This is true but it goes deeper than the leadership of organizations. It’s cultural. As you can read in my book, I blew the whistle at Transocean a year before the Deepwater Horizon explosion and the company (with uscg and abs’ tacit approval) worked diligently to shut me up which isn’t surprising. What did surprise me was the number of good friends and shipmates that turned on me. Many of these were the same guys who were pushing me to blow the whistle in the first place.
As sailors we bitch and moan all the time about the troubles we face but whenever someone stands up he gets blocked by leadership then pulled down by his fellow sailors.
My wife was a 2/m. We know people personally who have been harassed and even violently raped. I’ve been trying to publish these stories since day 1 of gCaptain but nobody’s willing to step forward and and publish the facts. And it’s not the big lawyers that scare them, it’s the multitude of sailors who will flood to places like this and yell at them and call them liars and whores.
Even that level of defamation against the victims might be ok if the good guys were willing to stand up and help them fight back but I don’t see much evidence of that happening. Nobody offered to help me against transocean. Even small things, that plimsoll dispute that’s mentioned above, well I got a lot of emails and forum posts cheering me on but nobody sent money or legal help or even started a gofundme fund to assist.
Big things too. ABS was our biggest advertiser but they pulled out when we started reporting on the bullshit that was happening during the el faro trial. That was a HUGE financial hit for gCaptain but I foolishly thought it would cause mariners to flood the trial and demand justice or picket uscg headquarters or do something to stop them. But nothing significant happened except the NTSB lead investigator did look into it and then was forced out, abs & uscg took control, and he’s been struggling to find work ever since.
And foolishly I keep forgetting this fact. Last year I blew the whistle on a small organization associated with my college that was failing miserably. It was not a powerful organization and I had the college leaders support as well as hundreds of alumni who supported my campaign but when the leaders of that organization started a smear campaign and threatened legal action my support vanished and again I got threats of violence.
Think about that: there are people dumb enough to call me, and industry leader and owner of a website with hundreds of thousands of followers that gets over 2 million views a month, and (after telling them I am recording the call) threaten to “drive to my house and beat the F out of me”. And they get away with it because they know if I publish there are plenty more people who will follow suit. And this was over a tiny bs college organization I was trying TO HELP.
And the same thing happened this year when I helped a black mariner organization put out a very simple messaged asking for help.
The only person I know who has been successful in blowing the whistle is Capt John Loftus and he succeeded by keeping his whistleblowing mostly secret till the end.
I’ve failed multiple times, so has Ryan, so have many others who have tried. And we will continue to fail until someone can organize a system of support because it’s just too easy to suppress one voice.
I have the biggest megaphone in the entire industry and if I cannot succeed how is a rape victim suppose to?
John Loftus succeeded not because he was more right than I, he did so because he had a team (a legal team) fighting for him (big legal teams cost bug $ so he was taking a huge personal risk).
Saltydog69 isn’t banned because of some high level conspiracy or because I don’t care about SASH (I care very deeply) it’s because a bunch of you flagged his posts and sent copies of them to organization who have expensive lawyers on staff.
His cause is good but, imho, he won’t succeed as long as the only name that’s not anonymous in his reports is his.
I’ve seen it dozens of times. Good people (Some of them very smart and passionate) stand up and are beaten down. Then they either give up or they keep doubling down in (like this guy or like c.captain) until an overwhelming number of people are against then.
But there is some hope. There are some groups working behind the scenes to get groups of women to come forward together. There are sash support groups popping up in secret. There are legal cases that are right now working their way secretly through the courts. He’s right, this is about to explode. I just don’t know how to help any of them because any publicity I give them is going to result in people at ALL levels (deckplate AND office) trying to stop them.
And once those groups now operating mostly in secret are ready for press then gCaptain will publish it and work to get them broader support just as we did for Loftus.
P.S. crucifying our own shipmates isn’t just a SASH issue, it’s at the heart of most of the problems we face in the US Merchant Marine right now. Hell, I can’t even push to restore rights that we already had and are still legally entitled to (like basic veteran medical for mariners) without getting a flood of angry emails and physical threats of violence. We have to stop fighting ourselves if we are going to have any hope of progress at all.