America’s Lawyer E29: Midterm elections are less than a week away, and the polling data shows a tough road for Democrats. We’ll tell you what the polls show and what we might expect to happen next week. New documents obtained by The Intercept prove the Department of Homeland has been censoring news on social media for years – we’ll bring you the details. And progressive Democrats have backed off their efforts to ask President Biden to seek a diplomatic end to the Russia-Ukraine conflict. 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. Midterm elections are less than a week away, and the polling data shows a tough road for Democrats. We’ll tell you what the polls show and what we might expect is gonna happen next. New documents obtained by The Intercept prove The Department of Homeland Security has been censoring news on social media for years, real serious censorship. And progressive Democrats have backed off their efforts to ask President Biden to seek a diplomatic end to Russian Ukraine conflict. In other words, don’t go to the table. Don’t try to meet, don’t try to amicably work this out. That’s what the Democrat’s message is. All that and more, it’s coming up. Don’t go anywhere. America’s Lawyer starts right now.
The midterm elections are just a few days away and Democrats, well, they’re not exactly enthusiastic about their prospects. Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins joins me to talk about this and many other topics. So, you know, if you read anything right now, it is just, it’s the same message. The Democrats are in trouble, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It’s that message that keeps coming through. If I’m looking at it, I think the Democrats take, I think the Republicans take the House, Democrats hold onto the Senate, may be wrong. What’s your take?
Farron Cousins: No, I agree with you. I think the House is a foregone conclusion. A couple weeks ago it really was looking like the Republicans would only have a couple seats advantage, you know, five, six is what the projections were. We’re looking at over 20 now.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. I’ve heard as high as 30.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. Things have definitely shifted in the Republicans favor in the House. So I, I think that’s almost a giveaway. It’s the Senate really, where we’re starting to see a lot of these races tighten. I mean, the polls are changing every day and that’s what’s getting so frustrated about what I do every day, is you can’t talk about a poll, because by the time people watch that video, a whole new poll is out that shows the exact opposite. So we don’t know.
Mike Papantonio: Well, I mean, first of all, you believe the same thing I do about polling. I think it’s basically useless.
Farron Cousins: Right.
Mike Papantonio: I mean, all you can do is read tea leaves.
Farron Cousins: It’s voodoo at this point.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah, it’s voodoo. You look at some numbers and you say, well, here’s what it looks like. So I, you know, I’m, I’m hearing the Republicans already beating on their chest. We’re, you know, gonna take the Senate, gonna take the House. They might, but guess work, you know, we’ve been reading tea leaves a long time. I don’t think that’s the situation.
Farron Cousins: And I think once it comes down to it, the Republicans just have so many bad candidates out there. Herschel Walker and Dr. Oz, obviously at the top of that list, those are the two everybody’s focused on. And I don’t know how those two candidates overcome all of the negatives. Even in deep red Republican territory, you still have those Democrats, Warnock and Fetterman polling above them. Not by as much as they, they were two months ago, but they’re still ahead by enough where they might be able to have a pretty easy victory.
Mike Papantonio: Problem is independents.
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: Right now you have independents sitting out there, what is it, 18% of them still haven’t made.
Farron Cousins: Right.
Mike Papantonio: I mean, that’s a, that’s a, that’s a big number. They still haven’t made a, actually the number of, the number of them that haven’t made up their mind is higher than that.
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: But the independents are gonna drive this. And the, the only, here’s the, here’s the spoiler here. The independents are heavily buying into the idea that the economy sucks, which it does. That crime is outta control, which it is. You know, it’s all of the talking points. That the border is a problem. They’re buying, independents are buying into that. Independents in the past really have more favored Democrats than they have Republicans. That’s, that’s not what it looks like this time to me.
Farron Cousins: Right. The independents are the people who actually do go out there every day and they say, is my situation better today than it was two years ago?
Mike Papantonio: Mm-hmm.
Farron Cousins: And almost every election, no matter who’s in charge, the answer to that question is, no.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: You’re not better off than you were two years ago. So they’re the ones who flip.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: They say, okay, well, in 2020 I did vote for the Democrats. I thought my situation would get better.
Mike Papantonio: Mm-hmm.
Farron Cousins: Things are not better. I’m looking at my bank account, I’m looking at my paychecks, they’re not better. And y’all can get mad all you want about hearing that, but that’s the way it is.
Mike Papantonio: Well, you know, that’s the problem with doing a show like this. People don’t, they just want to hear what they want to hear.
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: In other words, when we do a segment saying, hey, you know, Democrats may be in trouble. You got these whinnies, the whinnies, my God text, you know, Pap’s a right winger, Farron has forsaken the Democrats. They really hate to hear the truth. And it’s amazing to me. I mean, you, you could tell ’em, you could say, this is not conjecture, this is the truth. But I don’t think it’s just our audience. I think it’s Democrats in general, Republicans in general, they don’t want to hear what they disagree with. But that’s not real journalism, is it?
Farron Cousins: No. They don’t want to hear the bad news. And the bad news is that reality is showing us right now Democrats are gonna lose the House. We’re not gonna pick up as many Senate seats as we had originally thought. I still think we hold and I think we gain a seat or two, but we could also lose a couple seats that we did hold. So it, it’s not good news for the Democrats. And then of course, looking more broadly out there, yes, Biden has done some good things that we have talked about.
Mike Papantonio: We talk about it all the time.
Farron Cousins: But it’s not enough to change these people’s financial situation in middle America. It’s like the Obama recovery. They came out and told us after he took office and did these things, the economy’s great. No, it wasn’t. Wall Street was great.
Mike Papantonio: Right.
Farron Cousins: Corporations were doing great. Workers saw their pay decrease.
Mike Papantonio: 25 to 30% of Democrats are not enthusiastic about voting at all. Although the numbers are startling right now. This could be the biggest turnout we’ve seen in a long time.
Farron Cousins: It really could. So I think at this point, it really is, anything goes. Who knows?
Mike Papantonio: And God forbid we should say something that you don’t want to hear, but that’s what we do.
Exxon just posted record breaking profits as Americans continue to get gouged at the gas pump. Wow. This story, I think we were doing it before it was a story. I think we were doing it before, you know, before corporate media even thought it was an important issue. Why? Because Exxon advertises in corporate media. BP advertises in corporate media. We were doing this story when we started seeing the very edge of it. Right. Corporate media held off as long as they could until it was inescapable. And these numbers are $18 billion in one quarter was the profit for Exxon. At last Truthout, who’s social media, they had to cover this story. I still haven’t seen it fully covered with corporate media, have you?
Farron Cousins: No, absolutely not. And it is, it’s price gouging.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: You can’t make record profits during a time of record inflation if you are not artificially inflating your own prices. And that’s what we see here.
Mike Papantonio: Mm.
Farron Cousins: Exxon with $18 billion over three months.
Mike Papantonio: Shell.
Farron Cousins: Chevron, Chevron is 11.2. Shell almost 10 billion.
Mike Papantonio: 10 billion, $10 billion. Yeah.
Farron Cousins: It’s crazy what these companies are pulling in. And this is all just further proof of what Bernie Sanders told us almost a year ago, put a windfall profits tax in place.
Mike Papantonio: Well, now we, we talked about that. I, we literally have been talking about it even before Bernie talked about it.
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: It’s an easy solution. The president has right to do it. Now, he’s talking about it now.
Farron Cousins: Finally.
Mike Papantonio: But it’s too late. It’s too, it’s too late. I don’t know how to put it. Look, Con. Look, they, they, they created a bill that was going to address the potential for the windfall tax. It fizzled. Congress isn’t going to do it because they’re getting so much money from the oil industry. The president held off doing it as long as he can. I don’t, not even sure he’s still sold on the windfall tax. But that’s the solution here. I mean, it, it, it kind of comes down to the fact that you’ve gotten zero cooperation from Congress. Zero, zero cooperation from the Senate. I think it was Manchin and about three others that made the bill fizzle away.
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: That was gonna say we need to have some windfall tax punishment here. Right?
Farron Cousins: Right. But here’s the other thing too. On the other side, the bully pulpit side, Biden could be out there talking about these numbers every day. But instead what did he do? He went to Saudi Arabia to beg them, please, we need more oil. They laughed in his face and said, we’re gonna cut oil.
Mike Papantonio: Made him look like an idiot.
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: I mean, made him look like a child idiot.
Farron Cousins: So he has to point out this corruption. He has to talk about it publicly.
Mike Papantonio: Farron, you’ve, you and I have talked about this before, but the more money you put into the oil industry’s hands, the more money you put into the pharmaceutical industry’s hands, the more money you put into tech’s hands, simply they use that for affluence, influence. They take US, you know, they take Citizens United to the absolute max, spread out as much as they can. They buy gazillions of lobbyists. Their influence, watch, watch what happens here. They’re making so much money, it’s going to take a decade to, to slow the, to slow down the power that they’re gonna gain from all this money. $18 billion in one quarter, $10 billion in one quarter, $11 billion, that’s what these companies are making.
Farron Cousins: Yep.
Mike Papantonio: And all they’re doing is saying, you know, we kind of got you. It’s kind of checkmate because we can buy the media, which they’ve already done. We can buy more lobbyists, which they’ve already done. It’s, it’s just something that the president months ago should have said, you can’t do that. And I’m gonna make, I’m gonna show you why you can’t because you’re gonna get taxed big time.
Elon Musk now owns Twitter, but the investments from Saudi Arabia shouldn’t leave you feeling warm and fuzzy. Well, okay, let me, Farron, I saw this Newsweek, I have almost zero confidence in Newsweek. I mean, zero. It has become nothing more than a, you know, a polarized propaganda rag. What I hated about this story is they act like this is something new. Okay. Twitter was, Saudi Arabia already owned huge interest in Twitter.
Farron Cousins: They had spies at Twitter.
Mike Papantonio: They had spies.
Farron Cousins: We talked about that.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. We did a story on it. Not only they owned, they, they had huge shares in Twitter. So they roll it over to him, to, to Musk and Newsweek goes crazy about it. Like, oh, this is, this is something new. It’s not anything new. They’ve been owning part of Twitter.
Farron Cousins: Right. It, it’s definitely not new, but it certainly is terrifying that, you know, the Saudi Royal Holding company has $2 billion now invested in Twitter. They are the second largest investor behind Elon Musk.
Mike Papantonio: Mm-hmm.
Farron Cousins: And of course, the danger with that, as we have talked about plenty of times, is that Twitter, or not Twitter, Saudi Arabia puts people in jail for their tweets. An American citizen is now in jail in Saudi Arabia for 16 years.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. For a tweet.
Farron Cousins: For criticizing the kingdom on Twitter.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: And, and, and we can’t have these people who will kill you over your tweets having any stake in it. That’s the danger.
Mike Papantonio: Okay. The story we did on this, I, I just, it was weeks and weeks ago. I, I don’t remember exactly, but part of that story was Twitter knew what was going on.
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: The folks at Twitter knew that they had Saudi spies that were doing this, and they did nothing about it. And it wasn’t Elon Musk, it was the owners before Elon Musk that said, yeah, that’s okay because Saudis are giving us so much money. This mutt, the prince, the Saudi prince who is an absolute mutt, a wild bear, they describe him, is a guy that is going to do everything he can to influence the, the, the messaging there for $2 billion, just like the government does. We’re gonna do that story today. Just like, just like, just like all these agencies have done with social media. This is a great avenue for the Saudis, isn’t it?
Farron Cousins: It, it is. And again, I can’t stress enough how dangerous this is for the people of Saudi Arabia. Now, I got tons of issues with Musk buying Twitter. I don’t want the oligarchs out there holding the public town hall. That’s dangerous in and of itself. But having people that will literally kill you for your tweets, that’s even more dangerous.
Mike Papantonio: But Farron, do you see the point I’m making? Newsweek acts like this is, okay, this is something new. It’s not anything new.
Farron Cousins: Right.
Mike Papantonio: The Saudis we’re already in control of Twitter to where the, to where the folks at Twitter knew they had spies, didn’t do anything about it. And now this American is in prison for 16 years because of
Farron Cousins: Well, part of the reason this is treated as something new is because the Royal Holding company came out and bragged about it.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah, yeah.
Farron Cousins: On Twitter, they put out this big post like we’re now the second. So they’re drawing attention to it because now they think, oh look, we can be open about what we’ve been doing for years at Twitter. So if, if they’re willing to come out in the open, that again, super scary because now they feel like we don’t have anything to hide.
Mike Papantonio: But is Newsweek suggesting that the folks at Twitter are so stupid that they didn’t know that the Saudis were already in control of Twitter when they were in charge? You see, you got, you gotta, you gotta call balls and stripes.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. People don’t understand that it’s not that they just put the money in.
Mike Papantonio: No.
Farron Cousins: It’s that they’re, they already had the investment and they’ve just rolled it over.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. And put in a little more, I’m sure they’re gonna put in more depending on Elon, what Elon Musk does.
A new study has found that Americans trust in the media is at an all time low. These numbers are terrifying to me. When I look at the, the, the, the way that the American public regards corporate media. Okay. Take it from there.
Farron Cousins: It’s obviously, you know, what do we have like 35% total that trust the media at all.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: At any little bit.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: So huge majority says absolutely do not trust the media. But then when you break it down by party, this is what is stupid to me.
Mike Papantonio: It’s crazy.
Farron Cousins: 70% of Democrats say, no, no, no. We trust the media.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: And then you have, what is it?
Mike Papantonio: 12%, or is it, 12, 18?
Farron Cousins: 14% of Republicans say they trust it. So you’ve got 86% of Republicans say, no, we can’t trust the media. And they’re the ones consuming the most irresponsible media.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: But 70% of Democrats trusting it, that, that’s concerning because media’s not trustworthy right now.
Mike Papantonio: This article was done by Gallop, and there’s, there’s several articles that talk about this issue.
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: And when you look at the way they characterize it, it is that Democrats are attracted to polarized politics. It’s like you and I talked about earlier in the show, that Democrats want to hear what they want to hear, whether it’s journalism or not, they want to hear it. Republicans are the same way, but Republicans have a different attitude about this. They think that the media has become so dysfunctional that there has to be a complete sweep to redo it. But I mean, as I look at this story, the thing that scares me is corporate media now is figuring out we need to move into social media. How’s that affecting shows like ours or Sam Seder or, you know, David Pakman or TYT, how’s it affect us?
Farron Cousins: Well, what’s happened, and this is something you and I had actually talked about a couple years ago, I think, is that you’re seeing sites like YouTube push more corporate media, more videos from CNN and MSNBC and Fox News instead of pushing with their algorithms, independent outlets like what we have and Sam and Pakman and everybody else. So we get pushed back, you know, the, the views start to decrease a little bit. The engagement goes down and it’s all because we are not being pushed as much.
Mike Papantonio: We’re being throttled back, Farron.
Farron Cousins: A little. Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: I mean, I mean, we’re gonna talk a story in a minute here where we’re being throttled back and that’s happening with government. It’s happening with corporates that don’t like what we have to say. But if you go to the segment, let’s take any one of your segments that you do. It could be a segment that is, it’s, it’s so specific. It’s there, nobody else is talking about that particular segment. Look over to the right where they have listed all of the related stories. They’re completely, utterly unrelated.
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: They are MSNBC talking about, if you’re talking about Mars, they’re talking about Venus. It’s, it’s CNN. It’s, it’s ABC, CBS, it’s all of them because they now are trying to, to do the same thing to social media that they’ve done to corporate media.
Farron Cousins: And, and they’re, they’re also trying to pass a law that would make it easier for them to have this consortium.
Mike Papantonio: Right.
Farron Cousins: That basically works with the social media sites to throttle back independent news and push the corporate news.
Mike Papantonio: Okay. Look, you, you own Gallup. Okay. I mean, excuse me. You, you, let, let’s say you own a, any one of the sites. Pick, pick one. Financially, you do better if you can get MSNBC and CNN and all of the corporates to keep pumping money. That’s all it’s about.
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: Your story becomes irrelevant, Farron, the great stories you do. I mean, you do exceptional stories every day. But if I look at your story next to the, to CNN, MSNBC, you gotta go 20 stories down before we see anything happen to do with the Ring of Fire again or Sam Seder or David Pakman or TYT, they’re trying to make us disappear because it’s all about money.
Farron Cousins: Yeah, it is. And that I think is why it bothers me when you see the 70% number of 70% Democrats saying, no, we trust the media.
Mike Papantonio: Oh, I know.
Farron Cousins: Well, well you shouldn’t. Listen, the media’s not outright lying to you. And I, I think that’s a different, well, depends.
Mike Papantonio: I don’t know. Farron, I.
Farron Cousins: It depends on your outlet. Sure.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: But the issues we’ve always had with the media is the corporate influence, the censoring of the stories.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: The not telling you the whole truth.
Mike Papantonio: Well, it was just like the Newsweek story that we just did. Okay.
Farron Cousins: Right.
Mike Papantonio: Newsweek.
Farron Cousins: It’s true. But it’s also, you’re missing so much context.
Mike Papantonio: Right. You would have to read behind to understand that Newsweek basically hustled you on that story, to make it sound like the Saudis had just bought into Twitter. Well, no, that was absolutely incorrect. But that’s the way this is all being shifted. So somebody who, you know, we’re gonna say stuff corporate media doesn’t say, and we got the whinnies who say, I can’t believe you said that because I don’t want to hear it. It hurts my feelings that you said the Democrats, for example, are getting their butt kicked, hurts my feelings, and they get mad at us. That’s what social media should be doing because nobody else is doing.
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: Documents obtained by The Intercept prove that Department of Homeland Security has been censoring stories with the help of social media outlets in a big way. You wanna know who the big players are? These two women right here. One of them, one of them is with the government. The other one right here we think is working for Twitter. No, she’s working with the government and they’re making arrangements for the CIA, the FBI, whatever the agency is of the day, to tell them what they can and can’t put on social media. This story, I urge everybody, everybody should read this story. It’s by Lee Fang.
Farron Cousins: And Ken Klippenstein.
Mike Papantonio: And Klippenstein, exactly. Both of them are extremely talented journalists.
Farron Cousins: Amazing, yeah.
Mike Papantonio: From The Intercept. I think, I think they’re two of the really talented journalists of our time, investigative, along with people like Matt Taibbi. They uncovered it, didn’t they?
Farron Cousins: They did. And, and just so to give everybody the background here, what we’ve got starting in 2018, the government with the best of intentions says, well we gotta do something about foreign misinformation. So they give the Department of Homeland Security all of this power. They create what is essentially a disinformation board, although it didn’t have that name yet.
Mike Papantonio: So propaganda board.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. So they said, look, all we’re trying to do social media outlets, we just wanna make sure that you guys know and have the tools to root out this foreign information. Oh, also keep an eye out for terrorists because we’ve always gotta be on the lookout for that. And then within two years, again, it started in 2018, within two years, this thing had ballooned into, oh, well we gotta fight Covid misinformation. Noble cause, give them that. There was a ton of misinformation about Covid. And then things went completely off the rails because their true intentions came out. Now you can’t talk about Hunter Biden. You can’t talk about Ukraine. You can’t talk about Afghanistan. These are all in the documents from the Homeland Security.
Mike Papantonio: Okay. Let me, let me be more specific about that. You can talk about Afghanistan, but you can’t talk about the screw up of the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan. You can talk about Ukraine, but people who disagree with the fact that we should not, people who agree we should not be there at all, the, the government says no, we’re gonna censor that. And it’s you, you can talk about Covid, but, or the vaccine. But you can’t talk about the fact that it may be, it’s not efficacious in some situations. So here it is, Vijaya Gadde, this is this woman right here with Twitter meets with, what’s her Laura Dem, Dehmlow, Laura Dehmlow with the government. And they have an arrangement and the arrangement is a portal that the government can actually use and change the stories or actually censor the stories. Did, did I get that right?
Farron Cousins: You, you did. They even, I mean literally in the piece here, they have the website that the government goes to to log in to their back end of Facebook to go in there. That you, you’re not talking hyperbole. They literally have the website right here.
Mike Papantonio: And, and you’re not talking about, you’re not talking about supposition because they have the documents.
Farron Cousins: Right.
Mike Papantonio: Lee Fang, they actually got the documents.
Farron Cousins: Well, and here’s the, here’s the scariest part too. Okay. So you’ve got Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Discord, Wikipedia, Microsoft, LinkedIn, Verizon Media. They’re having monthly meetings, currently still, monthly meetings with the FBI, the CIA and the CISA.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: So they’re still meeting.
Mike Papantonio: Talk, talk about what the CISA. Viewers may not know what.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. This is a, that is essentially what the DHS had created. That’s the new branch.
Mike Papantonio: The cyber branch.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. That, that deals with, of course cyber terrorism as they call it.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: But it’s censoring stories here in the US. So that’s the separate branch and it continues to grow, continues to get more funding. But they’re still having monthly meetings. Like as of now with these people. This isn’t something that came to an end.
Mike Papantonio: And, and we, we know this. I promise you our stories when we do ’em on, you know, you and I disagree, I think Ukraine is insane. We shouldn’t be there. But they’ll throttle that, they’ll throttle that back. I mean, I’m, I’m telling you, that’s what they do with that. Or when we talk about, you know, how Afghanistan was mismanaged on the withdrawal, they’ll throttle that back. That’s what these folks have agreed to let happen. And nobody seems to care. I mean, do, do, maybe they don’t know about it. But these emails, this, this is not, this is not Klippenstein and Lee Fang making this up. This is, this is the product of AG, he’s running for AG, Eric Schmitt, and he is running in Missouri. He started this because he had gotten the leak that this was going on. So he starts putting their feet to the fire. He starts actually getting the material that says, we used to just talk about it, but now we’re seeing it face to face. And if you do a story that they don’t like or I do a story they don’t like or Lee, or Lee Fang does, or Sam Seder does, or David Pakman does, or TYT does, they throttle it back because people like this woman right here, this Gadde woman gives ’em permission to do that. She’s gone, by the way, Elon Musk fired her.
Farron Cousins: Yeah, she was just let go just a couple days ago.
Mike Papantonio: Thank God.
Farron Cousins: But look, this is a very serious issue and, and, and what we have always said, you and I sitting right here, we have talked about always with the slippery slope because this program, like I said, they, they started with the best of intentions. But we all know that’s never how it stays. Just like the Patriot Act. Oh no, we gotta, we gotta spy on the terrorists and we’re gonna keep you safe. And then two days later, yeah, we’re tapping into your phone too. Sorry. It’s what happens. This is the same thing. It’s the same kind of program.
Mike Papantonio: Let me give you the latest. Joe Biden, he put together his, his idea of this, this is his team. The team is called the misinformation, disinformation and malformation team. And they are the people that work with women like this and people like this that say, yeah, it’s, it’s the new norm in America because nobody gives a. It’s okay.
Farron Cousins: Well, well they, they, that actually didn’t end up happening. That’s what he tried to do. But remember there was such huge public backlash.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. Yeah, there was.
Farron Cousins: That finally like six months after he announced that, he said, okay, we’re not gonna do it.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah, we did a.
Farron Cousins: But he doesn’t need to do it because you’ve already got it in place.
Mike Papantonio: We did a half dozen stories on it.
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: And there was so much pressure because it was nothing more than a propaganda team that he had assembled. And this nut case woman that was a person who was supposed to be running it was crazy as a March Hare.
Pfizer has announced that there’ll be price gouging Americans next year by raising the Covid vaccine priced by 10000%. What a deal. Pick it up.
Farron Cousins: The United States taxpayers paid for the development of these vaccines.
Mike Papantonio: Right.
Farron Cousins: The government gave them our tax dollars and said, for the love of God, develop vaccines. We’ve gotta get over this pandemic. And they did it. And now they hold the patents. We can’t do anything about that because they didn’t say these are gonna be open source. And now Pfizer says, well, since the pandemic’s died down, starting in January, even though it costs us $1.18 to produce it, we’re gonna sell it for a hundred plus dollars per vial, per shot.
Mike Papantonio: Mm-hmm.
Farron Cousins: A hundred dollars.
Mike Papantonio: 10000% markup, 10000%.
Farron Cousins: Mm-hmm.
Mike Papantonio: Now you’ve done stories and I’ve done stories, we’ve done ’em together where we talk about that’s the new norm in the pharmaceutical industry. Here, the argument that it’s about research and development is completely utter nonsense. It has nothing to do with, has nothing at all to do with research and development. It doesn’t even have to do with marketing. They don’t have to market.
Farron Cousins: Right.
Mike Papantonio: The government is marketing for ’em all over the world. They’re doing the marketing. So this is just, hey baby, let’s just put it in our pockets. It costs them $1, to make a vial of vaccine, costs them $1. You just pointed out that they’re selling it for as high as $130 per vial.
Farron Cousins: And like you said, it all goes right into their pockets. The vaccines are developed. They know that we’re probably living in a post Covid world where you have to get a booster every year, maybe twice a year, just like a flu shot.
Mike Papantonio: Insurance is gonna pay it. We’ll just pass that on.
Farron Cousins: Exactly.
Mike Papantonio: Medicare is gonna pay it. Medicaid’s gonna pay it.
Farron Cousins: And you know the story I always come back to is one story that you told about a deposition you took over in Europe.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: And, and at the end of the day, you asked them, just out of curiosity. Why, why are you only charging them X amount here but you’re charging, you know, 10 times that in America? And the answer was, because we can.
Mike Papantonio: Because we can. Those were his exact words. He looked across the table. This is a product that was killing people all over the world. And this was like an aside. I thought, well I got a couple minutes, let me find out. I never dreamed he would say, I’m charging 300% more because we can in America. That’s what’s happening right here.
Farron Cousins: That, that is, it’s because we can.
Mike Papantonio: And the government could do something about it. Joe Biden could do something. Trump could have done something. Clinton could have done something. Obama could have done something. Bush could have done something. But they refused to do it because the pharmaceutical industry owns, bought and paid for, Washington, DC.
Progressive Democrats recently withdrew a letter to the President, Biden, that said, that urged him to seek a diplomatic end to the Russian Ukraine conflict. The letter from the Democrats was, you know, Joe, let’s try to sit down and talk about this. Let’s try some diplomacy. That’s all they said. You ought to go over there and we ought to try some. Tell me what happened when these little handful of Democrats made that suggestion.
Farron Cousins: Right. It was the progressive caucus. The, the real progressives.
Mike Papantonio: The real, real progressives. The ones we talk about that we need to put in Washington all the time. Yeah.
Farron Cousins: And, and they basically got slapped by the Democratic leadership saying, how dare you, how dare you try to question what it is we’re doing here. And what really means is how dare you off our defense contractor funders.
Mike Papantonio: Right.
Farron Cousins: Stop that. You’re gonna make them mad and we’re gonna lose money right before the midterms.
Mike Papantonio: Right.
Farron Cousins: There was nothing wrong with this letter.
Mike Papantonio: That’s exactly, look Farron, that, that is not, that. Look, you’re, your theories are always right on. I mean, when you said, watch, what you just said, why did it happen? Because we’re close to election. The, the weapons industry was very concerned that this is gonna make our defense contractors really mad. You just said that. My guess is that you had not even seen the other dozen articles that, that talk about that.
Farron Cousins: I had not.
Mike Papantonio: I, I, I believe that. But the point is that’s why it happened. So the president, rather than sitting down saying, you know, we ought to talk, we ought talk to these folks before we engage in nuclear frigging war. Maybe we oughta talk to ’em. And the Democrats that made that suggestion were shamed. I mean, absolutely shamed.
Farron Cousins: Well, and the Washington Post, you know, refers it as a, a giant misstep. It’s not a giant misstep to say, hey, instead of getting people killed, what if we sat down and talked, used actual diplomacy.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: Right. We’re not living in a Bay of Pigs situation anymore and we shouldn’t be. We’ve evolved.
Mike Papantonio: Okay. Think about that, Washington Post. What’s the connection? Bezos. Huge, huge war contractor.
Farron Cousins: Yep.
Mike Papantonio: Okay. So they take the position. What a stupid thing to say. You mean you really want to sit, sit down and work it out before we start a nuclear conflict? How stupid. That’s the Washington Post saying that. Farron, thank you for joining me.
Farron Cousins: Thank you.
Mike Papantonio: That’s all for this week. But all of these segments are gonna be available this coming week right here on this channel. And you can follow us on Twitter @AmericasLawyer. I’m Mike Papantonio and this has been America’s Lawyer, where we tell you stories that corporate media won’t tell you because their advertisers won’t let ’em, or because their political connections are so polarized that they can’t allow for it. We’ll see you next time.
