FOCUS: Charles Pierce | Senate Democrats Folded Like a Cheap Suit Charles Pierce, Esquire Pierce writes: "The United States Senate saw out the final hours of this plague-ridden alley-rat of a year by doing what it does best: capping off a week of posturing by folding like a cheap suit."
This is particularly true of the Democratic caucus, which talked bravely for almost a month about delaying a vote on the National Defense Authorization Act until Mitch McConnell brought an increase from $600 to $2,000 in survival checks to the floor for a clean vote. Whereupon all but six Democratic senators went over the side and voted with McConnell to move to begin debate on overriding the president*'s veto of the NDAA with no strings—and, more important, no additional cash—attached. It is important to note that, by the logic of the Senate, the country can afford $15.4 billion for the president*'s idiot Space Force next year, but it simply cannot afford the cost of keeping sick people from starving or being evicted. Dickens died too goddamn soon for these people.
(Before moving on, we should call out by name the five Democrats who joined Bernie Sanders—and, it should be said, six Republicans—in sticking to their word on the survival checks: Jeff Merkley, Chris Van Hollen, Ron Wyden and both senators from the Commonwealth—God save it! Interestingly, both incumbent Republicans from Georgia declined to vote at all.)
I am as big a fan of conservative Republican chaos as anyone is, so watching McConnell continue to go upside the president*'s head on the NDAA ordinarily would bring me great joy, especially since the president*'s veto was based on a) wanting to preserve the names of Confederate traitors on U.S. military posts and, b) wanting to arrange for Twitter to stop being mean to him. But the country is suffering now, immediately, and the unseemly scramble to pass this hog farm of a bill while essentially stiffing the rest of the country is an embarrassment to the idea of a civil society. But, as has been the case since forever, all you have to do to scare Democrats into line is infer that they are leaving the country open to its enemies, as McConnell more than well knows. It's Red-baiting without actual Reds. From Politico:
McConnell in particular slammed progressive Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) for making the defense bill collateral damage in the stimulus fight. Sanders is leading the charge with conservative Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) for $2,000 stimulus checks, which were approved overwhelmingly in the House earlier this week at Trump’s urging. Trump has derided the stimulus legislation, which he ultimately signed Sunday, that would only grant $600 stimulus checks to Americans. “The Senate will not let our national security be shoved off course, certainly not be senators who have spent years, literally years, trying to gut America’s capabilities while our adversaries continue ramping up," McConnell said of Sanders.
I'm fairly confident that the Senate will join the House of Representatives and override the president*'s veto. I am absolutely confident that this will occasion a full-blown tantrum from down at Camp Runamuck. But the response of the institutions of government to the exigencies of this monumental public health emergency remains more than a little embarrassing.
Alan Simpson, the Senator from Wyoming calls senior citizens the Greediest Generation as he compared "Social Security " to a Milk Cow with 310 million teats. Here's a response in a letter from PATTY MYERS in Montana ... I think she is a little ticked off! She also tells it like it is!
"Hey Alan, let's get a few things straight!!!
1. As a career politician, you have been on the public dole (tit) for FIFTY YEARS.
2. I have been paying Social Security taxes for 48 YEARS (since I was 15 years old. I am now 63).
3. My Social Security payments, and those of millions of other Americans, were safely tucked away in an interest bearing account for decades until you political pukes decided to raid the account and give OUR money to a bunch of zero losers in return for votes, thus bankrupting the system and turning Social Security into a Ponzi scheme that would make Bernie Madoff proud.
4. Recently, just like Lucy & Charlie Brown, you and "your ilk" pulled the proverbial football away from millions of American seniors nearing retirement and moved the goalposts for full retirement from age 65 to age, 67. NOW, you and your "shill commission" are proposing to move the goalposts YET AGAIN.
5. I, and millions of other Americans, have been paying into Medicare from Day One, and now "you morons" propose to change the rules of the game. Why? Because "you idiots" mismanaged other parts of the economy to such an extent that you need to steal our money from Medicare to pay the bills.
6. I, and millions of other Americans, have been paying income taxes our entire lives, and now you propose to increase our taxes yet again. Why? Because you "incompetent bxxxxds" spent our money so profligately that you just kept on spending even after you ran out of money. Now, you come to the American taxpayers and say you need more to pay off YOUR debt.
To add insult to injury, you label us "greedy" for calling "bxxxxxxt" to your incompetence.
Well, Captain Bxxxxxxit, I have a few questions for YOU:
1. How much money have you earned from the American taxpayers during your pathetic 50-year political career?
2. At what age did you retire from your pathetic political career, and how much are you receiving in annual retirement benefits from the American taxpayers?
3. How much do you pay for YOUR government provided health insurance?
4. What cuts in YOUR retirement and healthcare benefits are you proposing in your disgusting deficit reduction proposal, or as usual, have you exempted yourself and your political cronies?
It is you, Captain Bxxxxxxt, and your political co-conspirators called Congress who are the "greedy" ones. It is you and your fellow nutcase thieves who have bankrupted America and stolen the American dream from millions of loyal, patriotic taxpayers.
And for what? Votes and your job and retirement security at our expense, you lunk-headed, leech.
That's right, sir. You and yours have bankrupted America for the sole purpose of advancing your pathetic, political careers. You know it, we know it, and you know that we know it.
And you can take that to the bank, you miserable son of a bxxxxx.
P.S. And stop calling Social Security benefits "entitlements". WHAT AN INSULT!!!!
I have been paying in to the SS system for 45 years “It's my money”-give it back to me the way the system was designed and stop patting yourself on the back like you are being generous by doling out these monthly checks .
EVERYONE!! If you agree with what a Montana citizen, Patty Myers, says, please PASS IT ON!!!!
n the past 24 hours, there have been 37 airliner crashes, each plane with over 100 people on board. 3,700 dead! Oh wait — sorry. CORRECTION: In the past day, 3,700 Americans have died from COVID-19. Because if 3,700 Americans had died in 37 plane crashes in just one day, all hell would break loose! Demands would be made! Action taken. Those responsible would be held accountable. The nation would be paralyzed in grief and their voices would be heard. Any president who would claim these crashes didn’t happen or that the 3,700 deaths were a hoax, he’d be dealt with, right? Now imagine 3,700 more crashes today with 3,800 dead, and then the same tomorrow, 4,000 dead and on and on, day after day, month after month. The uproar from the public, the immediate removal of the president — the country would not let this continue. Why are we not in an uprising? Why are we resigned to this as inevitable? How many more deaths will it take? Which plane is your loved one on today?
Trump 'Did Not Want Anyone Tested for Covid Unless They Were in Hospital and Vomiting' Rachel Brodsky, The Independent Brodsky writes: "In a closer look at President Donald Trump's last few months in office, The New York Times has published a detailed new report around how the outgoing US leader wanted to approach the worsening coronavirus pandemic."
Overheard yelling at his son-in-law and senior advisor Jared Kushner on 19 August, Mr Trump reportedly demanded to "do what Mexico does" when it comes to testing for Covid-19.
"They don’t give you a test till you get to the emergency room and you’re vomiting," he said during a gathering of top aides in the Oval Office.
The statement mirrors Mr Trump's past thinking around how the US coronavirus cases should appear: specifically, the fewer tests conducted, the fewer positive cases on record.
The New York Timesalso reports that Trump was frustrated that Dr Francis S Collins, head of the National Institutes of Health, had said that it would still be a matter of days before the government could give approval for using convalescent plasma to treat Covid.
"They’re Democrats! They’re against me! They want to wait!" Trump said, arguing that the government's top medical professionals were conspiring against him.
According to interviews with more than two dozen current and former administration officials, Mr Trump's main concern around managing the public health crisis in the last quarter of his presidency essentially boiled down to how he could stand to benefit.
For example, as he made public promises around vaccine availability by Election Day, Mr Trump expressed worry that Joe Biden would receive credit if that deadline was hit.
When asked for a statement around the administration's coronavirus response, White House spokesman Brian Morgenstern had only positive words. "President Trump has led the largest mobilization of the public and private sectors since WWII to defeat Covid-19 and save lives."
Even as experts like Alex M. Azar II, the health and human services secretary, continued to impress upon Mr Trump the need for mask wearing, the president reportedly continued to blame too much testing for the worsening pandemic.
"I’m going to lose,” Mr Trump reportedly told Mr Kushner during debate preparations. "And it’s going to be your fault, because of the testing." When questioned, Mr Morgenstern denied that the exchange ever took place.
As of Thursday (30 December), 342,577 Americans had died from the pandemic. Vice President Mike Pence, Dr Anthony Fauci, Mr Azar, and more officials have received a Covid-19 vaccine. Mr Trump, who contracted the virus in October, has not.
The Secret Service is tasked with protecting the president-elect. (photo: Getty)
Joe Biden to Have New Secret Service Team Amid Concern About Trump Loyalty Victoria Bekiempis, Guardian UK Bekiempis writes: "Joe Biden is expected to receive Secret Service protection with a new team that is more familiar to him and replacing some agents amid concerns that they may be politically allied with Donald Trump."
In a changing of the guard as well as the man to be guarded at the White House, Biden’s security detail will undergo some staffing changes, the Washington Post reported on Thursday.
Several “senior” Secret Service agents are poised to return to the president-elect’s protection team and Biden knows these agents well because they guarded him and his family during his time as vice-president, according to the article, echoed in a report by CNN, citing a law enforcement source.
Re-assignments and promotions are common during transition periods between presidential administrations and are meant to increase comfort and trust between a president-elect and his security team, who shadow the commander-in-chief closely, including during private moments and sensitive discussions.
Although staffing changes are typical, several incidents reportedly contributed to the heightened concerns from Biden’s allies that some agents and officers might be loyal to Trump.
Some members of the president’s detail reportedly urged their colleagues not to wear masks during trips, for example – despite the federal government’s official guidance on Covid-19 – as Trump himself disparaged mask-wearing and held out for months before being seen wearing one in public.
In what was described as an “unprecedented” move, the Secret Service had permitted former detail leader Anthony Ornato to temporarily leave his role and serve as White House deputy chief of staff.
Ornato was among the coordinators of the June photo op for which Trump marched through Washington DC’s Lafayette Square to stand with a Bible – after peaceful protesters were forced from the area by troops on federal order, sparking uproar in political circles as well as among the public.
Ornato also assisted in the planning of many Trump campaign rallies even as Covid-19 tore through the US and gatherings were being discouraged or banned outright. In addition to members of the public, many Secret Service members contracted coronavirus or were exposed.
The Secret Service declined to discuss the reports. Biden has had a security detail since March, when he was campaigning for the Democratic nomination.
While former vice-presidents are given a security detail for six months after leaving office, he formally requested Secret Service protection after protesters rushed on to the stage at a campaign rally, CNN said.
Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, the two Democratic U.S. Senate candidates in Georgia, greet each other at an event on Monday. (photo: Paras Griffin/Getty)
Newly Released Georgia Senate Runoff Poll Finds Democratic Candidates With Widening Leads Madison Hall and John L. Dorman, Business Insider Excerpt: "Jon Ossoff and the Rev. Raphael Warnock, the two Democratic US Senate candidates in Georgia, widened their leads against Republican Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler in a new poll from JMC Analytics and Polling."
The JMC poll, conducted with 500 respondents on Monday and Tuesday, found Ossoff ahead of Perdue 50% to 43%, or 7 points, with 7% of respondents saying they were undecided.
The divide between Warnock and Loeffler in the poll was even larger: Warnock was ahead 53% to 44%, or 9 points, with 3% of respondents saying they were undecided.
JMC's poll was its first of the Senate runoff elections. A recent survey conducted by SurveyUSA found Ossoff with a 5-percentage-point lead and Warnock with a 7-point lead. And according to FiveThirtyEight's polling tracker, the margin of support has steadily increased for the Democratic candidates in polls conducted since the general election on November 3.
When JMC asked how and when its respondents planned to vote, 91% said they had already voted or planned to vote early in person or by mail, while 7% said they planned to vote on Election Day on Tuesday.
The two elections will directly affect the beginning of Joe Biden's presidency. If Ossoff and Warnock win, the Democratic Party will have control of the legislative and executive branches, allowing Biden to more easily accomplish his legislative goals.
But while JMC's poll is a good sign for Democrats, it is one of only a handful of pollsters that have participated in the Georgia Senate runoffs.
Hundreds of polls were conducted throughout the country before the 2020 general election; some were grossly off and led to backlash.
Nick Gourevitch, a Democratic pollster with Global Strategy Group, recently told Politico that trusting the accuracy of polls in Georgia following the tumultuous presidential polling would be a mistake.
"Everybody fundamentally understands that it's going to become an issue of partisan turnout," Gourevitch said. "And anybody who tells you they know exactly what's going to happen in terms of partisan turnout in a special election with two senators to decide control of the Senate in a post-Trump era when he's not on the [ballot] - nobody knows the answer to that question. It's a completely unique situation."
Nate Silver, the editor-in-chief and founder of FiveThirtyEight, said the answer was even simpler. "I think pollsters are being chicken," he said on FiveThirtyEight's podcast on Tuesday.
"You are not polling," Silver said of many of the large university-aligned pollsters, "because you are scared of being wrong."
He added: "Pollsters don't want to put their necks on the line because we live in a world where people are not very rational about probabilities and uncertainty."
Trump's recent defiance of the GOP is not helping the Republican candidates
Though Loeffler and Perdue have run as allies of President Donald Trump, he has put them in difficult political positions during their campaigns.
The president traveled to the state on December 5 to headline a rally on their behalf, but he mostly used the event to air his own grievances about the presidential election, repeatedly making baseless claims of voter fraud and falsely saying he won the state over Biden.
The president's pressure campaign against the state's election results drove Loeffler and Perdue last month to call for Raffensperger's resignation, which the secretary of state firmly rejected.
Watch: What does a Joe Biden presidency in the US mean for the global economy?
Warnock and Ossoff have for months been pressing for increased direct aid in a COVID-19 relief bill, and it has emerged as a major campaign issue in both Senate races.
Loeffler and Perdue had expressed support for the $900 billion compromise bill that Congress passed last week. But after the president called the $600 stimulus checks in it a "disgrace," Perdue and Loeffler backed his proposal for $2,000 checks.
Though Trump isn't on the ballot, his legacy is at stake. Loeffler and Perdue still have to closely align themselves with the president to win or risk turning off his most ardent supporters.
With control of the Senate on the line and Democrats in a solid position to capture both seats, Loeffler and Perdue will have to increase turnout on their side, or a blue wave could give Biden a unified government to enact his agenda.
Staff members dismantle the death row lethal injection facility at San Quentin State Prison on March 13, 2019. (photo: Getty)
The Decline and Fall of the American Death Penalty Ian Millhiser, Vox Excerpt: "The number of death sentences and executions in the US has fallen off a cliff since the 1990s. 2020 continued that trend."
One significant reason so few people were executed in 2020 is the Covid-19 pandemic — which has slowed court proceedings and turned gathering prison officials and witnesses for an execution into a dangerous event for everyone involved. But even if 2020 is an outlier year due to the pandemic, DPIC’s data shows a sharp and consistent trend away from the death penalty since the number of capital sentences peaked in the 1990s.
In total, only 17 people were executed in 2020, a number that would be much lower if not for the Trump administration resuming federal executions this year for the first time in nearly two decades. 2020 is the first year in American history when the federal government executed more people than all of the states combined: 10 of the 17 people executed in 2020 were killed by the federal government.
Only five states — Texas, Alabama, Georgia, Missouri, and Tennessee — conducted executions in 2020. And of these five states, only one, Texas, killed more than one person on death row.
The trend away from new death sentences and executions has continued despite two recent significant pro-death penalty opinions from the Supreme Court. The Court’s decisions in Glossip v. Gross (2015) and especially in Bucklew v. Precythe (2019) make it much more difficult for death row inmates to claim their executions violate the Constitution’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishments.
Nevertheless, it remains to be seen whether the longstanding trend away from the death penalty will eventually be reversed by the Court’s new 6-3 Republican majority. For the moment, the trend appears to be robust even in the face of significant doctrinal shifts by the Supreme Court.
Why has the number of death sentences and executions declined so sharply?
There are many factors that likely contribute to the death penalty’s decline. Among other things, crime fell sharply in recent decades — the number of murders and non-negligent manslaughters fell from nearly 25,000 in 1991 to less than 15,000 in 2010. Public support for the death penalty has also fallen sharply, from 80 percent in the mid-90s to just 55 percent in 2020, according to Gallup. And, beginning in the 1980s, many states enacted laws permitting the most serious offenders to be sentenced to life without parole instead of death — thus giving juries a way to remove such offenders from society without killing them.
Yet, as Duke University law professor Brandon Garrett argues in End of Its Rope: How Killing the Death Penalty Can Revive Criminal Justice, these and similar factors can only partially explain why the death penalty is in decline. Murders, for example, “have declined modestly since 2000 (by about 10 percent),” Garrett writes. Yet “annual death sentences have fallen by 90 percent since their peak in the 1990s.”
Garrett argues, persuasively, that one of the biggest factors driving the decline in death sentences is the fact that capital defendants typically receive far better legal representation today than they did a generation ago. As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said in 2001, “People who are well represented at trial do not get the death penalty.”
The Supreme Court briefly abolished the death penalty in Furman v. Georgia (1972). Though Furman produced a maze of concurring and dissenting opinions and no one opinion explaining the Court’s rationale, many of the justices pointed to the arbitrary manner in which death sentences were doled out. The particular death sentences before the Court in Furman, Justice Potter Stewart wrote, “are cruel and unusual in the same way that being struck by lightning is cruel and unusual” because death sentences appeared to be handed down to just a “random handful” of serious offenders.
Four years later, in Gregg v. Georgia (1976), the Court allowed states to resume sentencing serious offenders to death but only with adequate procedural safeguards. Gregg upheld a Georgia statute that allowed prosecutors to claim that a death sentence is warranted because certain “aggravating circumstances” are present, such as if the offender had a history of serious violent crime. Defense attorneys, in turn, could present the jury with “mitigating circumstances” that justified a lesser penalty, such as evidence that the defendant had a mental illness or was abused as a child. A death sentence was only warranted if the aggravating factors outweigh the mitigating factors.
This weighing test is now a centerpiece of capital trials in the United States, which means the primary job of a capital defense lawyer is often to humanize their client in the eyes of a jury. Defense counsel must explain how factors like an abusive upbringing, mental deficiencies, or personal tragedy led their client to commit a terrible crime.
Doing this well, Garrett argues, “takes a team.” It requires investigators who can dig into a client’s background, and it often requires social workers or other professionals who “have the time and the ability to elicit sensitive, embarrassing, and often humiliating evidence (e.g. family sexual abuse) that the defendant may have never disclosed.”
And yet, especially in the years following Gregg, many states didn’t provide even minimally competent legal counsel to capital defendants — much less a team that included a trained investigator and a social worker.
Virginia, for example, has executed more people since the Gregg decision than any state except for Texas. A major reason is that, for quite some time, Virginia only paid capital defense lawyers about $13 an hour, and a lawyer’s total fee was capped at $650 per case.
In 2002, however, the state created four Regional Capital Defender offices. And, when state-employed defense teams couldn’t represent a particular client, the state started paying private lawyers up to $200 an hour for in-court work and up to $150 an hour for out-of-court work. As a result, the number of death row inmates in Virginia fell from 50 in the 1990s to just five in 2017.
Virginia’s experience, moreover, was hardly isolated. As Garrett notes, many states enacted laws in the last four decades that provided at least some defense resources to capital defendants.
And in states that did not provide adequate resources to defendants, several nonprofits emerged to pick up the slack. In Texas, for example, an organization called the Gulf Region Advocacy Center (GRACE) was formed in response to a notorious case where a capital defense lawyer slept through much of his client’s trial.
Some of these nonprofit lawyers have become minor celebrities within the legal profession. At least one, Bryan Stevenson, is arguably a celebrity well beyond the world of attorneys — Stevenson was played by Michael B. Jordan in the movie Just Mercy.
Capital defendants, in other words, are much less likely to be left alone — or practically alone with an incompetent lawyer — during a trial that will decide if they live or die. And that means that they are far more likely to convince a jury that mitigating factors justify a sentence other than death.
The future of the death penalty is now very uncertain thanks to the Supreme Court’s new majority
Cases like Furman and Gregg are rooted in the Eighth Amendment, which prohibits “cruel and unusual punishments.” This amendment’s use of the word “unusual” suggests that the kinds of punishments forbidden by the Constitution should change over time, as certain punishments fall out of favor in society and thus become more unusual. As Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote in Trop v. Dulles (1958), the Eighth Amendment “must draw its meaning from the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.”
Under this framework, there’s a very strong argument that the death penalty is unconstitutional. After all, if a punishment becomes more constitutionally dubious as it becomes less common, what should we make of a punishment that was only carried out 17 times in the last year and that has been used less and less frequently over the last three decades?
The Supreme Court, however, almost certainly cut off any chance that this argument could prevail in its 5-4 decision in Bucklew.
Although Bucklew does not explicitly overrule the long line of Supreme Court decisions applying Warren’s “evolving standards of decency” test, Justice Neil Gorsuch’s majority opinion in Bucklew ignores that framework altogether and substitutes a different, much more narrow approach to the Eighth Amendment.
“Death was ‘the standard penalty for all serious crimes’ at the time of the founding,” Gorsuch wrote in Bucklew. And, while his opinion does list some methods of execution — “dragging the prisoner to the place of execution, disemboweling, quartering, public dissection, and burning alive” — that violate the Eighth Amendment, Gorsuch argues that these methods of execution were unconstitutional because “by the time of the founding, these methods had long fallen out of use and so had become ‘unusual.’”
Warren’s framework, in other words, asks whether a particular punishment has fallen out of favor today. Gorsuch’s framework, by contrast, asks whether a particular punishment was out of favor at the time of the founding. That’s a sea change in Eighth Amendment doctrine and one that could have profound implications for the death penalty.
It’s not yet clear how far the Court will take its recent opinion in Bucklew. Bucklew was a case about whether a state could use a particularly agonizing method to execute someone sentenced to death. That makes it distinct from cases like Gregg, which ask whether certain individuals can be given a death sentence in the first place.
It’s possible that the Supreme Court’s current majority will leave in place the Gregg framework, with its mandatory weighing of aggravating and mitigating factors, while also giving states more leeway to decide how to execute someone once a death sentence is handed down.
At the very least, though, Bucklew suggests that many members of the Supreme Court object to some of the foundational principles that guided Eighth Amendment cases for many decades. And that they are eager to make significant doctrinal changes to the constitutional law governing criminal punishments.
The future of the death penalty is highly uncertain. But Bucklew gives capital defense lawyers plenty of reasons to fear that future.
hey are two young girls from two very different worlds, linked by a global industry that exploits an army of children.
Olivia Chaffin, a Girl Scout in rural Tennessee, was a top cookie seller in her troop when she first heard rainforests were being destroyed to make way for ever-expanding palm oil plantations. On one of those plantations a continent away, 10-year-old Ima helped harvest the fruit that makes its way into a dizzying array of products sold by leading Western food and cosmetics brands.
Ima is among the estimated tens of thousands of children working alongside their parents in Indonesia and Malaysia, which supply 85% of the world’s most consumed vegetable oil. An Associated Press investigation found most earn little or no pay and are routinely exposed to toxic chemicals and other dangerous conditions. Some never go to school or learn to read and write. Others are smuggled across borders and left vulnerable to trafficking or sexual abuse. Many live in limbo with no citizenship and fear being swept up in police raids and thrown into detention.
The AP used U.S. Customs records and the most recently published data from producers, traders and buyers to trace the fruits of their labor from the processing mills where palm kernels were crushed to the supply chains of many popular kids’ cereals, candies and ice creams sold by Nestle, Unilever, Kellogg’s, PepsiCo and many other leading food companies, including Ferrero – one of the two makers of Girl Scout cookies.
Olivia, who earned a badge for selling more than 600 boxes of cookies, had spotted palm oil as an ingredient on the back of one of her packages but was relieved to see a green tree logo next to the words “certified sustainable.” She assumed that meant her Thin Mints and Tagalongs weren’t harming rainforests, orangutans or those harvesting the orange-red palm fruit.
But later, the whip-smart 11-year-old saw the word “mixed” in all caps on the label and turned to the internet, quickly learning that it meant exactly what she feared: Sustainable palm oil had been blended with oil from unsustainable sources. To her, that meant the cookies she was peddling were tainted.
Thousands of miles away in Indonesia, Ima led her class in math and dreamed of becoming a doctor. Then one day her father made her quit school because he needed help meeting the high company targets on the palm oil plantation where she was born. Instead of attending fourth grade, she squatted in the unrelenting heat, snatching up the loose kernels littering the ground and knowing if she missed even one, her family’s pay would be cut.
She sometimes worked 12 hours a day, wearing only flip flops and no gloves, crying when the fruit’s razor-sharp spikes bloodied her hands or when scorpions stung her fingers. The loads she carried, sometimes so heavy she would lose her footing, went to one of the very mills feeding into the supply chain of Olivia’s cookies.
“I am dreaming one day I can go back to school,” she told the AP, tears rolling down her cheeks.
Child labor has long been a dark stain on the $65 billion global palm oil industry. Though often denied or minimized as kids simply helping their families on weekends or after school, it has been identified as a problem by rights groups, the United Nations and the U.S. government.
With little or no access to daycare, some young children follow their parents to the fields, where they come into contact with fertilizers and some pesticides that are banned in other countries. As they grow older, they push wheelbarrows heaped with fruit two or three times their weight. Some weed and prune the trees barefoot, while teen boys may harvest bunches large enough to crush them, slicing the fruit from lofty branches with sickle blades attached to long poles.
In some cases, an entire family may earn less in a day than a $5 box of Girl Scout Do-si-dos.
“For 100 years, families have been stuck in a cycle of poverty and they know nothing else than work on a palm oil plantation,” said Kartika Manurung, who has published reports detailing labor issues on Indonesian plantations. “When I … ask the kids what they want to be when they grow up, some of the girls say, ‘I want to be the wife of a palm oil worker.’”
The AP’s investigation into child labor is part of a broader in-depth look at the industry that also exposed rape, forced labor, trafficking and slavery. Reporters crisscrossed Malaysia and Indonesia, speaking to more than 130 current and former workers – some two dozen of them child laborers – at nearly 25 companies. Their locations are not being disclosed and only partial names or nicknames are being used due to fears of retribution.
The AP found children working on plantations and corroborated accounts of abuse, whenever possible, by reviewing police reports and legal documents. Reporters also interviewed more than 100 activists, teachers, union leaders, government officials, researchers, lawyers and clergy, including some who helped victims of trafficking or sexual assault.
Indonesian government officials said they do not know how many children work in the country’s massive palm oil industry, either full or part time. But the U.N.’s International Labor Organization has estimated 1.5 million children between 10 and 17 years old labor in its agricultural sector. Palm oil is one of the largest crops, employing some 16 million people.
In much smaller neighboring Malaysia, a newly released government report estimated more than 33,000 children work in the industry there, many under hazardous conditions – with nearly half of them between the ages of 5 and 11. The study was conducted in 2018 after the country was slammed by the U.S. government over the use of child labor, and it did not directly address the large number of migrant children without documents hidden on many plantations in its eastern states, some of whom have never seen the inside of a classroom.
Many producers, Western buyers and banks belong to the 4,000-member Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, a global association that provides a green stamp of approval to those committed to supplying, sourcing, financing or using palm oil that’s been certified as ethically sourced.
The RSPO has a system in place to address grievances, including labor abuse allegations. But of the nearly 100 complaints listed on its case tracker for the two Southeast Asian countries in the last decade, only a handful have mentioned children.
“It is an issue, and we know it’s an issue,” said Dan Strechay, the RSPO’s global outreach and engagement director, adding that the association has started working with UNICEF and others to educate members about what constitutes child labor.
Strechay said many parents in Indonesia and Malaysia believe it’s the “cultural norm” for their kids to work alongside family members, even if it means pulling them out of school. “And that’s not OK,” he said.
Palm oil is contained in roughly half the products on supermarket shelves and in almost three out of every four cosmetic brands, though that can be hard to discern since it appears on labels under more than 200 different names.
And in a world where more and more consumers are demanding to know the provenance of the raw materials in the products they purchase, many companies are quick to issue assurances that they are committed to “sustainable” sourcing. But supply chains often are murky – especially in the palm oil industry – and developing countries that produce commodities in large volumes cheaply often do so by disregarding the environment and minimizing labor costs.
Most people take words like “organic,” “fair trade” and “sustainable” at face value. But not Olivia. She became increasingly worried about palm oil, rifling through the kitchen cupboards in her family’s century-old farmhouse in Jonesborough, Tennessee, to inspect the ingredients printed on cans and wrappers. Then she began digging through her shampoos and lotions, trying to make sense of the scientific-sounding names she saw there.
Now 14, Olivia has fired letters off to the head of Girl Scouts of the USA, demanding answers about how the palm oil is sourced for the organization’s cookies. She’s started an online petition to get it removed. And she and some other members of Troop 543 have stopped selling them.
The Girl Scouts did not respond to questions from the AP, directing reporters to the two bakers that make the cookies. Those companies and their parent corporations also had no comment on the findings.
“I thought Girl Scouts was supposed to be about making the world a better place,” Olivia said. “But this isn’t at all making the world better.”
Many kids are introduced to palm oil soon after they’re born – it’s a primary fat in infant formula. And as they grow, it’s present in many of their favorite foods: It’s in their Pop-Tarts and Cap’n Crunch cereal, Oreo cookies, KitKat candy bars, Magnum ice cream, doughnuts and even bubble gum.
“Let them enjoy it,” said Abang, a skinny 14-year-old who dropped out of the fifth grade to help his father on an Indonesian plantation and has never tasted ice cream. He has accepted his own fate, but still dreams of a better future for his little brother.
“Let me work, just me, helping my father,” Abang said. “I want my brother to go back to school. … I don’t want him in the same difficult situation like me.”
Though many consumers aren’t familiar with it, palm oil became ubiquitous nearly two decades ago after warnings about health risks associated with trans fats. Almost overnight, food manufacturers began shifting to the highly versatile and cheap oil.
Indonesia is the world’s largest palm oil producer and, with a population of 270 million, there is no shortage of strong backs. Many laborers migrate from the poorest corners of the country to take jobs that others shun, often bringing their wives and children as helpers in order to meet impossibly high daily quotas.
Others have been living on the same plantations for generations, creating a built-in workforce – when one harvester retires or dies, another in the family takes his place to hold onto company-subsidized housing, which often is a dilapidated shack with no running water and sometimes only limited electricity.
It’s a cycle that 15-year-old Jo was trying to break. Even though he had to help his family in the fields each day, heaving palm fruits high over his head and lobbing them onto trucks, his parents let him keep $6 a month to cover school fees so he could attend morning classes.
“I am determined to finish high school to find a job outside the plantation,” said Jo, who toiled alongside his mother, father and grandfather. “My parents are very poor. Why should I follow my parents?”
But for many migrant children in neighboring Malaysia – which relies almost entirely on foreign workers to fill constant labor shortages – the hurdles to a brighter life seem insurmountable.
Male harvesters technically are not allowed to bring their families to plantations on Borneo island, which is shared by both countries. So children often follow behind, sometimes traveling alone on illicit smugglers’ routes known as “jalan tikus,” or rat roads. The perilous border crossings to the Malaysian states of Sabah and Sarawak can take place at night, either on foot across winding jungle paths or in packed speed boats racing without lights, sometimes colliding or capsizing in the dark.
An official estimate says 80,000 children of illegal migrants, mostly from Indonesia and the Philippines, are living in Sabah alone, but some rights groups say the true number could be nearly double that. Without birth certificates and with no path to citizenship, they are essentially stateless – denied access to even the most basic rights, and at high risk of exploitation.
Migrant workers without documents are often treated “inhumanely” in Malaysia, said Soes Hindharno, an official from Indonesia’s Manpower Ministry. He said he had not received any complaints about child labor occurring in his own country, but an official from the ministry that oversees women and children’s issues acknowledged it was an area of growing concern in Indonesia.
Malaysia’s Ministry of Plantation Industries and Commodities did not respond to repeated requests for comment, but Nageeb Wahab, head of the Malaysian Palm Oil Association, a government-supported umbrella group, called allegations of child labor very serious and urged complaints to be reported to authorities.
Children of migrant parents grow up living in fear they will be separated from their families. They try to remain invisible to avoid attracting the ever-watchful eyes of police, with some keeping backpacks with supplies ready in case they need to flee their houses and sleep in the jungle to avoid raids.
Many never leave their guarded plantations, some so remote that workers must climb hills to search for a phone signal. And for those who dare to go out, trouble can come quickly.
Alex was 12 when he began working 10 hours a day on a small plantation with his father, hoisting fruits so heavy his aching muscles kept him awake at night. One day, he decided to sneak off to visit his favorite aunt in a nearby village. With no passport, Alex said authorities quickly found him and carted him off to a crowded immigration detention center where he was held for a month.
“There were hundreds of other people there, some my age, and also younger children, mostly with their mothers,” he said. “I was very afraid and kept thinking about how worried my mother and father must be. It made it hard to even eat or drink.”
But the biggest obstacles faced by Alex and other child workers in the two countries are lack of access to adequate, affordable education and medical care.
Some companies in Indonesia provide rudimentary elementary schooling on plantations, but children who want to continue their studies may find they have to travel too far on poor roads or that they can’t afford it. In Malaysia, the problem is even bigger: Without legal documents, tens of thousands of kids are not allowed to go to government schools at all.
It’s such an extensive problem that Indonesia has set up learning centers to help some of its children on plantations in the neighboring country, even sending in its own teachers. But with such heavy workloads on plantations, one instructor said he had to beg parents to let their sons and daughters come for even just a half-day of classes. And many children, especially those living in remote, hard-to-reach areas, still have no access to any type of education.
“Why aren’t companies playing a role in setting up schools in collaboration with the government?” asked Glorene Das, executive director of Tenaganita, a Malaysian nonprofit group concentrating on migrant issues for more than two decades. “Why are they encouraging the children to work instead?”
Medical care also is woeful, with experts saying poor nutrition and daily exposure to toxic chemicals are undermining child laborers’ health and development. Many Indonesian plantations have their own basic clinics, but access may be available only to full-time workers. Travel to a private doctor or hospital can take hours, and most families cannot afford outside care. Migrant children without documents in Malaysia have no right to health care and often are too scared to seek medical help in villages or cities – even in life-threatening emergencies.
Many young palm oil workers also have little understanding about reproductive health. Girls working on remote plantations are vulnerable to sexual abuse, and teen pregnancies and marriages are common.
Ana was just 13 when she first arrived in Malaysia, quickly learning, as she put it, that “anything can happen to the female workers there.” She said she was raped and forced to marry her attacker, but eventually managed to break free after years of abuse and return home to start a new life. Now a mother with kids of her own, she abruptly left Indonesia last year again to look for work in Malaysia.
Many children do not have the option to ever leave. They are born on plantations, work there and sometimes die there. Overgrown headstones and crosses marking graves in crude cemeteries are found on some plantations near the towering palm trees.
Others, like 48-year-old Anna’s husband, are buried in community graveyards along the Indonesian and Malaysian border. A month after the palm oil harvester’s death, Anna lovingly tended his plot at the Christian site in Sabah, crammed with the bodies of hundreds of other migrants.
She said her son, whose own newborn baby was buried in the adjacent grave, had inherited his father’s job. He is the family’s main breadwinner now.
The cycle continues.
Olivia is not the first Girl Scout to raise questions about the way palm oil makes its way into the beloved American cookies.
More than a decade ago, two girls in a Michigan troop stopped selling S’mores and other seasonal favorites because they worried palm oil’s expansion in Indonesia and Malaysia was destroying rainforests and killing endangered animals like orangutans.
After they campaigned for several years, the Girl Scouts of the USA became an affiliate member of the RSPO and agreed to start using sustainable palm oil, adding the green tree logo to its roughly 200 million boxes of cookies, which bring in nearly $800 million annually.
The RSPO was created with the best of intentions and it attempts to factor in the interests of a wide array of groups, including environmental organizations, industry leaders and banks. Its mission was not to flip a switch overnight, but to encourage the mammoth palm oil industry to evolve after years of breakneck growth and little outside oversight.
Still, for many food and cosmetic companies facing increased pressure from conscientious consumers, the association’s stamp of approval has become the go-to answer when questions are raised about their commitments to sustainability.
Monitoring the millions of workers hidden beneath palms covering an area equal to roughly the size of New Zealand, however, is next to impossible.
Some women and children on remote, sprawling plantations told the AP and labor rights groups that they are ordered to hide or stay home when sustainability auditors visit. They said only the optimal, easiest-to-reach parts of a plantation are typically showcased, with poor living and working conditions in distant areas hidden from outside eyes.
“The RSPO promises sustainable palm oil. But it doesn’t mean that that palm oil is free of child labor or other abuses,” said Robin Averbeck of the Rainforest Action Network, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that has found pervasive problems on plantations, including those certified as sustainable. “It has simply become a tool for greenwashing.”
When contacted by the AP, companies reaffirmed their support of human rights for all workers, with some noting they rely on their suppliers to meet industry standards and abide by local laws. If evidence of wrongdoing is found, some said they would immediately cut ties with producers.
“We aim to prevent and address the issue of child labor wherever it occurs in our supply chain,” said Nestle, maker of KitKat candy bars. Unilever – the world’s biggest ice-cream maker, including Magnum – noted that its suppliers “must not, under any circumstance, employ individuals under the age of 15 or under the local legal minimum age for work or mandatory schooling.” There was no response from Mondelez, which owns Oreo cookies, or Cap’n Crunch parent company PepsiCo.
Consumers have their own challenges in trying to buy responsibly. Those, like Olivia, who want to make sense of where their palm oil really comes from often find themselves confused, since the dense terms used to explain what makes palm oil sustainable can sometimes raise even more questions.
Take Girls Scout cookies, for instance, which are made by two different U.S. bakers
Boxes from both are stamped with green palm logos. The maker of Olivia’s cookies, Little Brownie Bakers in Kentucky, has the word “mixed” beside the tree, meaning as little as 1 percent of the palm oil might be certified sustainable. ABC Bakers in Virginia says “credits,” which means money is going toward promoting sustainable production.
The bakers’ parent companies – Italian confectionary brand Ferrero and Canadian-based Weston Foods – would not comment on the issue of child labor, but both said they were committed to sourcing only certified sustainable palm oil.
Weston Foods, which owns ABC Bakers, would not provide any information about its palm oil suppliers, citing proprietary reasons, so the AP could not determine if its supply chain was tainted.
Palm oil, the highest-yielding vegetable oil, is an important part of the two Southeast Asian countries’ economies and the governments bristle at any form of criticism, saying the industry plays an important role in alleviating poverty.
They have banned products touted as “palm oil-free” from supermarket shelves and created slogans calling the crop “God’s gift.” And when students at an international school in Malaysia were criticized last year for staging a play questioning the industry’s effect on the environment, school administrators responded with an apology.
Back in Indonesia, Ima could give a very different classroom presentation about palm oil, but she has no chance. She continues to toil full time on the plantation alongside her family, even though her mother had promised she eventually could resume her studies.
“Sometimes my friends ask me, ‘Why did you drop out? Why are you not at school?’” Ima said, her resentment readily apparent. “‘Because I have to help my father. If you want to replace me and help my father, then I will go to school. How about that?’”
After learning about Ima, Olivia is even more determined to fight on. She sent letters to her customers explaining her reasons for no longer selling Girl Scout cookies, and many responded by donating money to her Southern Appalachian troop to show support.
Now, Olivia is asking Girl Scouts across the country to band with her, saying, “The cookies deceive a lot of people. They think it’s sustainable, but it isn’t.
“I’m not just some little girl who can’t do anything about this,” she says. “Children can make change in the world. And we’re going to.”
Ali King, who leads the South West New Zealand Endangered Species Charitable Trust, carries a stoat trap on a beach in Preservation Inlet. (photo: Naomi Arnold/Washington Post)
f you wanted to design the perfect predator, the stoat would be hard to beat. Ali King calls it the shark of the New Zealand bush, and it’s a fitting description. Stoats were introduced here in the late 1800s to help control the imported rabbits that were overrunning sheep pastures. Instead, they quickly became indiscriminate serial killers.
“Always searching, always killing. They never rest,” King says as he walks up a beach in the fractured southwest tip of the country. An energetic jack-of-all-trades, King has pursued the small, sinuous creatures since co-founding a conservation organization in 2004, and today he is carrying a wooden box trap as well as rabbit meat and a hen’s egg to use as bait — weapons to help restore the seabirds and other diverse species that once filled canopy and forest.
The effort is part of an audacious project across New Zealand to get rid of nonnative pests that have decimated much of its unique fauna. Few nations have ever waged a battle like this on such a major scale, and the “Predator Free 2050” plan could offer global lessons in how to utilize scientific advances as well as how to win hearts and minds for the cause.
After four years, more than 5,000 groups and tribes — Maori iwi — have registered to do predator control in their communities, and 117 islands have been declared free not just of the weasel-like stoats but of possums, rats and mice. But progress on the mainland will come much harder.
“It’s fair to say that most people would regard the project as incredibly ambitious, to try and remove that many species at that scale,” noted Euan Ritchie, an associate professor in wildlife ecology and conservation at Deakin University in Australia. “But I think if anyone can achieve it, it’s probably the New Zealanders.”
Even if the project doesn’t achieve its ultimate goal, he anticipates benefits such as investment in new technologies. “We’re going to learn so much about in what ways we should be managing invasive species better.”
The government’s Department of Conservation leads the multimillion-dollar effort in partnership with community groups and nonprofits such as King’s South West New Zealand Endangered Species Charitable Trust, which focuses on remote, uninhabited Coal Island. The latest expedition saw him and a small group of volunteers sailing along the country’s southwest coast into Fiordland National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage site. They spent a week lugging traps and bait onto the beaches and into the bush on Coal, several other islands and the mainland, because stoats can easily swim the blue expanses of channel.
King still has a stoat in the boat’s freezer from an earlier trip, and on one bright, clear morning, he pulls back the flesh on her muzzle to show four long, sharp teeth. She wasn’t pregnant, unlike most females, which are typically just a few days old when fathers or siblings impregnate them.
“They’re a ticking time bomb the day they’re born,” King says.
“It’s like the living dead, isn’t it?” a volunteer says. “There are just hordes coming towards you.”
At night on the cliffs of Coal Island — or Te Puka-Hereka in Maori, which translates as “The Tied Anchor” — three sets of solar-powered speakers broadcast the cacophonous calls of burrow-nesting sooty shearwaters and mottled petrels. The seabirds have been absent for more than a century. The trust wants to bring them back as a step toward reviving the biodiversity that once flourished throughout New Zealand.
Creating a safe harbor on offshore islands can be daunting logistically, but Coal is particularly challenging because it is so isolated. This trip, like others the trust coordinates several times a year, depends on a Department of Conservation research vessel called Southern Winds. It leaves from the seaport of Bluff on the mainland’s southern coast, navigates the rolling Pacific for six hours and finally pulls into Preservation Inlet, where maritime radio is the only way to communicate with civilization.
In 2008, the 4.5-square-mile island became the world’s first larger island to have mice eradicated, after helicopters strafed the terrain with poisoned cereal bait. The mice have not returned, and pilot Peter Garden has gone on to help eliminate rodents on other vulnerable islands, including Seychelles and the Aleutian Islands.
An aggressive deer culling also ended well on Coal; although amorous stags sometimes swim ashore, they leave when they don’t find any females. Yet stoats have made three comebacks in the past decade, including in 2019 during one of the biggest drops of beech seeds and rimu fruit in 40 years.
When the trees reproduce so heavily, the feasting is great for birds, but it also draws stoats. More than a dozen were caught in recent months. Autopsies showed bellies full of feathers, signaling the ongoing danger to birds such as the kakapo, a fat, flightless parrot found only in New Zealand and considered one of its “unique treasures.”
“For me, what’s really hit home is just how bad the stoats are,” said Amber Bill, director of biodiversity threats at the Department of Conservation. Until the islands can be made secure, “we can’t ever return birds like kakapo.”
Elsewhere in New Zealand, other issues loom for Predator Free 2050. Alpine areas that previously were just beyond a stoat’s range may be warming up enough through climate change to allow the mammals to survive.
Cooperation is crucial to the project’s ultimate success, Bill acknowledges. The department is working with charitable trusts, businesses, community groups and individuals, deploying lures and traps, fences, and pest tracking, detection and removal.
Some are novel approaches, such as a device that senses a predator via special pads and then sprays a toxin onto its fur, which the animal ingests as it grooms itself. But other strategies in urban parks and backyards are more mundane, with ordinary New Zealanders simply planting more trees, setting ordinary traps and recording their catches. According to the Predator Free New Zealand Trust, “having a trap in every 5th urban backyard is enough to create a safe environment for our native wildlife to flourish.”
The project represents the country’s “greatest opportunity to see a shift in conservation,” Bill said. But collaboration is “the only way we will achieve it.”
The volunteers, who each paid to come on the trip, wake every morning in their bunks on the Southern Winds, eat breakfast and get the day’s instructions. They pull on wet-weather gear, which had to clear stringent quarantine measures before departure, and clamber into inflatable dinghies. Then it’s a quick ride across the still waters of the fjords, dodging seals on the coastline and watching rogue waves carefully to time a leap for the rocks.
On Coal Island, they tramp through the dripping rainforest. They bang rebar into the ground to fully secure each trap, since even a hungry stoat will be scared off by unexpected movement.
All the while, birds mostly lost now from the mainland flit and call above them: the saddleback, with its distinctive chestnut markings and a voice like a car refusing to start; the kaka, the raucous, chatty parrot with flashy red underwings; and the kakariki, the small, bright parakeet named with the Maori word for green.
A helicopter lands one afternoon on the island’s beach with a surprise for the volunteers: two Haast tokoeka kiwis, crouching on towels in wooden boxes. They are the rarest kind of New Zealand’s nocturnal, flightless icon, listed as “nationally critical” — one level below extinct. Only 400 survive today.
“This is what we work for,” King says. “It’s not all doom and gloom and stoats.”
The group walks a short way into the bush to release the birds. At a year old, they’re big and heavy enough to fight off predators.
Dee Wainui has come for the occasion as a representative of the Kai Tahu iwi. This day is personal for her. Her father was beaten as a youth for speaking Maori at school, so she never learned it at home while growing up. Her involvement in conservation efforts on nearby Stewart Island-Rakiura and in her community of Riverton is her way of helping to reverse some of the damage wrought by colonization.
“It’s a game changer,” she says. “This is mahi [work] that I’m blessed to do. You can go back with your mokopuna [grandchildren] and say: ‘I planted that tree. Our manu [birds] are here because of that.’ ”
“What will happen if we don’t?” she asks. “We won’t have anything.”
After a Maori prayer, the kiwis are let go to scuffle into holes scraped for them under some beech trees. They’ll start exploring at dusk, joining about 40 others of their kind on the island. Even with very active management, increasing their numbers will take generations.
The Southern Winds finally weighs anchor and continues its journey. Along the way, there will be traps on other islands to check and re-bait — places where once-silent forests, where the ground and trees teemed with rats, are now coming back to life.
“It’s a passion,” King says. “Once you get hooked … you find it bloody hard to leave it.”
ewer people were executed in 2020 than in any year for nearly three decades, and fewer people were sentenced to die than at any point since the Supreme Court 
hey are two young girls from two very different worlds, linked by a global industry that exploits an army of children.
