Cassandra, the Ignored Prophet of Doom, Is a Woman for Our Times

By ADAM COHEN
NYT

In “Treme,” HBO’s new series about New Orleans, a college professor played by John Goodman railed against the needless tragedy of Hurricane Katrina. The storm was a natural disaster, he says, but the flooding that followed was a man-made catastrophe, decades in the making. Many people knew about the threat, but no one did anything about it.

Mr. Goodman’s blustery tirade about warnings not heeded channeled a national anger that extends well beyond Katrina. We are living in an age of Cassandra, in which experts and ordinary people are regularly grabbing the appropriate authorities by the lapels and warning them of impending disasters — almost invariably to no avail.

Harry Markopolos, a Boston financial analyst, has been out promoting his new book, “No One Would Listen.” It is an account of the eight years he spent trying to persuade the Securities and Exchange Commission that Bernard Madoff was running a multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme. Mr. Markopolos recounts his tireless efforts to wave red flags in front of government watchdogs. In the spring of 2000, Mr. Markopolos says he tried to explain to a senior S.E.C. official why Mr. Madoff’s numbers did not add up, but “it very quickly became clear he didn’t understand a single word I said after hello.” In the end, perhaps $65 billion disappeared, much of it belonging to charities and retirees.

There have been decades of urgent reports about sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, including a 1963 letter that recently surfaced in which the head of a New Mexico Catholic order recommended to the pope that pedophile priests be removed. Cases of abuse in the United States have been drawing attention at least as far back as 1985, when a Louisiana priest admitted to abusing 37 children. A 1992 meeting of bishops in South Bend, Ind., admitted that some bishops had hidden abuse cases. Still, just last year, the Diocese of Memphis and the Dominicans agreed to pay $2 million to a man who reported being abused as a teenager in 2000.

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