The judges who were sending kids to jail in exchange for cash from a private prison company have been ordered to pay over $200 Million to their victims. Plus, the popular weedkiller Round Up has now been linked convulsions in animals, and it could easily be doing that to humans. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.
Transcript:
*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
Mike Papantonio: The judges who were sending kids to jail in exchange for cash from a private prison have been ordered to pay more than $200 million to their victims. Wow. Okay. So we, this story, this story began when you had two judges that made a deal. They made a deal with contractors that were part of building this new private prison. They made a deal with the people who were running the private prison. And the deal was, you give us $3 million, $2.8 million, you give us $2.8 million and we’re going to send you as many people as we can over the years to go into your private prison. Pick it up from there.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. And, and it was sometimes children as young as eight years old. And we’re talking about, we’re not talking about kids that are out there robbing banks or killing people. We’re talking about truancy, we’re talking about, oh, we caught you smoking a cigarette at school. You’re going to prison because it’s putting money in my pocket. And many times in the courtroom, what they would do when they handed down these harsh sentences for these minor offenses, they would immediately take the child and wouldn’t even allow them to say goodbye to their family.
Mike Papantonio: Put ’em in shackles, put ’em in shackles
Farron Cousins: Right. And drag them outta the courtroom. That’s the last the parents saw of them until they got outta jail.
Mike Papantonio: 4,000 juvenile convictions. Convictions ranging from petty theft, truancy, smoking at school and being belligerent. These two judges, criminals, criminals themselves. How the hell they ever became judges is beyond me. But they’re criminals. One is in prison for how long? How, how what’s 20, 20 some years. The other guy is.
Farron Cousins: Yeah, 28 years and 17 years.
Mike Papantonio: 17. And the, the one for 17 years is house arrest. He’s not even in prison. He has one of those shock jobs around his ankle.
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: He can’t leave, but he’s, he’s being held prisoner at home because of COVID. That’s the way this story, this story reports. The other, the other criminal is in prison where, in Kentucky?
Farron Cousins: In Kentucky, yeah and he is, he’s 72 serving a 28 year sentence. So he’ll die in jail.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. Let’s hope
Farron Cousins: He’s, he’s not coming out there, thank goodness.
Mike Papantonio: Sooner than later, sooner than later. Okay.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. I, I don’t imagine he’s getting the best healthcare in there. And again, we, we, this is what these people deserve.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: They ruined the lives of these children, psychologically scarred them forever, for the small price of $2.8 million.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: That is, that is not a lot of money to sell out 4,000 children.
Mike Papantonio: Sol Weiss, a good friend of mine, the lawyer that handled the civil case in this situation got the $200 million. When he started this, you know, if you listen to what he had to say, he knew there, this will never be collected. These kids are never gonna collect that money. But he understood that this is such an ugly story, if we don’t tell it again and again, and again, we’re faced with a story right down the road here in North Florida, that we’re talking about the, the, the boys ranch that did the same thing. So this is repeating itself all over the country. This is not an isolated story.
Mike Papantonio: The popular weed killer Roundup has now been linked to convulsions in animals. And it’s, we know the harm it’s doing to humans. That’s already been established. It’s killing human beings, but now it’s killing your dogs and your cats. Anything you keep out in the yard. Talk about his story a little bit.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. This is very disturbing obviously, because what they’ve started to know is, notice scientists have, is all of the earthworms in these areas where Roundup is being sprayed, you know, by the barrel, all these earthworms are suffering convulsions because what it does is it exacerbated convulsions in C elegans and concluded that a receptor protein called GABA A.
Mike Papantonio: That’s right.
Farron Cousins: Was the neurological target.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: So it gets into the neurological system and causes convulsions and these same receptors, they’re not just in earthworms, they’re in human beings too.
Mike Papantonio: You know what’s really ugly about it is the company’s known this for 40 years. The early rat studies that were do, that were done, showed exactly the mechanism that we’re talking about here. It showed, they had, they had rat studies, it caused convulsions, it caused death, it caused cancer in rats. They phonied up the studies. They completely phonied ’em up. They got ’em to the EPA. The EPA saw that the company had phonied up the studies and allowed it to happen anyway, because they said, if we don’t have Roundup, the world is gonna run out of food. Do you remember that pitch?
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: If we don’t have Roundup, the world is gonna run out of food.
Farron Cousins: You know, people also gotta understand you’ve been through these documents. You’re, you’re not basing this on what you think. You’ve seen the documents. You’ve, you’ve done the lawsuits here. Like, you know more about this than probably anybody else. And, and it’s so much worse than even what these stories tell because it’s not just the cover up. It’s the massive cover up. And right now, even Bayer is saying, because Bayer owns Monsanto that had Roundup, they say, well, that’s just worms. This isn’t, this isn’t any mammals.
Mike Papantonio: No, no.
Farron Cousins: Who cares about worms?
Mike Papantonio: Farron, the other argument in the documents when I was taking depositions, that the argument was it’s only rats. It’s only beagles. We can’t extrapolate that to human beings. Well, in order to be able to say that they had to commit fraud.
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: So the Supreme Court, United States Supreme Court looked at this and said, is there, can we go forward with this case? When the Supreme Court says, yes, this conservative Supreme Court, you know, these folks have done some bad things.
