Month: September 2019

Apparently, beer and wine aren’t the only beverages containing surprisingly high levels of glyphosate, a purported carcinogen and one of the most widely used herbicides in the world (it’s the main ingredient in the weed killer Roundup).

Swiss food and beverage behemoth Nestle warned its suppliers that it will be performing more tests on coffee beans after the company found higher levels of the weedkiller glyphosate – the key ingredient of weedkiller Roundup, originally designed and sold by Monsanto.

For those who aren’t familiar with the controversial agro-chemical, Glyphosate has found itself at the center of a flood of lawsuits against Monsanto and its new owner, Bayer, as alleged victims claim that Roundup causes cancer. After buying Monsanto for $63 billion, Bayer is facing billions of dollars of lawsuits that have hammered the company’s shares.

Now, the world’s largest coffee roaster is forcing suppliers from Indonesia to Brazil to scramble to meet its new standards. Nestle hopes these tests will be “temporary” until these countries “correct” the application of glyphosate.

But Nestle’s request is just one indicator of a conflict arising between companies that import large quantities of agricultural commodities and the farmers that grow them, as more countries ban or severely limit the use of Roundup.

“We actively monitor chemical residues, including glyphosate, in the green coffee that we purchase,” Switzerland-based Nestle said in a statement. “This monitoring program has shown that in some green coffee lots chemical residue levels are close to limits defined by regulations. We are reinforcing our controls working with suppliers to ensure that our green coffee continues to meet regulations all around the world.”

According to Bloomberg, the new measures requested by Nestle “have the potential to complicate global coffee trade-flows” since Europe has some of the most strict standards on glyphosate levels, while Australia and Malaysia also have relatively high limits. That’s compared to the US, where restrictions on glyphosate levels in food are relatively lenient.

Nestle said it is “working with growers” to reduce their reliance on glyphosate: “Our agronomists will continue to work with coffee farmers to help them improve their weed management practices, including the appropriate use of herbicides and adoption of other weeding methods.”

Meanwhile, a manager at one Brazilian growing cooperative said his organization is struggling to help members reduce glyphosate levels to help meet European standards.

Submitted by Priceonomics

Employee turnover is an expensive problem, and business owners with small teams can feel the pinch the most. Not only does your business pause when an employee leaves, but you also have to spend valuable time finding that person’s replacement. 

Turnover is extremely common—and it’s also extremely preventable. By isolating the reasons why good employees leave, we can help business owners take concrete steps to reduce turnover. 

Gusto is the employee system of record for more than 100,000 small businesses across the US. We recently conducted a study to better understand why employees leave for voluntary and involuntary reasons. Here’s what we found.

The three drivers of employee turnover

Across the Gusto employer base, the average company has a 32% turnover rate per year. In other words, 32% of employees quit or are terminated every year. At a 20-person business where everyone earns $50,000 a year, that 32% turnover rate can cost nearly $100,000 a year.*

In our analysis, we found that three drivers were shown to be the most predictive of turnover at small businesses: 

• Pay: For hourly employees, turnover rates level off at the $25-per-hour wage. After that wage, additional pay has a minimal effect on turnover.
• Tenure: Newer employees have a higher turnover risk than tenured employees, particularly within the first year.
• Managerial responsibility: Employees who manage others have a lower turnover rate than those without direct reports. 

Why employees leave small businesses

1. Pay

For this analysis, we focused on hourly employees since that’s where we saw the real differences emerge. Among this group of employees, how does their chance of leaving change with different pay rates? 

The following chart plots the average turnover rate at various hourly rates.

An employee making the current federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour has a 70% chance of leaving within a year, which is more than double the average turnover rate of 32%. It’s also nearly double the average turnover rate (41%) of someone earning $15 an hour (the new proposed federal minimum wage outlined in the Raise the Wage Act).

Takeaway: Pay becomes less of a contributing factor to turnover at around $25/hour. 

2. Tenure

The chart below shows the average turnover rate by an employee’s tenure:

Nearly half of new hires leave a business within their first year. That number drops to 40% in year two, and by the third year, it’s reduced to 32%. 

Takeaway: Once employees get through the first year, they’re less likely to leave. One theory is that employees are less likely to get terminated as they prove themselves at work.

3. Managerial responsibilities

Are employees with direct reports more or less likely to leave than those who don’t manage anyone?

The following chart shows the turnover rates of three types of employees:

• Senior managers: Employees who have a direct report, but no boss. (This group does not include business owners.)
• Middle managers: Employees with a direct report and a boss
• Employees only: Employees without any direct reports

We found a strong correlation between management responsibilities and turnover. A senior manager has just a 13% turnover rate, compared to an employee without any direct reports, who is over three times more likely to leave. 

Even after controlling for factors like salary and tenure, people who manage others are still more likely to stay. One theory is that senior managers are usually more invested in the team and the future of the business—which can make it harder to leave.

Takeaway: The data strongly indicate that managerial responsibilities are correlated with someone’s chance of leaving.

Three strategies that can prevent employee turnover at small businesses

Any action plan for companies that are serious about minimizing turnover should include the following:

• Recognize that higher wages strongly correlate with lower turnover when employees are paid less than $15 per hour (the new proposed federal minimum wage).
• Pay special attention to an employee’s first year and set them up for success.
• Create a career ladder that involves managerial responsibility as employees add value to your business.

Let’s explore each recommendation in more detail.

1. Revisit your comp package

The more you pay your employees, the lower your turnover rate—until a certain point. This finding is particularly important if you have employees with hourly rates of $25 and below. After that benchmark rate, additional compensation results in only a slightly lower turnover rate.

However, not every business owner can easily bump up their team’s pay.

Here are a few other best practices that can help you prevent employees from leaving because of non-competitive pay:

• Set a salary for yourself that’s reasonable and meaningful. Revisiting your own salary will help you be better prepared as you figure out compensation for other people on your team.
• Do competitive research so you can be sure your compensation package is meaningful to new hires—and sets you apart from other companies.
• Don’t ask about salary history: Make sure asking about a candidate’s salary history isn’t a part of your hiring process, so you’re following the law and staying unbiased. 
• Brush up on the latest minimum wage laws for your city and state so you can be sure you’re compliant.

2.  A meaningful employee onboarding program

The first year is a danger zone. During this timeframe, employees leave companies at roughly the same rate at which they stay. 

Onboarding programs aimed at making first-year employees successful can pay immediate dividends in reducing employee turnover. Too often, onboarding programs focus mostly on the immediate requirements—like filling out a W-4—and not enough on training that sets employees up for success. 

Below are a few resources to help you set up a better onboarding program:

• Personalize your program: Use the information you learned about your new hire throughout the interview process—whether it’s from a reference check or the candidate themselves—to inform how you onboard them. For example, if a candidate learns better by doing, give them a project to start on right away.
• Use an employee onboarding checklist to be sure you don’t forget any key compliance steps along the way.
• Create an employee handbook that makes it easy for new employees to understand your company’s policies, mission, and what you expect from them.
• Stay on top of best-in-class examples: Get inspired by these pro tips from companies with thoughtful onboarding programs.

And while you should never take your most tenured employees for granted, it’s nice to know they’re more likely to stay at your business.

This is an opportunity to keep them engaged through career development plans that help them grow, thoughtful promotions and bonuses, and making sure their compensation packages stay competitive.

3. Pay attention to career growth

While we don’t advise giving someone management responsibility before they’re ready, it’s clear that company leaders have some of the lowest turnover rates. 

In practice, that means you should be on the lookout for high-potential employees, since an employee with managerial responsibility is less likely to leave their current company. Not only does leading others contribute to tenure, but expanding your management team might also help if you’re struggling to keep everyone in flying formation.

Here are a few more suggestions that you can incorporate in your business: 

• Conduct regular performance reviews that give employees tangible next steps for how they can progress in their careers.
• Give potential managers opportunities to prove their abilities to lead others, whether it’s having them manage an intern or owning a new project or process end-to-end.
• Identify the managers within your business instead of kicking off an outside search.
• Promote employees who have management potential vs. employees who are good at what they do, but lack the skills or interest in leading people.

In this analysis, we’ve found that pay, employee tenure, and management responsibility are the three biggest indicators of turnover at small businesses. They’re also three things that business owners can actually do something about.

While the strategies identified in this article aren’t free, they’re still worth considering and experimenting with. Because investing in these areas can be more cost-effective than having your best employee walk out the door for a reason you could have easily fixed. 

Methodology

We looked at anonymized data among tens of thousands of Gusto employers across the United States from a diverse set of industries, geographies, and business sizes. The goal was to see how many employees that were employed at a business on January 1, 2018 left at some point during that year, either for voluntary or involuntary reasons. We were then able to segment the data by tenure, pay, and management responsibility to unpack the circumstances that contribute to employee turnover.

*Based on the Work Institute 2018 Retention Report, which calculated that turnover costs can equal 33% of a person’s salary.

Is a Trump vs Hillary Round Two possible?

Based on bookies’ bets and a few recent actions, speculation is once again starting to grow that Hillary Clinton may be about to enter the Democratic Party presidential nominee race…

First, the repeatedly failed presidential candidate has a suddenly full media schedule this week, making appearances on CBS Sunday Morning, Stephen Colbert, and The View among others.

Secondly, as GatewayPundit notes, in the interview with CBS Sunday Morning that is airing this weekend, Clinton said that things happened during 2016 campaign that will not happen again, implying that she may be planning to try again.

“Look, there were many funny things that happened in my election that will not happen again,” Clinton said. “And I’m hoping that both the public and press understand the way Trump plays the game.”

Clinton went on to call President Donald Trump a “illegitimate president” and accusing him of winning by using voter purging and suppression.

“I believe he understands that the many varying tactics they used – from voter suppression and voter purging to hacking to the false stories – he knows that there were just a bunch of different reasons why the election turned out like it did.”

And reflects on “losing to a corrupt, human tornado.”

Thirdly, Clinton also asserted that she supports impeachment and thinks that people are attempting to spread “falsehoods” about Joe Biden.

“The most outrageously false things were said about me in 2016, and unfortunately, enough people believed them. So, this is an effort to sow these falsehoods against Biden,”

The president of the United States has betrayed our country.

That’s not a political statement—it’s a harsh reality, and we must act.

He is a clear and present danger to the things that keep us strong and free.

I support impeachment.

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) September 25, 2019

Fourthly, she has stepped up her attacks on Trump’s actions dramatically, seemingly forgetting her own:

“I don’t care who you’re for in the Democratic primary, or if you’re a Republican, when the president of the United States, who has taken an oath to protect and defend the Constitution, uses his position to in effect extort a foreign government for his own political purposes, I think that is very much what the Founders worried about in high crimes and misdemeanors.”

Finally, Wall Street’s worst nightmare appears to be coming true as Elizabeth Warren surges to the top of prediction markets’ expectations for who will get the nomination.

Source: Bloomberg

And the market is starting to pay attention to Warren’s rise…

Source: Bloomberg

With Biden down – spun as “smeared by Trump” – who better than Hillary to step in statesman-like to defend Americans’ democracy?

Judging by the bookies’, admittedly still outside, odds, it is very possible…

We are sure President Trump will look forward to that.

Authored by Irina Slav via OilPrice.com,

The idea of colonizing Mars left the sphere of speculation a long time ago, and it’s taking long strides towards a reality. In fact, scientists are now at the stage of devising ways to make a Mars colony self-sufficient. According to one recent study, this self-sufficiency will depend on insects and high-calorie crops grown in tunnels.

Food, it appears, will be the biggest challenge, according to planetary scientist Kevin Cannon, who spoke to Space.com about the work he and his colleagues from the University of Central Florida are doing on Mars colonization.

The idea of colonizing Mars centers around making this colony self-sufficient rather than reliant on imports. While energy can be sourced locally—using solar installations and nuclear reactors, apparently—food would be more difficult to grow locally. Luckily for the future Mars settlers, technology has advanced sufficiently to make lab-grown meat one possibility. Not so luckily, insects will also have to be part of the menu.

“Bugs are the way to go, if people can get over the gross factor,” Cannon told Space.com. Insects, according to the researchers, offer a very attractive ratio between the amount of calories they can offer and the amount of water and food they need.

That’s why the team included cricket farms in their model for a self-sufficient Mars colony with a population of one million.

Besides the tiny six-legged packs of calories, Cannon’s team also factored in lab-grown protein: anything from chicken meat to fish and algae, according to Cannon, is now possible to grow in the lab and it’s not that expensive, either. In just two years, the cost of a hamburger patty has fallen from over $300,000 to just $11 thanks to generous investments in this particular technology for making meat substitutes.

Why not just transport some farm animals and keep them for milk, dairies, and meat? Because the transportation itself would be a challenge, and feeding them on Mars would be another challenge, according to Cannon. Mars’s soil is not like Earth’s, which is why even plants for humans may need to grow in tunnels rather than in greenhouses outside.

“If you want to feed a large population on another planet, you have to move away from the idea of watery vegetables and really think about the tremendous amounts of energy, water and raw materials needed to produce enough calories,” Cannon told Space.com, noting that most research on Martian settlement has focused on food grown to feed astronauts, but has underestimated the amount of space, water, and sunlight that many plants need.

The team has estimated that with cricket farms and some 9,000 miles of tunnels for growing vegetables, a colony of a million people could achieve self-sufficiency within a century. While this happens, a lot of food would need to be imported from Earth and this would add to the total costs of colonizing the Red Planet. In the meantime, most Martian settlers would need to overcome the common human aversion to eating insects. Lab-grown burgers would certainly help.

In the months leading up to a CIA whistleblower’s hearsay complaint about President Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, the US intelligence community quietly eliminated a requirement that whistleblowers must provide first-hand knowledge of alleged wrongdoings, according to The Federalist‘s Sean Davis. 

Then, on September 24 – days before the anti-Trump was declassified and released to the public – a new version of the whistleblower complaint form revised in August, 2019 – the Disclosure of Urgent Concern” form – was uploaded and used by the CIA employee to file the complaint.

And while the public just learned about this a week ago, the whistleblower letter to House and Senate Intelligence Committee chairs Adam Schiff (D-CA) and Richard Burr (R-NC) was dated August 12, the same month the form was updated. 

The brand new version of the whistleblower complaint form, which was not made public until after the transcript of Trump’s July 25 phone call with the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and the complaint addressed to Congress were made public, eliminates the first-hand knowledge requirement and allows employees to file whistleblower complaints even if they have zero direct knowledge of underlying evidence and only “heard about [wrongdoing] from others.”

The internal properties of the newly revised “Disclosure of Urgent Concern” form, which the intelligence community inspector general (ICIG) requires to be submitted under the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act (ICWPA), show that the document was uploaded on September 24, 2019, at 4:25 p.m., just days before the anti-Trump complaint was declassified and released to the public. The markings on the document state that it was revised in August 2019, but no specific date of revision is disclosed. –The Federalist

A previous version of the document provided by the ICIG and DNI until recently declared that whistleblower complaints must only contain first-hand knowledge of alleged wrongdoing – and made clear that hearsay, gossip or rumor would be rejected. 

“The [Intelligence Community Inspector General] cannot transmit information via the ICPWA based on an employee’s second-hand knowledge of wrongdoing,” reads the prior version of the form, which contains the bolded heading: “FIRST-HAND INFORMATION REQUIRED,“ and “This includes information received from another person, such as when an employee informs you that he/she witnessed some type of wrongdoing.”

“If you think that wrongdoing took place, but can provide nothing more than second-hand or unsubstantiated assertions, [the Intelligence Community Inspector General] will not be able to process the complaint or information for submission as an ICWPA,” the form concludes. 

Old form: 

New form:

And as The Federalist breaks down – “The Ukraine call complaint against Trump is riddled not with evidence directly witnessed by the complainant, but with repeated references to what anonymous officials allegedly told the complainant.” 

For example: 

“I have received information from multiple U.S. Government officials,” “officials have informed me,” “officials with direct knowledge of the call informed me,” “the White House officials who told me this information,” “I was told by White House officials,” “the officials I spoke with,” “I was told that a State Department official,” “I learned from multiple U.S. officials,” “One White House official described this act,” “Based on multiple readouts of these meetings recounted to me,” “I also learned from multiple U.S. officials,” “The U.S. officials characterized this meeting,” “multiple U.S. officials told me,” “I learned from U.S. officials,” “I also learned from a U.S. official,” “several U.S. officials told me,” “I heard from multiple U.S. officials,” and “multiple U.S. officials told me.” –The Federalist

And if any doubt remains, the CIA employee told Schiff Burr (R-NC) in their August 12 letter; “I was not a direct witness to most of the events,” which is repeated in the actual complaint as: “I was not a witness to most of the events described…“

Meanwhile, the complaint contains several false claims noted by Davis:

While the complaint alleged that Trump demanded that Ukraine physically return multiple servers potentially related to ongoing investigations of foreign interference in the 2016 elections, the transcript of the call between Trump and Zelensky shows that such a request was never made.

The complainant also falsely alleged that Trump told Zelensky that he should keep the current prosecutor general at the time, Yuriy Lutsenko, in his current position in the country. The transcript showed that exchange also did not happen.

Additionally, the complaint falsely alleged that T. Ulrich Brechbuhl, a U.S. State Department official, was a party to the phone call between Trump and Zelensky.

“I was told that a State Department official, Mr. T. Ulrich Brechbuhl, also listened in on the call,” the complaint alleged. Shortly after the complaint was released, CBS News reported that Brechbuhl was not on the phone call. –The Federalist

Following the complaint, the Justice Department (DOJ) and Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) deemed the submission to be statutorily deficient and therefore free from reporting requirements to Congress. Under mounting pressure, however, the White House declassified and released the complaint to Congress on Wednesday evening, hours after they released transcript of the underlying Trump-Zelensky phone call in question which refuted grandiose claims made in mainstream publications such as Trump pressuring Zelensky “about eight times.” 

Read the rest of the report here. 

Brace yourself, because this stat is about to be utilized by Democrats in every debate and speech between now and November 2020. The average cost of employer-provided health coverage passed $20,000 for a family plan this year, according to a new survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Premiums rose 5% to $20,576 for the employer-provided plans in 2019. On average, 71% of that cost is borne by the businesses while the rest is paid by the employee.

But why is this number such a milestone? As economist Drew Altman told WSJ: “It’s the cost of buying an economy car, but buying it every year.”

Though employers still bear a larger percentage of the overall cost of health-insurance plans, costs for families rose even more swiftly than costs for employers this past year, with an 8% jump (to $6,015 a year). Singletons fared slightly better: Premiums for the individual plans increased by just 4% (to $7,188).

The disappointing fact is that, for many companies, a 5% annual increase in health-benefit-related costs isn’t new, according to WSJ. And some firms are instituting new policies, like a $250 penalty for employees who get imaging scans without checking a price-transparency system.

At Elkay Manufacturing Co., a closely held company in Oak Brook, Ill., with around 1,500 US employees, the cost of coverage has been going up around 5% to 6% a year, said Carol Partington, senior manager of total benefits. For 2019, the company introduced its first high-deductible plan, and put in place a new $250 penalty for employees who get imaging scans without checking prices through a price-transparency program.

Elkay, which makes products including sinks and faucets, and does interior design work, tries to keep workers’ share of health costs at roughly 20%, with the company bearing the rest, Ms. Partington said.

“If our costs go up, theirs is going to go up in that same proportion.”

And another trend: The rising cost of employee health benefits continued to exceed inflation and wage growth, according to the Kaiser foundation, squeezing workers despite a low unemployment rate, which should, in theory, press companies to raise wages and sweeten benefit packages.

“For some workers, employer-based coverage isn’t such a great deal,” because of the high costs they have to bear, said Gary Claxton, a senior vice president of the Kaiser foundation.

At companies that employ a lot of low-wage employees, the low-wage earners are often forced to shoulder a larger percentage of their health-care costs.

“For some workers, employer-based coverage isn’t such a great deal,” because of the high costs they have to bear, said Gary Claxton, a senior vice president of the Kaiser foundation.

But why is this stat so important to the election cycle? As one political expert said, health-care policy is playing a big role in the Democratic debates thanks to the party’s embrace of Bernie Sanders’ Medicare for All (“M4A”) plan.

“Health-care affordability is generally the No. 1 issue for voters,” said Dan Mendelson, a founder of a health-care consulting firm and former federal official who is now an operating partner at a private-equity firm. “The issue is the costs that consumers actually see, including deductibles, copays and the cost of prescription drugs.”

Remember: Joe Biden has endorsed a plan that would effectively create a public option by letting consumers buy into Medicaid.

Though Democratic Socialists like to complain about the immense profits that the health-care industry is raking in, the biggest driver of these higher insurance costs is simply the rising price that insurers and employers pay for health care.

“The vast majority of this can be explained by prices,” particularly for hospital care, said Niall Brennan, chief executive. Consolidation by hospital systems has in many cases given them a larger share of their local markets, which “enables them to engage in pretty unconstrained pricing behavior,” he said.

A report published earlier this year from the Health Care Cost Institute found that between 2013 and 2017, average health care prices increased 17.1%, while health-care utilization declined 0.2%.

Of course, this number might also benefit President Trump, too; it’s just one more thing that he can blame on Obama.

Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,

The word “whistleblower” has been trending in news headlines lately, but not for the reasons that any sane person might hope for.

“Read the whistleblower complaint regarding President Trump’s communications with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky”, says The Washington Post.

“Trump responds to hearing on whistleblower complaint”, says MSNBC.

“Trump-Ukraine scandal: what did the whistleblower say and how serious is it?”, writes The Guardian.

“Whistleblower complaint says White House tried to ‘lock down’ Ukraine call records” announces CBS.

“Whistleblower’s complaint is a devastating report from a savvy official”, declares CNN.

So who is this “savvy official”? Who is this courageous whistleblower who boldly shone the light of truth upon the mechanisms of power in the interests of the common man? Who is this brave, selfless individual who set off an impeachment inquiry by taking a stand and revealing the fact that the US president made a phone call in July urging Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to help investigate corruption allegations against Joe Biden and his son?

Well believe it or not, according to The New York Times this brave, noble whistleblower who the mainstream media are currently championing is an officer for the Central Intelligence Agency.

The idea that the media needs to “protect” a high-level CIA officer making explosive claims about the president, which have now been used as the basis for impeachment proceedings, is such an insane perversion of journalistic ethics

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) September 27, 2019

“The whistle-blower who revealed that President Trump sought foreign help for his re-election and that the White House sought to cover it up is a CIA officer who was detailed to work at the White House at one point, according to three people familiar with his identity,” The New York Times reports. “The man has since returned to the CIA, the people said. Little else is known about him.”

So there you have it. A mysterious stranger from the lying, torturing, propagandizing, drug trafficking, assassinating, coup-staging, warmongering, psychopathic CIA was working in the White House, heroically provided the political/media class with politically powerful information out of the goodness of his heart, and then vanished off into the Langley sunset. Clearly there is nothing suspicious about this story at all.

In all seriousness, even to call this spook a “whistleblower” is ridiculous on its face. You don’t get to call someone from the US intelligence community a whistleblower unless they are actually whistleblowing on the US intelligence community. That’s not a thing. A CIA officer who exposes information about government officials is an operative performing an operation unless proven otherwise, because that’s what the CIA does; it liberally leaks information wherever it’s convenient for CIA agendas while withholding all other information behind a veil of government secrecy.

A CIA officer who exposes information about CIA wrongdoings without the CIA’s permission is a whistleblower. A CIA officer who exposes information about someone else is just a spook doing spook things. You can recognize the latter by the way the mass media supports, applauds and employs them. You can recognize the former by the way they have been persecuted, imprisoned, and/or died under mysterious circumstances.

But if you listen to the billionaire media, we should be calling this CIA officer a whistleblower, we should be enraged at The New York Times for exposing that CIA officer’s identity, and we should be raising a small fortune on GoFundMe for “legal aid” that this CIA officer will never need.

“The idea that the media needs to ‘protect’ a high-level CIA officer making explosive claims about the president, which have now been used as the basis for impeachment proceedings, is such an insane perversion of journalistic ethics,” journalist Michael Tracey tweeted today on this new development.

Socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor.
Privacy for the powerful, surveillance for the powerless.
Charity for CIA spooks who will receive full establishment protection, rugged individualism for everyone else. https://t.co/hknmtlFVdv

— Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ (@caitoz) September 27, 2019

While all this political/media class cheerleading for whistleblower protections is going on, the most prominent whistleblower in America remains imprisoned for taking a principled stand against secret grand juries while being driven into crippling debt. Chelsea Manning is still racking up fines of $1,000 per day while locked in a Virginia federal detention center for refusing to testify against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. The mainstream press that is so keen to champion a “whistleblower” who works for the CIA and provided information which feeds into America’s fake partisan pro wrestling feud has been almost completely silent on the actual whistleblower who exposed actual US war crimes.

“The courageous whistleblower Chelsea Manning has now been held in a federal detention center in Alexandria, Virginia for more than six months,” reads a recent article by World Socialist Website, one of the only news outlets to consistently report on Manning’s plight. “Manning has not been charged with or committed any crime. She was sent to jail on March 8, 2019 for refusing to testify before a secret grand jury that has indicted persecuted WikiLeaks founder and publisher Julian Assange, who published the information she leaked exposing rampant US imperialist criminality.”

“The vindictive treatment of Chelsea Manning has included ‘administrative segregation’ — a prison euphemism for solitary confinement — and being fined an unprecedented $1,000 per day for refusing to answer grand jury questions,” WSWS reports. “By the time she might be released in October 2020, she will be left owing the US government as much as $440,000. Convicted antiwar activist Jeremy Hammond, who provided intelligence documents to WikiLeaks, has been also brought to the same jail as Manning in order to coerce him into giving false testimony.”

“On a scale of ‘haha’ to ‘lol,’ how likely would you say it is that politicians’ sudden interest in whistleblowing will lead to the reform of the Espionage Act, which the government has routinely used to jail the sources behind some of the most important stories in US history?” tweeted NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden in response to an Onion article satirizing the latest hypocrisy.

On a scale of “haha” to “lol,” how likely would you say it is that politicians’ sudden interest in whistleblowing will lead to the reform of the Espionage Act, which the government has routinely used to jail the sources behind some of the most important stories in US history? https://t.co/CIbcLCN5Qn

— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) September 26, 2019

Pointing out hypocrisy is such a common practice in politics that it often wears a bit thin these days, especially since it’s frequently done in a disingenuous way, but when implemented with intellectual honesty it serves a very useful purpose: it shows when people aren’t really being truthful about the position that they are taking.

The political/media class of the United States do not care about whistleblowers. They do not care about truth, and they do not care about justice. They do not care about holding power to account, because they exist only to serve power.

I don’t pretend to know what the CIA’s game is here; it probably isn’t to remove Trump from office because everyone knows that will not happen and failed impeachments historically boost a president’s popularity. But I do know that everyone cheerleading for this fake “whistleblower” while ignoring the real ones has exposed themselves.

*  *  *

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