Matt Taibbi with a story about Michael Winston, who blew the whistle on Countrywide Mortgages. You can guess how http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/a-whistleblowers-horror-story-20150218#ixzz3S9J9l0Dh“>this all turned out, right?

He says he’s spent over a million dollars fighting Countrywide (and the firm that acquired it, Bank of America) in court. At first, that fight proved a good gamble, as a jury granted him a multi-million-dollar award for retaliation and wrongful termination.

But after Winston won that case, an appellate judge not only wiped out that jury verdict, but allowed Bank of America to counterattack him with a vengeance.

Last summer, the bank vindictively put a lien on Winston’s house (one he’d bought, ironically, with a Countrywide mortgage). The bank eventually beat him for nearly $98,000 in court costs.

That single transaction means a good guy in the crisis drama, Winston, had by the end of 2014 paid a larger individual penalty than virtually every wrongdoer connected with the financial collapse of 2008.

When Winston protested his preposterous punishment on the grounds that a trillion-dollar company recouping legal fees from an unemployed whistleblower was unreasonable and unnecessary, a California Superior Court judge denied his argument — get this — on the grounds that Winston failed to prove a disparity in resources between himself and Bank of America!

This is from the court’s ruling:

Plaintiff argues that the disparity in the resources between the individual plaintiff and the defendant Bank of America make it unfair to place the cost of the premium on plaintiff. Plaintiff offered no evidence in support of this argument; it is rejected.

“I mean, Carlos Slim, the world’s richest individual, is nothing next to Bank of America,” says Winston today. “I just have to shake my head at all of it.”

An articulate, well-educated family man who speaks with great pride about his two grown children, who’ve stood by him throughout his troubles, Winston’s life has been turned upside down by his experience.

“I’ve never in my life not worked, but I’m unemployable now,” says Winston, a longtime high-level executive at blue-chip corporations like McDonnell-Douglas and Lockheed Martin. Although he spent most of a lifetime scrupulously saving, he says he’s “worried now that there will be a time when I won’t be able to support my family.”

Even worse, while the bank was going after his savings, Winston was diagnosed with laryngeal cancer. He has been undergoing painful treatment ever since and is literally fighting for his life now, on top of everything else.

“It’s been a very difficult year,” he says.

Yet Winston would likely bear all of this more easily were it not for bitterness over the fact that the sacrifices of whistleblowers like himself have too often resulted in dead ends or worse in recent years.