Via America’s Lawyer: Johnson & Johnson considers bankruptcy filings in order to settle injury liabilities tied to its talc-based products. Mike Papantonio and Farron Cousins discuss more.
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Transcript:
*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
Mike Papantonio: Johnson and Johnson may be trying to send their talc liabilities into bankruptcy to protect the company’s profits. Here’s a company that murdered, there’s no other way to put it. Why do we look at manslaughter differently when a person drinks a fifth of Jack Daniels drives 90 miles an hour through a school zone and kills a child, why do we look at that person different than we’re looking at Johnson and Johnson? The material they had that showed that the product they were making would cause cancer in women, slow ugly death that they had right in their file cabinets. And now this is a company that’s worth half a trillion dollars and they’re looking for bankruptcy protection from some, you know, from some cat up in New York who’s going to say, yeah, yeah, I’m a bankruptcy judge. I’m going to give you that protection. What’s your take?
Farron Cousins: Again, just another horrendous story here, because we know in the, you know, the lawsuits have already shown this J & J is preparing, you know, all these massive, massive pay, payouts. And they said, well, how can we reduce this? Well, we’ve pulled baby powder off the market. You know, about a year or so ago, I guess it was. And we knew that there was asbestos in there, we knew that other talc fibers were also causing horrendous problems. So let’s do what all these other corporations do. What we have seen so many companies get away with. Let’s file for bankruptcy, we’ll create, and this is tentative. They haven’t decided anything. They’re discussing it. You create a little bitty shell company. So you shift all the profits over to the big company, J & J keeps those. And you shift all the liabilities over here to little bitty subsidiary that has no money to pay out.
Mike Papantonio: No, no surprise. This is called the Texas two step. The law is developed in Texas to where a company that has killed hundreds of people, thousands of people, that might be worth half a trillion dollars like this company, can say, you know what, yeah, we killed all those people. We made billions of dollars. We fooled the regulators for long enough. We spent a lot of money on politicians so we could get away with it. Now this is the real deal. CEOs get to keep all of the billions of dollars they were paid over those years and we’re going to go bankrupt. And the family that has a mother or a daughter or sister dying of disease, an ugly, ugly cancer, cervical cancer, that we don’t have to pay them anything. That’s the new norm. And you know the only person talking about it that’s, that is outraged, is Elizabeth Warren. She’s the only person who’s taking leadership on this issue. The media won’t even talk about this story.
Farron Cousins: Right.
Mike Papantonio: Why? Because it’s Johnson and Johnson because they get paid too much money from Johnson and Johnson. You think MSNBC is going to cover this story? You think CNN is going to cover this story? Hell no they’re not.
Farron Cousins: Absolutely not. And if they do, it’s only going to be in the terms of dollars and cents. What is this going to do to the J & J stock? What’s it going to? No, they’re not going to talk about the diseases. They’re not going to talk about the deception and the lies and the documents. They’ll only talk about, well, financially speaking, this might make good sense. They’re, they’re, they’re ridiculous. They’re bought off.
Mike Papantonio: And nobody goes to prison. They have killed thousands of people and nobody goes to prison under our new American culture. Ugly story.
Farron Cousins: It is.
Mike Papantonio: This could happen though.
