Random People Who Were Right All Along, But No One Listened To Them (13 items)

• 

  (#4) George Washington

  • Dec. at 67 (1732-1799)

  George Washington was an incredibly intelligent leader, and most of the time, when he spoke, people listened. But the one piece of Washington's advice that everyone decided to ignore was his warning about political parties.

  To really demonstrate this commitment, Washington remained nonpartisan throughout his entire presidency. In his farewell address, Washington said the following of partisan politics:

  "It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which finds a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions. Thus the policy and the will of one country are subjected to the policy and will of another."

  Any of this sound familiar?

  Essentially, Washington worried that political parties would become too powerful, rob the people of their control over their own government, and distract everyone from what they should really be focusing on. It's been 250 since his presidency, and maybe people are finally starting to listen.
• 

  (#6) Alexander Fleming

  • Dec. at 73 (1881-1955)

  The man who discovered penicillin, the world's first antibiotic, also predicted that bacteria could become immune to antibiotics. After receiving the Nobel Prize for Medicine, Alexander Fleming gave a lecture in which he warned that microbes can become "resistant" to antibiotics if they were exposed to "non-lethal quantities of the drug."

  Granted, Fleming didn't specifically predict the outbreak of super bugs like MRSA, which are resistant to nearly all antibiotics, but you would think his colleagues and successors would have listened more closely to his warnings about antibiotic resistance. Just one year after Fleming gave this speech, the first strain of penicillin-resistant bacteria appeared in London.
• 

  (#9) Cofer Black

  • 73

  Ever since 9/11, more and more evidence has come out that President Bush and other major members of his administration were forewarned about the possibility of a terrorist attack but took no steps to prevent one. Cofer Black was the chief of the CIA's counter-terrorism unit back in 2001 - he was the main man who issued a strong and serious warning to the president.

  On July 10, 2001, Black and his colleagues at the CIA had a meeting with Condoleezza Rice. They warned her that "significant terrorist attacks" would occur in the US in the a matter of months or weeks.

  Inexplicably, nothing happened. The July meeting between Black and Rice was completely left out of the 9/11 Commission's official report, as if they wanted to pretend it had never happened at all...
• 

  (#11) Brooksley Born

  • 83

  Brooksley Born is an activist lawyer who served as chairperson of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) in the '90s. Born was an early advocate for curtailing the expanding market for derivatives, a major driving factor in the 2007 economic crash.

  But when Born tried to tell Alan Greenspan that derivatives should be regulated, he completely dismissed her and made sure she couldn't take action on her own. Congress actually passed a bill that prohibited the CFTC from regulating derivatives. Obviously, Born was later vindicated, but it was too late for the country at that point.
• 

  (#5) The Crew Of The Mesaba, Who Radioed The Titanic About Icebergs

  The Mesaba was a ship that attempted to warn the Titanic's crew about icebergs in the area. The Mesaba sailed through the same waters that the Titanic was heading for several hours before the fateful iceberg collision and sent out a warning about icebergs to every ship in the area, including the Titanic.

  The crew of the Titanic did receive the message, but the radio operator who received it didn't think it was important enough to deliver to the captain. This was probably because the Titanic's radios had broken, and all the operators were overwhelmed with transcribing messages and hand-delivering them to individual passengers. One would think that a message about an unusually high number of icebergs would have gone into the "high priority" pile, but, of course hindsight's always 20/20.
• 

  (#10) Harry Markopolos

  • 66

  Harry Markopolos exposed the Bernie Madoff ponzi scheme years before it blew wide open. Markopolos worked as a financial analyst for an investment company in competition with Madoff's. In his quest to figure out what Madoff's strategy was, he realized that Madoff had to be ripping people off.

  Markopolos, who describes himself as a math geek, uncovered the scheme simply by crunching the numbers and realizing that Madoff's returns were mathematically impossible. Markopolos took his findings to the SEC in 2001 and contacted several journalists. But nobody took him seriously, and he had to go on living "in fear of his life."

  Markopolos thinks the folks at the SEC dismissed him because none of them had expertise in finance, so they couldn't see what he was seeing. Imagine how embarrassed they felt in 2008.

New Random Displays    Display All By Ranking