties in 65 AD after questioning Nero, a powerful leader.
I believe I was fired by Bloomberg LP after questioning the flawed nature of energy and climate markets and my powerful firm’s role in it. I contended, while I was employed there and still do now, that there is a glaring error in the way people think about the climate crisis.
It’s not the people who emit greenhouse gas who are the wrongdoers. That is pretty much everyone.
The real wrongdoers are those who don’t believe that market rules governing financial and physical behavior can be changed to prevent the worst of global heating.
Those rules need to be dramatically tweaked, because they decide what gets invested in. They influence choices in the market that either hurt the climate or help protect it. They are not fit for purpose.
There are so many people making money out of the current flawed system, including Bloomberg. These folk decline to adjust to spur more sustainable outcomes. Some are ignorant. Even worse, many of them know rules and laws can be changed for the better, but simply want to keep on seeking rent from the current system, so they stay idle.
Those people need to be edged out of leadership positions, roles that influence market structure. New structures will mean commerce enhances human rights and brings people closer together, instead of further apart.
The retaliatory delayers, as I’ll call them, form groups and strategies to get rid of those seeking a more sustainable and more-human world.
The playbook they deploy is classic “ganging up,” or bullying. If pretty much everyone with power is a retaliatory delayer, then retaliation and delay goes unpunished, to invoke Lucan.
One of the best examples of ganging up in history is those against JFK, who died this week in 1963…but of course bullying and collective retaliation goes back to the dawn of humankind.
The people lined up against Kennedy were much more formidable than the middle managers at Bloomberg LP wanting me out of the way because I was relentlessly advocating for pro-climate changes to how the media company covered market news.
See this excerpt from the book JFK, an American Coup d’etat, by Colonel John Hughes-Wilson (2013).
Today, this group retaliation is still going on.
Instead of making an independent assessment or immediately seeking a de-escalation, countries quickly fell into retaliatory tribes after the Hamas-Israel conflict flared up last month.
In my case, the list of enemies (I mostly didn’t even realise they were enemies at the time) were still well organized and determined.
I’m writing this today because my unfair dismissal litigation, now in its fourth year, is winding down (there are no juries involved so I should be able to avoid being in contempt) …and given Kennedy’s death anniversary ….now’s a good time to revisit the machinations against me by the retaliatory delayers.
It’s also crucial that climate envoys have as much information as possible ahead of the COP28 UN climate talks, which are already getting underway in Dubai.
Michael Bloomberg, majority owner of his firm, and Mark Carney, chairman, both have leadership roles in the UNFCCC process and are therefore deeply conflicted because they’ve overseen billions of dollars in revenue and profit from fossil fuels the past few decades as global emissions repeatedly rise to record levels. I’m not discounting that they have done things to slow the climate crisis, too.
Is it a dove, is it a human hand?
Photo credit: CarrZee — world peace sculpture in Antwerp train station (Belgium).
What’s at stake is no less than adjusting markets to save the world as we know it.
At the turn of the 21st century, many corporations were violently opposed to a push to incorporate human-rights and environmental protection into private-sector behavior. That’s for governments, they said.
Now that’s changing, but no where near fast enough, according to Stephane Rabant, who chairs a group of business-human-rights lawyers at the International Bar Association seeking to change the way companies work.
In 2023, it’s now widely accepted that a sustainable environment is a human right, yet that notion is still struggling to gain traction in actual corporate behavior, for instance.
At the beginning of this century “some companies strongly opposed being held responsible for their involvement in human rights abuse,” sometimes violently Rabant said. Now, “several companies” (CarrZee: out of about 200 most to blame for the climate crisis, for instance) are just beginning to change, he said in a speech at the IBA conference earlier this month and in a series of phone conversations with me, since.
The big hurdle is that protecting human rights will probably lower profits, at least in the short term (the next 10 years or so), Brabant said.
Famed UN leader Kofi Annan, who died in 2018, stressed the importance of ensuring that the benefits of globalization are shared equitably, not just by a privileged few.
- ‘We have to choose between a global market driven only by calculations of short-term profit, and one which has a human face. Between a world which condemns a quarter of the human race to starvation and squalor, and one which offers everyone at least a chance of prosperity, in a healthy environment. Between a selfish free-for-all in which we ignore the fate of the losers, and a future in which the strong and successful accept their responsibilities, showing global vision and leadership. I am sure you will make the right choice.‘ Swiss conference, 1999
This quote highlights Annan’s concern about the nefarious potential for markets to prioritize short-term gains at the expense of long-term human well-being.
He was wrong when he said we’d make the right choice. We chose the selfish free-for-all
We’ve spent the last 24 years making the wrong choice. Billionaires still mostly seem to think putting a “human face” on markets means rigging them for themselves. They think they deserve to be the human face of markets and that’s not what Annan meant.
That’s why those speaking out about human rights abuse are still suffering in 2023 — it’s because they threaten profits that have been allowed to balloon at the expense of equality, nature, climate, women’s rights, water quality (I could go on and on).
In the case of Mr Bloomberg, he’s going around in an influential role in the UNFCCC yet he treats the UN with contempt. One of the more interesting things to come out of my litigation is Bloomberg LP still hadn’t undertaken a human rights due diligence survey and report (and it still hasn’t yet, I believe). All big companies should do this, according to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.
In its 2020 “impact report,” Bloomberg said this: “Bloomberg complies with the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights.”
But it doesn’t really do that.
Because of the discrepancy I applied in May 2021 to add the miscarriage of justice element to my whistleblowing claim, which was mostly at that time based on calling out environmental damage by Bloomberg, which is a protected activity. Whistleblowing about miscarriages of justice is also meant to be protected.
“That’s also why the Claimant (me) is applying to join Mr Michael R. Bloomberg, the Respondent’s majority owner and United Nations climate envoy, to this litigation — the discrepancy needs explanation for the Tribunal to make an informed decision on the whistleblowing/unfair dismissal claim,” I said at the time.
https://www.ohchr.org/documents/publications/hr.pub.12.2_en.pdf
https://www.bloomberg.com/impact/
The tribunal didn’t agree with me. I contend it simply declined to address the meaty issues of my case.
Still now, instead of being listened to, whistleblowers are retaliated against across vast areas of government and industry.
So how did Bloomberg LP embark on this retaliation in my case?
I’ll start in 2019, where we left off in part one.
In February of that year my name was on a “headcount roadmap” (unbeknown to me at the time) and the retaliatory delaying middle managers overseeing me decided to give me a bad performance review for 2018, even though my exclusives and the number of stories on Bloomberg’s “front page” screen surged 60% and 26% respectively in that year.
So I was on the best-read “top worldwide” screen about every second day, when Bloomberg could choose from the output of of about 2,500 reporters and analysts. Why did they choose me so often if I was such a bad performer?
The Tribunals simply refused to interrogate this.
What follows are the facts and my impressions, opinions. Because the cover up of what happened is so thorough, there are facts that I still don’t know. I’ve sought more information from Bloomberg and staffers throughout the litigation.
People mentioned below can email me at mathew@carrzee.net and I will incorporate their comments into this story, over the next few days.
Keep in mind too, the people below may have been following orders and not making autonomous decisions. Bloomberg had a militaristic “yes man” culture during the almost 20 years I was with the firm.
Retaliatory delayer No. 1 — Stuart Wallace, senior newsroom leader in London, now Dubai
Photo: X
In late 2017, Mr Wallace sat down with me and promised that should I write about natural gas markets for another year, I could then move onto another beat. I’d already been writing about natgas, a booming global market as the world was supposedly pivoting away from coal, for 15 years and was getting tired of it. I wanted to focus on climate policy and carbon pricing.
Surprisingly, as I complained to Mr Wallace about my unfair performance review — which he had signed off on — and the need for better management of climate news, he argued that pension funds were not that keen on the climate transition.
This was 2019 and I was stunned, even though I knew Mr Wallace was soaked with fossil fuels during his career.
He’s now been promoted as of this month to run “Russia+” as well as Middle East and Africa, according to his LinkedIn account.
For me, it’s important that someone with his bias toward fossil fuels isn’t overly influential in how the COP28 climate talks news is covered during the next three weeks or so.
Retaliatory delayer No. 2 Will Kennedy – the other Kennedy
Photo: X
Under UK law, companies must protect whistleblowers and not retaliate against them. Even in a Tribunal hearing about allegedly unfair dismissal of a whistleblower (me), Kennedy didn’t understand this law 18 months after he helped fire me, I contend.
I reckon he pretended to forget key conversations leading up to my dismissal, as I cross examined him, misleading the Tribunal. He had said earlier it was “bonkers” to try to put climate context in fossil-fuel news.
I contend that the result of not doing so is this: massive overinvestment in climate-damaging technology and fuels, huge jumps in global temperature as we are seeing in 2023, more droughts, flooding, deaths, destruction, worsening inequality.
See this:
He conceded to me once that he had previously been a bad reporter prior to being promoted to management roles. He’s a fairly classic yes man, though like these other people I’m naming has plus points too.
You gotta ask why does a New York-based global firm like Bloomberg LP run its global commodities news business from London. I contend it’s related to deflecting accountability under US securities and corruption laws, making use of British laws which allow for lawfare-type litigation — which deters journalistic scrutiny of the firm and of Mike Bloomberg himself.
Retaliatory delayer No. 3 — Reed Landberg
Photo: X
Mr Landberg’s role in part was to manage me out of the firm, I contend. He claims he was trying to make me better (and that’s true to some extent).
He certainly misled his bosses about my performance, or gathered false evidence to set me up to fail, based on documents disclosed in the litigation.
He played up my flaws as a reporter and I don’t shy away from having some of those. He was temporarily removed from my sacking, I contend, to protect him from culpability for my alleged unfair dismissal — see section above that I’ve highlighted in yellow (I was finally fired in May 2020).
This yellow highlighting is evidence that underpins my claim that my sacking was one of the most sophisticated in global corporate history.
Of course many people who worked for Bloomberg over the years suffered a similar fate. The UK employment tribunals declined to properly interrogate the circumstances of my dismissal and I contend that’s at least partly because Mr Bloomberg uses his money and influence to get what he wants.
Landberg is now leading Bloomberg’s economic coverage in Brexit Britain and is highly influential in how markets and investors see that country.
I contend Bloomberg LP needs to be split up (into news and market infrastructure segments) so that it’s not used for U.S. economic and political imperialism around the world. It’s also crazy that Elon Musk is allowed to own X and Jeff Bezos is allowed to own the Washington Post, for similar reasons.
The three gentleman delayers that I named above above (and probably others) decided to place me on a performance improvement process days after I went to the firm’s Navex whistleblowing hotline in mid 2019. That hotline, which had a website-based element, allowed employees to complain about bad things happening / wrongdoing at Bloomberg LP.
I knew doing this was not risk free, but I wasn’t ready for the blatant retaliation that followed.
By the way the tribunals have so far concluded that my firing was fair enough, even though it included some unfairness. Yet the judges never placed enough weight on the timing of this decision to place me on the performance review immediately after I blew the whistle.
That review and my alleged failure to meet the conditions of it was the excuse used by Bloomberg to justify my sacking. The real reason was my whistleblowing, I unsuccessfully argued (so far).
The tribunals never properly interrogated the circumstances and so my case has been a series of miscarriages of justice, I contend.
Excerpt of what I said in the Navex system (in part) in 2019 was this:
Source: From my communications with the whistleblowing system / UK judiciary; note Bloomberg did launch “Bloomberg Green” a couple of years after I said it should; it still does not cover market structure much, even though it gets about $1 billion a year from fossil fuels; nor does it cover banking industry market structure much. That’s an industry that provides it with the largest portion of its total $11 billion or so of annual revenue.
This stuff that I said back in 2019 and before that about energy and climate market structure — shifting rules and improving news about them — will be considered at COP28 through the middle of next month.
See also this for context, if you want more.
As another aside (sort of), on top of ignoring what I regard as clear whistleblowing, now the tribunals want me to pay £10,000 of Bloomberg’s legal costs. Which brings me to:
Retaliatory delayer No. 4 — Melanie Lane, co-head of employment at CMS, Bloomberg’s outside lawyer
CMS website: snip
So consider this section of a global lawfirm’s website for a moment.
If Im right and CMS are not commenting …I’m being asked in 2022/2023 to pay £10,000 to Bloomberg for being unreasonable in pursuing reinstatement/automatic unfair dismissal in May 2020.
Meanwhile, Bloomberg’s lawyer is this year boasting about being involved in litigation that I initiated (not her) and that she helped defend using what I regard as lawfare tactics (something CMS is known for, by the way)…please comment Ms Lane.
Lawfare includes conducting litigation to take advantage of people without the same resources as you, for instance.
Is this the boldest corporate greenwash in global commercial history? Maybe.
Lane got hired because of:
Retaliatory delayer No. 5 — Emma Ross-Thomas, who fired me
Photo: X
Ross-Thomas fired me, even though she knew I was a whistleblower.
I told her that face to face and emailed her directly about it. Bloomberg LP simply pretended it could not find the said email … and she pretended not to read other emails about it. To be clear, she misled the tribunal, I contend.
I don’t accept that she could not remember key conversations about my dismissal with delayers 1-3, which is what happened when I cross examined her at a British Employment Tribunal hearing in 2021.
She was appointed into her role to deflect blame for my sacking that would have swung to Mr Landberg, I contend. Note her LinkedIn profile does not say when she was appointed into her current role — it was late 2019 / early 2020, a few months before her big move against me.
Retaliatory delayer No. 6 – Laura Zelenko
Source: X
Had Zelenko (Investigating Editor A in the story linked immediately below) not covered up my whistleblowing via highly sophisticated corporate dismissiveness, my dispute would never have happened.
There are scores of other retaliatory delayers within Bloomberg LP, who lined up to join the bullying group who ousted me and — at the very least — stood by while I was harassed by ‘the partnership’
[Stay tuned for more]
Please remember, I’m not saying and I never said Bloomberg was worse than other global corporations.
Indeed I specifically said its coverage of climate news was better than in many other instances. But being better than Fox News isn’t the standard that should be applied when measuring whether a news outfit is doing well enough, especially when you are number one or near number one for global investment influence..
The measure should be — is the outfit helping encourage sustainability / human rights protection / better market rules … or perpetuating a system we know is severely damaging.
Corporate ‘gods’ vs humanity and world peace
Weirdly, this week my teenage son’s religious studies homework — teachings about how god interacts with the world — signals how earthbound systems need to change and how those shifts do not necessarily need to be massively disruptive.
Companies, the media and billionaires could emphasise the religious concept of “immanence” when behaving like God (I’m being a little cheeky) — being close to people and customers …”knowing them so well” … “around them at all times” (I’m citing my son’s Religions Paper Revision — Islamic beliefs section) — instead of adopting an attitude of “transcendence” — being outside space and time or separate from people and customers or controlling them.
In other words, instead of banding together to protect profits and reputation and wiggle out of accountability and punishment … band together to protect people more generally. Then we’ll all get something closer to sustainable world peace.
NOTES
August 19, 2018; “the Conversation”
Kofi Annan: his legacy is not perfect, but he helped improve millions of lives
Rosa Freedman, University of Reading and Aoife O’Donoghue, Durham University
The passing of Kofi Annan, former United Nations Secretary-General and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, has been met with tributes from all around the world. His home country, Ghana, declared a week of national mourning.
Annan rose through the ranks of the UN to become the first black African to head the organisation, and his many achievements are rightly being celebrated. Under his tenure, human rights and development were put at the forefront of all UN work, ensuring that the organisation focused on all people in all parts of our global society. Courageously, he was also the first UN Secretary-General to recognise and condemn the UN’s disproportionate focus on Israel as a human rights violator compared to many other similar or worse offenders.
It is also right to remember that on his watch, the UN’s reputation was tarnished by two of its worst stains. He was head of UN peacekeeping at the time when genocides were perpetrated in Rwanda and the Former Republic of Yugoslavia while UN peacekeepers stood by and did nothing, and he was in charge of the UN during the oil-for-food scandal in Iraq.
But as a whole, Annan’s life and work will nonetheless be celebrated for a long time to come.
A life well lived
Kofi Annan was born on April 8 1938 in Kumasi, Ghana, which was, at the time, part of the British Empire and known as the Gold Coast. His family were traditional rulers and his father a provincial governor. Ghana’s independence was secured when Annan was in his final year of secondary school. He attended a national university, followed by studying in the United States on a Ford Foundation scholarship. After his studies, Annan took a job at the World Heath Organization and began his lifelong career at the UN.
There are many ways in which he changed and improved the world through his work at the UN, and indeed in the positions he took after his retirement. During his tenure as Secretary-General he reformed the UN’s human rights system, in particular by establishing the modern Human Rights Council. His commitment to ensuring development around the world and to establish the principle that no-one be left behind culminated in the Millennium Development Goals, the forerunner of today’s Sustainable Development Goals. https://www.youtube.com/embed/AFxiNz8xdxM?wmode=transparent&start=0
Annan focused intensely on peace and security, ensuring that UN member states accepted the Responsibility to Protect doctrine. This political mandate emphasises that the UN, and particularly its peacekeeping personnel, must prioritise protecting civilians in conflict and crisis zones. Its creation was a direct response to the UN’s failure to protect civilians in Rwanda and the Former Republic of Yugoslavia, where genocides, war crimes and crimes against humanity were perpetrated while peacekeepers stood and watched. At that time, Annan was Under-Secretary-General for peacekeeping, and it raised eyebrows when he was appointed Secretary-General immediately afterwards. He replaced Boutros Boutros-Ghali, who was not reappointed for a second term – in no small part because of the terrible failures under his leadership.
Annan further strengthened the role of the UN Secretary-General’s role in peacefully settling disputes and came close to securing a settlement in Cyprus. He spoke out against the invasion of Iraq in 2003. But as Secretary-General, he also oversaw the staff members at the heart of the oil-for-food scandal in Iraq, a scheme intended to get food and vital supplies to Iraqi citizens but which also fell prey to corruption on a grand scale. While he was cleared of direct involvement, questions continue to be asked as to what he knew and when, and whether he could and should have done more.
The good and the bad
All in all, this makes for a complicated biography. While his appointment as the first black African Secretary-General was undeniably a breakthrough moment for representation at the UN’s top echelons, he failed just as his predecessors did to bring about the long-promised parity of gender, ethnicity and class that the UN structure badly needs. And those failures – particularly to appoint more than a few women to senior roles – undermine the UN’s claim to uphold the obligation under its own Charter to represent “we the peoples”. Still, he did more than his predecessors or immediate successor, for example appointing Mary Robinson as High Commissioner for Human Rights and Edward Mortimer to assist with his UN reform agenda – an agenda far more wide-reaching than any before or since.
After retirement, Annan continued his work for the UN, including as Special Envoy on the Syrian crisis and Chair of the Advisory Commission on Rakhine State, Myanmar. This body played a major part in keeping the peace there in ways that seem tragically elusive today. He was also a member of the Elders, a group of senior people from around the world that has included Mary Robinson, Nelson Mandela, Ela Bhatt and Jimmy Carter, all of whom use their reputations to attempt to bring peace to troubled parts of the world.
Tributes are being paid to Annan from within the UN and from leaders and peoples around the world. As Secretary-General he used his platform to effect meaningful change for billions of people across the world. His was a life well lived, and his legacy will live on.
Rosa Freedman, Professor of Law, Conflict and Global Development, University of Reading and Aoife O’Donoghue, Professor, Durham Law School, Durham University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
(Updates to clarify that my theory on the CMS claim on the environmental case might be wrong)