America’s Lawyer E02: Russian oligarchs are dying at an unusually high rate, with half a dozen found dead since the start of Russia’s attack on Ukraine. We’ll be looking at these deaths and what it could possibly mean as this conflict drags on. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has declared War on Disney, but taxpayers in Florida are the ones who are really being punished – we’ll tell you how. And the makers of popular baby formula brands have been hiding a terrible secret that is leaving infants to die of a horrible disease. We’ll have all the details for you. All that, and more is coming up, so don’t go anywhere – America’s Lawyer starts right now.
Transcript:
*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
Mike Papantonio: Hi, I’m Mike Papantonio and this is America’s Lawyer. Russian oligarchs are dying at high rates and half a dozen have been found dead since the start of the Russia’s attack on Ukraine. We’ll be looking at these deaths and what it could possibly mean as this conflict drags on. Governor Ron DeSantis has declared war on Disney. But taxpayers in Florida are, are they really the ones that are gonna be punished? We’re gonna talk about it. And the makers of popular baby formula brands have been hiding a terrible secret that’s leaving infants to die a horrible disease. We’ll have the details for you. All that and more it’s coming up on America’s Lawyer. So don’t go anywhere. It starts right now.
Some of Russia’s wealthiest citizens have been found dead since the start of the conflict with Ukraine, could be a clear sign that Russia or some folks in Russia, aren’t happy with what Putin’s up to. Ring of Fires Farron Cousins joins me now to talk about this story and many others. As I look at the story, the things that jump out at me are this, there’s a division clear division among the oligarchs. There’s some oligarchs that are cooperating, everything they can do to help cooperate with sanctions. They’re not being sanctioned. Then there’s oligarchs that are being sanction. Their, their ability to live has been taken away from them, at least in their minds. Their yachts are, you know, houses, the yachts, the, you know, dozens of houses around the globe. But so these two oligarchs, well, actually it’s more than that. There’s what seven is it seven or eight in the last few weeks?
Farron Cousins: So far, yeah.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. So far that we know of.
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: So they’re, they’re, they’re being found dead, but with these two, for example, that it kind of tells the story, the entire family was found murdered and they’re trying to say it was murder suicide. One fellow was found hung. They said he hung himself, but he killed his family before he hung, hanged himself. So, I mean, if you’re looking at the story, you gotta, the question is, is Putin gonna be able to survive a war of the oligarchs? Or is Putin the one responsible for their deaths? That’s the big question.
Farron Cousins: I think, you know, based on what we’ve seen with this, you know, Putin administration, I guess if you wanna call it just over the years, dissent of any kind, obviously not tolerated. We have seen journalists killed. We have seen political adversaries, you know, poisoned. We have seen people fall off balconies that otherwise should not have fallen off balconies. This is all on par with what we have seen this administration do for, for a decade or more now.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: And when they go to these scenes and they see, oh, this oligarch a guy worth $500 million, just couldn’t take it anymore and he stabbed his wife and daughter to death then hung himself. But the local authorities, because this was not in Russia where it happened.
Mike Papantonio: Spain. It was Spain.
Farron Cousins: Right. And they say well, but he has no blood on him. How can he stab these people multiple times and not have a trace of blood anywhere on him?
Mike Papantonio: Okay. The two suggestions that I’ve seen are both, both interesting. One is that it’s oligarchs versus oligarchs. If it’s oligarchs versus oligarchs then this guy Putin is absolutely in charge. He’s absolutely calling the shots because all of them came into their money by way of Putin. I mean, all of them came either through the KGB, the military, they came through the, the, the, the, the cold war structure, where they were literally given entire industries. Here, you take the energy industry, you take the precious metals industry. It was a gift. And so as you’re looking at it that gift’s falling apart for a lot of ’em, right?
Farron Cousins: It, it, it really is. And of course, nobody in Russia has more power than Vladimir Putin. Unless you add up all of these oligarchs, those are the only people that could really spark some kind of change, to spark regime change.
Mike Papantonio: Right, that’s.
Farron Cousins: In their own country. So obviously, that is the threat that these individuals pose. So you could, like you said, it could be oligarch on oligarch. You could have some of them who say, listen, we’re gonna weather this. We’re gonna emerge on the other side okay. You over here, you’re making the situation worse. We need to, you need, it’s time for you to go.
Mike Papantonio: There’s a second part of it that I, I don’t think you can have this discussion without, talking about the second part of it and that’s, that’s Putin’s health. Okay. If you see, I mean, the, the, the visuals, at least the optics we’re seeing now is it’s, it’s a beat down old man. He’s bloated looking, as he stands up his hands are trembling. He’s holding on, as he’s sitting, he’s literally holding onto the table to, to apparently steady himself. When he raises his hands, it looks like Parkinson’s disease. There, there, your, there’s a whole set of events that are taking place that lead you to believe, could it be Parkinson’s disease? The other part is cancer, thyroid cancer.
Farron Cousins: Right.
Mike Papantonio: He’s being, they’re bringing in specialists. What he’s had half a dozen meetings with the best specialists in the world.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. In, in just the last two years, dozens and dozens for, for people that are experts in thyroid cancer and various other illnesses, I think there’s been 35 visits he has had just in the last couple years. And, and of course the state maintains, everything’s great, everything’s wonderful. He’s, he’s perfectly fine. He may have, you know, residual pain from falling off a horse, you know, to 10 years ago, but that doesn’t do the things that we saw in that video last week.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: You know, he is, he is bloated. He can’t keep his feet still. His, his thumbs, even as he’s holding, you can see it trembling.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: That’s not normal. There, there’s something going on.
Mike Papantonio: Well, people are looking at it saying the possibility of Parkinson’s disease is very high, which just adds to the problem. It’s, it’s like that other straw on the camel’s back, he’s, he’s not doing well in the Ukraine, this promise that he made to the Russian people is not bearing itself out. We’re gonna be in and out in a matter of two months, I think he said, it’s anything but that. You’ve got these folks that have supported his regime that are losing everything. It’s a tough time for, for Putin right now and whether he can weather or not is, your guess is as good as mine.
Farron Cousins: Well, and if there’s a health issue in there and he says, well, listen, six months from now, this isn’t gonna be my problem. Then you’re looking at an even more dangerous individual that has nothing to lose.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah, yeah.
Farron Cousins: That’s really scary.
Mike Papantonio: Court documents have revealed some of the most disgusting secrets that Johnson and Johnson’s been hiding for decades. Almost, you just can’t make stories up like this. First of all, this is a company that’s a, is a criminal enterprise. There’s no question to my mind, I would call it a criminal enterprise. They’ve killed thousands of women with cervical cancer. They’ve known about it for 50 years. They knew the baby powder that they were using had the ability to shut down, well, it, they, they knew it was a carcinogen. They knew it had asbestos in it. They knew even the powder alone could cause physical injury, even without the asbestos. So women dying all over the country from cervical disease. Pick it up from there. This story, you almost could not make this up.
Farron Cousins: This one, when I, when I first saw it, I had thought, okay, this, this isn’t real. This is, this is something out of a bad movie with an overexaggerated plot.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: But it really is not. And building off what you said, they knew that it was carcinogenic. That’s why in the 1970s, according to these new unsealed documents, they go to prisons and they say, hey, we need some inmates. So they get a bunch of inmates and they start injecting them with asbestos. They inject them with talc and, you know, they see if there’s differences here. Is, is the talc as bad as just straight asbestos injected into these mostly black inmates. And again, that’s something nobody’s gonna believe them if you tell that story, but this is in their documents.
Mike Papantonio: You know what the ugliest part of it is, their support, their way to defend what they did. They injected asbestos into the body of 10 inmates, African American inmates, and their response was, you know what the response is, this is guy named Kligman, Kligman, you know, ran this whole deal. Kligman says, well, at the time, it was just appropriate. We were able to do it from the scientific community. That type of conduct was appropriate. Therefore, we don’t understand why you’re so upset. Literally, we don’t understand why you’re so upset.
Farron Cousins: Right. And, and this is the kind of thing that of course would remain unknown to the public. One, of course if you’re watching corporate media, you don’t know this story, but two, if these lawsuits hadn’t come about. So it just makes you wonder, not you because you see this every day.
Mike Papantonio: Oh, we’re handling, yeah.
Farron Cousins: But, but all these folks out there that are watching this and learning about this for the first time, this only got uncovered because they got sued. So think about all these companies out there that aren’t being sued. What are they hiding in their file cabinets? It’s more stuff like this.
Mike Papantonio: What, what about these bonehead judges who are saying, we’re going to allow you to seal this. I mean, the judge sees it firsthand. The judge sees the criminal conduct from these CEOs firsthand and he says, you know what, we’re just gonna seal it up. We’re not gonna let anybody know about it. And when they do that, the people that are still using the product are at huge risk, because they don’t know how serious this is. I mean, we, we’ve got to change the mindset of these judges who believe that you, they’re gonna protect the corporation. We’re gonna seal this up to where nobody knows about it. This story, sealing up a story where the company goes out and injects a cancer causing element into the bodies of 10 African American prisoners because at the time it was scientifically appropriate.
Farron Cousins: Right. And we, we didn’t break any, you know, laws doing that, but also not just the judge who says we’re gonna seal it. But how about the judge who says, we’re gonna let you declare bankruptcy, even though you pulled in a couple billion dollars this past year.
Mike Papantonio: Oh, Lord.
Farron Cousins: You’re still bankrupt. So you can avoid liability.
Mike Papantonio: This is a 400 billion, $400 billion company that a New York judge who has never done anything for consumers, who’s always been on the other side of consumers. If you go to New York and you’re in bankruptcy court and you’re not a corporation, you’re dead in the water. This guy came up through the corporate system, never represented corporate, never represented consumers at all, always represented corporations. And he allows them to declare bankruptcy while women are dying by the hundreds all over this country because of the toxic product that Johnson and Johnson created.
Farron Cousins: Well. And, and, and it, it, it’s so devastating because obviously the company’s not bankrupt. All that’s gonna do is reduce the amount that these families, the survivors are gonna be able to get and, and that’s just how this system is rigged in favor of these corporations.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: This is how the justice system in the US works. And if we don’t highlight it, people don’t understand how bad it really is.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
A Christian university is being investigated by the federal government for possible human trafficking violations. Wow. I looked at this story. This is, this is Olivet University, it’s a Christian college. It’s not well known. I hate to even throw the word Christian college around it. It’s, it’s not really.
Farron Cousins: It’s a different kind of.
Mike Papantonio: It’s a, it’s a different kind of Christianity when you take a look at this. Labor trafficking, human trafficking, sex trafficking, you name it. It seems to be connected up in some way.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. And what’s really devastating about this story is that you have these students because that’s what they were doing. They were recruiting students from Korea, from China saying, hey, come over here. We’re gonna give you these student visas. You know, you can come to our college. You can maybe make a better life for yourself. They get over here and then they just ship them off to work these, you know, below minimum wage jobs, obviously. They get paid pennies on the dollar and then they never follow through. They never even track where these people were, were being shipped to and that’s what this whole thing is starting to look like. That this really was just a massive criminal front for human trafficking.
Mike Papantonio: You know, as you look at this story, Newsweek came out with this story. Now I was really interested in that because Newsweek, one of the owners of Newsweek is directly tied to this Christian university. I mean, not only that, but the other 50%, that it controls this university is a guy named Dev Pragad. He’s the one that has the Jans Christian sect. It is a weird Christian sect. And so you got 50% owned by the people that, you know, anyway you cut it somebody knew what was going on and Newsweek in the middle trying to say, oh, well we have high ground because we’re reporting it. No, they’re not reporting it because of high ground. They’re reporting it because they’ve been caught. Listen, this two years ago, these folks were fined a million, I think $1,700,000 for the same, for fraud and money laundering. And now this is surfacing.
Farron Cousins: Well, that’s because of the fraud and money laundering investigation, they didn’t go far enough. Why are you laundering money?
Mike Papantonio: Yes.
Farron Cousins: Where is the fraud? And so they had to come back after these other allegations came out and they said, oh God, I’m sorry. We forgot the other half of our investigation here.
Mike Papantonio: Well they stopped the inv, literally stopped the investigation. Had they gone on and followed the money trail.
Farron Cousins: Right.
Mike Papantonio: Department of Justice, I say it again and again, if it’s not low hanging fruit, if they can’t go in and tie the case up in a month or if there’s any shot that they might lose, they’re not gonna do it. This is a great example of it. This should have been caught a long time ago. The same time they caught ’em for money laundering, same time they caught ’em for fraud. They should have continued the investigation. This story should never, never should have developed.
Ron DeSantis attacks Disney and you know what, if you take a look at it, the question is, are Florida taxpayers liable for some of the attack. It’s, it’s a complicated story.
Farron Cousins: It really is.
Mike Papantonio: But at the same time, look, here’s what DeSantis comes out. DeSantis says, I don’t want you messing with our politics. You’re coming down to Florida. We’ve given you all of these gifts. We’ve given you 40 square miles. Now understand 40 square miles is what Disney controls. And so, so DeSantis says, why is it that everybody has to pay taxes, but you don’t. That’s where the story starts, right?
Farron Cousins: Well, and, and Disney actually is paying taxes. They’re paying, you know, hundred, over a hundred million in taxes. And DeSantis was perfectly fine with Disney funding all of these same people that voted for this bill, hundreds of thousands of dollars to get these same people elected, who wrote this legislation. But then when they came out after of course public backlash, then Disney says, okay, we, we don’t support it now. Then suddenly they draw this ire, which of course is, is a little more than political retaliation. The problem is Disney’s not the one who’s having any problem. Disney’s gonna be just fine. They could actually end up saving money.
Mike Papantonio: Okay.
Farron Cousins: On this deal.
Mike Papantonio: I’ve, I’ve heard that argument Farron, but I want you to think about something. Okay. The argument is that you have, you know, a billion dollars worth of bonds that Disney sold those bonds to make improvements. You follow me. On 40 acre, I mean 40 miles worth of, of territory, they say they sold bonds to make improvements. Point is this. The argument we’re hearing is, oh, now taxpayers are gonna be responsible for those bonds. They’re not finishing the story though. The rest of that story is if you control the bonds you control what you can tell Disney to do. You can tell Disney, I’m sorry, I’m glad you invested in these roads, I’m glad you invested in this sewage, but now we’re gonna charge you more for the use of that. That’s where there, the argument is not being, is not being completed. The people who are against this, and there’s, there’s a lot of reasons to be against it, but there’s a lot of reasons to be for it. It’s corporate welfare that bugs me about Disney. We’ve always allowed their corporate welfare in this state. And, and, and.
Farron Cousins: Well, we certain, we certainly have. And look, you know, getting rid of Disney’s special privileges, I, I have no problem with that. The reasoning behind it, absolutely. The effect on taxpayers, yes. Because the Reedy Creek county or district, whatever it’s called, is what held those bonds.
Mike Papantonio: Right.
Farron Cousins: Those bonds now have to go to Lake Buena Vista. They have to go to all the other counties there and somebody has to pay it. And here’s my other thought on this too, Disney, no longer has to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year buying the big dogs. It’s a lot cheaper to go and buy off a board of county commissioners.
Mike Papantonio: Good point.
Farron Cousins: Oh, we’re gonna punish you Disney, really? Here’s $10,000.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: You can pay them off so much faster than a state legislator.
Mike Papantonio: That’s a good.
Farron Cousins: And that’s what’s gonna.
Mike Papantonio: It’s a very good point. The point is if you control the bonds, it’s not just a liability. That’s the point I’m trying to make.
Farron Cousins: Oh yeah.
Mike Papantonio: But the, the, the argument that’s being made is kind of a stupid argument. The argument that’s being made by the people who are so upset that DeSantis has done this. It’s the same folks. They hate DeSantis. They hate Republicans. They hate. It’s, it’s the same hate speech. But the point being, they’re not making the right argument, the argument, oh, these bonds are gonna cost a billion dollars. Well, the people who hold those bonds control those assets too, and they can, they can increase the cost of the assets to Disney and Disney will pay it.
Farron Cousins: Well, which is, you know, why I always make that point. Disney’s gonna start saying, well, we don’t have to send our money to the state.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: We can pay off so.
Mike Papantonio: Mayors.
Farron Cousins: Many more local people and Disney, I’m telling you, they’re gonna come out on top of this.
Mike Papantonio: That, that’s a good, that’s a good point.
Farron Cousins: And everybody else gets screwed.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. That’s a point I really had not thought about it when I think about those bonds.
A new study has found that states that legalized marijuana have seen a dramatic drop in prescription sales of drugs. Wow. Well, we’ve done this story before. We, we, the it’s been the, it’s been the drug industry that has fought desperately to keep legalized marijuana out of there. I mean, they’ve, they spent billions of dollars trying to prevent the legalization of marijuana. This story kind of tells the story, doesn’t it?
Farron Cousins: It does. And, you know, we, we’ve, everybody knows that, okay, when you have the legalized marijuana and even the medical marijuana, you reduce prescriptions for pain medications. Well, this massive study said, listen, it’s not just pain medications, it’s sleep medications. It’s depression medication, you know, psychosis, seizures, which you and I have talked about. It is a broad spectrum of different pharmaceuticals that essentially get taken out of the equation when people can, can go this route.
Mike Papantonio: Well, yeah, full.
Farron Cousins: It’s amazing.
Mike Papantonio: Full disclosure, you know, this story, but I feel like I have to disclose it. We, we helped, we helped Charlotte’s Web get started. We invested a lot of money into Charlotte’s Web and Charlotte’s Web was something that was designed, we got drawn into it because children who had epilepsy, they were having 50 grand mal seizures a week were reduced to zero because of the, because of the Charlotte’s Web product that we came out with. That then led to legalization of marijuana in the state of Florida and it’s of course it’s caught on all over the country. But it’s interesting. We, we used to talk about, well, the only people that are beating, beating this down is the drug industry. And now we see why, huh?
Farron Cousins: Well, exactly. And, you know, there was actually a survey that came out towards the end of last year, a nationwide massive survey. Do you support legalization of marijuana? Not just medical, but all marijuana. 91% of the American public as a whole said, yeah, I support that. So there, I mean, there’s literally no other issue in this country that is more uniting for left and right and center than legalizing marijuana.
Mike Papantonio: Not for Biden though.
Farron Cousins: Right. Republicans want it, Democrats want it. Everybody wants it.
Mike Papantonio: Well, all they have to do, all the feds have to do is they have to open up the banking business to where people can run this just like they would any other business and I don’t see that happening with this administration.
Farron Cousins: No.
Mike Papantonio: Climate activists recently blocked the entrances to major corporate news outlets in a protest over the lack of attention being paid to climate change. Wow. I don’t, I can actually tell you this because I’ve known you for so long. I don’t know anybody who’s done more stories on climate change than you. You’ve written them in magazines. You’ve been on TV with them. You’ve been on radio with them. You are the expert in this and you’ve always said, why in the world won’t corporate media tell the story? I’ve always said you because people don’t read it.
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: Isn’t that it?
Farron Cousins: And, and that is absolutely the truth. I mean, I still run into that problem now, anytime I do a segment on climate change, okay, snooze, let me move on to the next thing. And, and what’s even more telling is, you know, these individuals, this was last Friday they did this, they blocked the New York Times. They blocked News Corp. They blocked all these massive newspapers, Gannett, to make, to make it to where they couldn’t print because they were protesting over climate change and nobody’s even talking about the story. I mean, that’s how bad it is. They can’t even get attention for a protest about the lack of attention in climate change.
Mike Papantonio: What I remember years ago, Farron, you were saying this, you were saying, look, Mike, I can do a feature story in the trial lawyer magazine. I can put it on the front cover. It can be the expansive story about what’s really happening and nobody will read it. And unfortunately that’s true with social media too.
Farron Cousins: Oh, it is.
Mike Papantonio: When we do a story on so, on climate change, you know, it’s, there’s no comparison to the regular story, the regular news stories we do. It’s like, it’s, it’s crickets, it’s yawn. But everybody says, ah, you gotta do the story anyway.
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: So corporate media, corporate media said, no, I don’t think so.
Farron Cousins: Well, yeah, and, you know, that, that, that is one of the reasons I continue to do these stories and I’m always going to do these stories because it doesn’t matter if one person’s watching or if 1 million.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: You’ve gotta get the message out there. And unfortunately I do see a lot of folks that, you know, are, are in the YouTube game as well that also avoid it.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: And you can’t do that. You know, we have to talk about these stories. Everybody should be covering them and, you know, I, I applaud what these activists did. Unfortunately we’re probably the only ones who are talking about it, but they did it. It was a good thing. We need more of this.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah, yeah. Thank you, Farron. Thanks for joining me.
Farron Cousins: Thank you.
Mike Papantonio: The biggest producers of baby formula on the planet have been pushing their products relentlessly to consumers and now that it’s been a devastating disease that’s been linked to their products in premature babies, the public’s finally starting to pay attention. Attorney Sara Papantonio joins me to talk about what’s happened. Sara, this, this story is so bothersome because we understand somewhere in the range of could be 3000 preemie babies dying every year because of this product. Lay, lay the story out for me, if you would.
Sara Papantonio: So this is a story about the, the baby formula industry. For decades now, what we’ve seen is a dramatic increase in the rate that children and, and, and infants are for, fed formula and a dramatic decrease in infants that are fed breast milk. And that’s all at the hands of the formula industry. So what that comes with is when we have premature babies who are born thirty six, seven weeks or before they’re being fed baby formula instead of breast milk in order to increase their growth, which is a false narrative put on by the industry. But what’s happening is those premature babies aren’t able to digest the enzymes within that, that formula. It’s a cows milk formula. And as a result, it’s causing their intestines and it’s causing their organs to break down and necrotize in a disease we call necrotizing enterocolitis. So you’ve got a, a, a newborn baby, the most vulnerable population of infants that we could possibly have ingesting a cows milk formula and as a result, their, their organs are essentially shutting down on them and they’re dying as a result.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah, they, when they do the autopsies, they’re finding that basically it’s, it’s the entire gastrointestinal system is turned into almost dust, like a film in a dust. And the agony the child goes through. Sometimes when I read this story, I, I, to me, I read a story where a nurse who used to work specialized with these children had to stop working, because she couldn’t stand the screaming, the pain that the kids were going through as their dying, these, these preemie babies. So the first thing that they’re introduced to in the world is this kind of suffering. The industry knew, and they have known, they wasn’t it 20, it seemed like 2009 everybody really started talking about the fact they asked the industry, why are you going out there and discouraging breastfeeding? Why are you discouraging mother’s milk? Well, we know now, don’t we?
Sara Papantonio: Right.
Mike Papantonio: Because they’re making so much money.
Sara Papantonio: And, and that’s, what’s so disgusting about this story is it’s suffering that these children never had to go through. You know, since as early as the 1990s, what we know is that cow’s milk formulas cannot be properly digested by premature infants. But what these companies are doing instead of promoting that message and promoting safe, safer alternatives, they continue to promote their formula. They continue to run media scare tactics against mothers and families to make them fearful of breastfeeding their own children because that’s, you know, when I start getting really concerned when I see a company starting to take marketing tools out of the playbook of tobacco.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Sara Papantonio: And when I see a baby formula company taking marketing tips from a tobacco company, that’s when my eyes really, really start.
Mike Papantonio: Well, you, you, when you started looking at this case, I, I know the thing that was startling to me is I looked at the adver, I looked at, first of all, I looked at the PR firms. They’re using exactly the same PR firms that we ran into with tobacco and we ran into it with opioids, same evil empire Madison avenue sociopaths that were telling the story. We actually compared ads where you had one ad that’s a tobacco ad and one ad that was a child, a, a preemie, well it was a formula ad, it looked exactly alike. You had the doctor saying, this is what you need. Tobacco you had doctors, you had the message doctors choose this cigarette to smoke as crazy as that was.
Sara Papantonio: Right.
Mike Papantonio: But it’s the same PR organizations, isn’t it?
Sara Papantonio: Right. I mean, for every study, for every publication that says do not feed premature infants this type of formula, the baby formula industry stacks up about five times the amount of touchy, feely advertisements that they push and push and push to the public so that they don’t see the true nature of the products that they’re giving these children.
Mike Papantonio: Sara real quick. I mean, I just want to really land this, but the truth, truth is there’s plenty of science that shows that this baby formula that’s being set, that’s being sold by Abbott, by Mead, by Nestle. I’ve never seen such, I mean, when you look at Nestle’s history, you go, my God, these people should be in prison, not selling products to the American consumer because of their, just Google it and I know you have, but I’d love the people who watch this program, just Google Nestle and Google all the awful things that they’ve been fined for. They’ve, they’ve paid, God knows how much in fines because of their conduct. They’re the ones running this industry, aren’t they?
Sara Papantonio: Absolutely. This is a $55 billion industry and they’re spending a big chunk of change of that on public opinion.
Mike Papantonio: And in 2011, they were told by the world, World Health Organization and many other organizations, the product you’re selling is killing preemies. Told it straight out. And then they, when they were told that they had actually increased the sales and increased the marketing. Sara Papantonio, thank you for joining me.
Sara Papantonio: Thank you.
Mike Papantonio: 5 million refugees coming out of the Ukraine without much of a plan to tell them what we’re gonna do to help ’em as, as they leave that country, that war torn country. So what do we do? Well, I have got the expert with us, it is Donniya Davies and she’s, she’s been at this for a very long time and she can help us better understand what it is we can do. A lot of times what ends up happening Donniya is we know sometimes a problem is so big that we, it, it’s almost like we can’t, we can’t get our arms around the problem. You’re talking about the aspect there’s very specific things we can do.
Donniya Davies: Absolutely.
Mike Papantonio: There’s, there, there are very specific things we can do to welcome Ukrainian refugees into our community. Right now in the United States that’s not really happening.
Donniya Davies: No.
Mike Papantonio: We’re hearing a hundred thousand refugees are coming. There’s no sign of that so far. Pick it up from there. What, what is it that we ought to be thinking about as this develops?
Donniya Davies: Thank you, Mike. I can only explain what we’re doing in the UK with Sanctuary Foundation. What we’re trying to do is we’re trying to work alongside the UK government that have actually proposed 200,000 Ukrainian refugees coming to the UK. What we’ve done is we’ve gone out to the public and we’ve said, who wants to be a part of this? And within moments and weeks we’ve managed to get 30,000 people that are individuals, businesses, civil groups, universities, schools, that have said, we want to build community and help these refugees, to match hosts with these refugee families. And what it is is it’s a simple approach of community to community, where we actually get a community of Ukrainians that have been living in humanitarian centers in Poland or in Moldova or in Romania and what we do is we transplant them almost into a community in the UK.
Mike Papantonio: And when you say community, that means a home. I mean, they, they, they have a home. Somebody says, we’re not just gonna bring you into our home, but we have, we’ve also lined up a job for you.
Donniya Davies: That’s right.
Mike Papantonio: You can work here, here or here. So in the United States, that’s really the starting point to me is I think about what it is we can do. Right now in the United States of course, we’re confronted with the idea we’ve got immigration issues coming across the border and because of that, people are saying, well, they’re almost shutting down where it comes to saying, well, how do we bring in more refugees from the UK? I mean, excuse me, from, from the Ukraine. But the point is this, there’s very specific things we can do.
Donniya Davies: Absolutely.
Mike Papantonio: Right now in the United States we’re faced with a work shortage. If you go to restaurants or you go to many, many organizations and they say, we can’t get, we can’t get enough people to stock ourselves. We can’t get enough people to even work in this restaurant. And it’s happening across the board, it’s happening in white collar settings where we need, we need people who can, who can operate at a very high level from a managerial standpoint, they can’t even get those folks. So isn’t this a perfect time for us to be thinking about how do we bring Ukrainian refugees into the United States in an organized kinda way?
Donniya Davies: Absolutely. A lot of these refugees are actually working in some of our centers in Poland. We’ve got fulfillment centers that are like Amazon warehouses, and they’ve come and they’re volunteering and we’re employing them. You know, there’s global empowerment mission that is out there. They’ve got warehouses fulfillment centers and they have got Ukrainian people that are working, operating them. We’ve got students that were medical students that are coming and working. These are extremely hard working, very, very lovely people that need homes. They need to be loved. There needs to be education, schools for these children of, and families and businesses that need to come together and work alongside the US government to create community to community approach.
Mike Papantonio: Well, where, where we are now is we’re hear, you know, we’re hearing about what’s happening. We know that there’s a crisis over there. We’re thinking, well, Poland is gonna solve the crisis or the bordering states of Ukraine are gonna solve the crisis. That’s just not happening, is it?
Donniya Davies: That’s not gonna happen because they’re overrun with, if you think about it, it’s 5 million people that are displaced. And 5 million people when you think about it, when are we ever gonna see that in our lifetime? And so we have to decant these borders. So when we look at the, the borders, they are full, these centers are full. And unless these people move to other countries where we’re gonna.
Mike Papantonio: Tell us about the centers. What does a center look like? Try to describe what’s happening in the center. We’re gonna, they’ll see some films on this, but.
Donniya Davies: Absolutely. So the centers are pretty much, they come over the border, they get looked at, they go into these buses, the, the buses then take them to these centers. They stay there for a minimum of two days before they’re then taken to other centers where there are people from various countries that are saying, come to Norway, come to Switzerland, come to, to Germany, come to the UK, come to Canada.
Mike Papantonio: Which is wonderful because what they’re trying to avoid is predatory conduct.
Donniya Davies: Absolutely.
Mike Papantonio: You know, we had this, this case that we followed here in Georgia, where they had 2000, basically prisoners being held up in Georgia, they were immigrants. And simply there as labor. Well there’s, there’s the, there’s the labor predatory. There’s the sexual predatory. All of those things were on the table immediately. So at least there’s some organization where a country’s coming in and saying, come to Canada, we’ve got a job for you. We have homes for you. And at this point right now, the US is kind of way behind on that, aren’t they?
Donniya Davies: I’m afraid so. I don’t know of one organization that’s actually doing what we’re doing, working alongside the UK government. And we’re quite happy to share ideas and what we’re doing and help the US. We’d love to be able to do that.
Mike Papantonio: Thank you, Donniya. We’ll, we’ll try to do what we can on our show to try to promote what you’re trying to accomplish. Okay.
Donniya Davies: Thank you so much. Thank you.
Mike Papantonio: That’s all for this week, but you can find all of these videos on YouTube channel at youtube.com/theRingofFire. The videos are gonna be posted throughout the week and you can follow us on Twitter @americaslawyer. I’m Mike Papantonio and this has been America’s Lawyer where we tell you the stories that corporate media won’t tell you because they’re advertisers don’t let ’em tell stories like this or their political connections don’t allow for it. We’ll see you next week.
