America’s Lawyer E51: Multiple billionaires in the United States have been hit with subpoenas as part of an ongoing lawsuit that is trying to find out how the banking industry and other wealthy individuals helped Jeffrey Epstein commit crimes. Amazon spent more than $14 million dollars last year trying to fight labor unions at their warehouses – one of the largest amounts we’ve seen spent in a single year. And the restaurant industry has been revealed to be the driving force behind the efforts to weaken child labor laws in America. 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. Multiple billionaires in the United States have been hit with subpoenas as part of an ongoing lawsuit that’s trying to find out how the banking industry and other wealthy individuals helped Jeffrey Epstein commit pedophilia. Amazon spent more than $14 million last year trying to fight labor unions at their warehouses, one of the largest amounts we’ve seen spent in a single year so far. And the restaurant industry’s been revealed to be the driving force behind the efforts to weaken child labor laws in America. That and more, it’s all coming up, don’t go anywhere. America’s Lawyer starts right now.
Billionaires from Google, Hyatt Hotels and venture capital firms have all been hit with subpoenas as part of the lawsuit looking at how JP Morgan helped Jeffrey Epstein for years and years commit pedophilia. Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins joins me to talk about that. Farron, I don’t, as I look at, anytime I see subpoenas, I look at the idea the names had to come from somewhere. This, they didn’t just pull these names out of the hat and say, hey, let’s go after these people. Right?
Farron Cousins: Yeah. So this is a very weird lawsuit, I guess, happening. The Virgin Islands is saying that JP Morgan, obviously, you’re essentially laundering money, you know, to kind of boil it down to its basic for Jeffrey Epstein. That’s how he was able to pay for these women. That’s how he was able to escape scrutiny. You cooked the books almost to make sure this guy wasn’t caught. So as part of that investigation, the lawyers have now said, wait a minute, suddenly we need to talk to an executive from Google. We gotta go to Hyatt Hotels. We’ve gotta go to the real estate folks. We gotta go to the venture capitals. So those names, and you know, we’ll.
Mike Papantonio: We’ll put ’em up there.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. You know, Brin, Pritzker, Zuckerman, Ovitz. Obviously there was something in JP Morgan’s files because they have not released, it’s still under seal, what the subpoenas are in reference to.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. They have been holding these files too long. Okay. These files need to be made public. And the only shot we have at this point is this very courageous AG in the US Virgin Islands that’s saying, look, if you think that this is just some old crazy cat that went to the island and had sex with trafficked girls, you’re wrong. It was a network. Everybody knew about the network. Everybody talked about the network. Everybody wanted to be part of the network. The banks were actually helping empower him to have this network.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. And one of the things that JP Morgan is accused of is in addition to letting Epstein have free rein with the money, the CEO at the time was also good friends with him, but they say that Epstein in return would send wealthy clients over to JP Morgan. So a possibility is that these individuals named are some of the clients who Jeffrey Epstein said, hey, why don’t you go and invest your money with JP Morgan. Which only then raises the questions, why were y’all already friends with Jeffrey Epstein?
Mike Papantonio: Exactly.
Farron Cousins: And when did you have, did you have these conversations on the island? Did you have ’em on the Lolita Express?
Mike Papantonio: Well, the argument’s gonna be that Jeffrey Epstein drew these people to JP Morgan, that they were big investors. There was a quid pro quo. I think we’ve just seen the beginning of this, but, you know, we are not gonna know until the government does what they should do. That’s release this information. Let’s take a look at it.
Farron Cousins: Yep.
Mike Papantonio: According to the latest data, Amazon spent $14 million last year to fight labor unions, the largest amount in a single year, according to labor researchers. The anti-union industry, well, it’s big business, and Amazon is their best customer. I have never seen so many labor cases coming out as I’m seeing right now. Okay. When we started things like, you know, for example Starbucks. Oh my God. I mean, you know, you’ve got that cat showing up in front of Congress committing perjury about his labor. You’ve got all of these social media folks that are supposed to be warm and fuzzy, you know.
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: Let’s, this is warm and fuzzy media. We don’t do this to our people. We’re different. Right? That we’re not part of the industrial complex in any way. We’re different. I’ll be damned if they’re different. They’re worse.
Farron Cousins: Right. These are the companies who, you know, they’ll put on their rainbow flags when it’s time to do it. Like, oh, look, we’re so inclusive. We love all of you. And then behind the scenes, they are beating the hell out of their workers, making them pee in jars and, you know, go to the bathroom on themselves in the delivery trucks. $14 million Amazon spent, which is a, you know, not even close to anything that touches their profits. They spent $14 million for these anti-labor law firms to go out there and bust up the unions that we’ve seen a big union drive for Amazon. We’ve seen a couple victories now.
Mike Papantonio: Does anybody do as much virtue signaling as the Starbucks and the Amazons and all of these internet startup companies? It’s all virtue.
Farron Cousins: Starbucks is the worst. They’re absolutely the worst on it.
Mike Papantonio: And then you seen, yeah, you look behind the curtain and they’re absolutely the worst. But, you know, Amazon, and as a matter of fact, Starbucks and Amazon even created a new way to deal with it. That is, let’s change the language. We did this story. Let’s change the language to where, you know, we’re warm and fuzzy. Gee whizz, if you engage in this type of union activity, you’re putting little Johnny over here, who’s trying to work his way through college, you’re taking his job away from him. Okay. And it’s disgusting. But they’ve got these lawyers that have taken this to a whole new level. It’s jargon. They’ve focused on jargon. What is it that, what’s people, what are people moved by? And it’s this, part of it is that virtue signaling. Yeah. We’re talking about unions, but we’re doing it for the right reason. Right?
Farron Cousins: Yeah. And these lawyers that they hire, they’re trained in how to skirt the labor laws so that they can kind of walk right up to that line of legal versus illegal with their union busting tactics. And it’s something, and by the way, $430 million annually in the United States is what these anti-labor firms pull in.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. I saw that number.
Farron Cousins: So, it is a massive business and these lawyers make a ton of money. And as we always talk about, imagine you go through law school, you learn everything you can. You’re like, I’m gonna be a great lawyer. And instead you decide, you know what I’d really like to do? I’d like to make sure that these hundred people at Amazon can’t have healthcare.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: I wanna make sure that instead of $15 an hour, they get paid 10. That’s my dream legal career.
Mike Papantonio: I always talk about that as you know. I talk about it at the seminars I put on. What is it you want for your legacy? I mean, you wanna be a lawyer for these freaks to where you’re saying, yeah, I really had a good day. These people can’t pay their bills now because I was able to keep their benefits down. And you go home and you have dinner with your family and, or the lawyer who prevents when a pharmaceutical kills 10,000 people, who goes home and says, you know, I really had a good day. I won a motion in court to where these people may not be able to recover now. And that’s a big victory for me. Who in the hell thinks like that? But there are tens and tens of thousands of them working for these big silk stocking law firms. It’s disgusting to me.
Farron Cousins: Because they’re pulling in the millions, you know, they’re weeping into their, you know, $5,000 pillows every night and they’re, and they’re sick. These people are so gross.
Mike Papantonio: They have a license to do good. You know, they have a license to clean up the environment, to get bad products off the market, to make Wall Street do what Wall Street’s supposed to do. They have a license to help people, and they choose to take that license and say, I’m gonna work for some corporation that does the horrible things that Amazon does to their workers. And I’m gonna declare victory when I succeed.
Gun sales are going through the roof in America right now and Trump supporters are snatching up Trump themed weaponry as fast as it can hit the shelves. Wow. Okay. There’s nothing more, you know, you’ve got a Trump nine, you know, you’ve got Glocks, you’ve got 1911s. You’ve got all kinds of guns that now have the Trump’s signature. Not only do you get this 45, but you all, the 45 Glock, but you also get his signature on it. They can’t even keep these on the shelves. That’s the story. Everybody they talk to, we can’t even, they’re selling as fast as we can put ’em on the shelf.
Farron Cousins: I mean, look, you could take a bag of dog droppings, put Trump’s name on it and these people in the MAGA hats are gonna buy it no matter what. They don’t care what it is because he is their celebrity. He is their hero. They love that Trump name. They love that Trump brand. And to be honest, this is probably one of the only Trump branded things they can afford. They can’t afford to go be members at Mar-a-Lago. They can’t afford to go stay in Trump hotels.
Mike Papantonio: He has nothing in common with any of them.
Farron Cousins: And they don’t get it.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: They wouldn’t, you know, to borrow a phrase you’ve used plenty of times, they wouldn’t be allowed in the back door at his country club.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. They would, if they came in through the back door, somebody would think they’re a servant. Okay. So the FBI, the numbers are that sales topped 1 million a month for 44 straight months of a million and more just in sales with Trump guns. Where’s this going?
Farron Cousins: Um, I hope that’s the end of where it goes. I hope these are display pieces and that we’re not gonna see, you know, a mass shooting committed with a Trump themed gun. But we have a real, and Trump himself, by the way, is not even a shooter. His kids go out and they do, you know, that stuff. But Trump doesn’t. This has nothing in common with anything about this man. If you plated it in solid gold, maybe, because he’s ostentatious like that. But look, we’ve got an American public, you know, even in gun owners, even NRA members, majority of ’em say, listen, we gotta be smarter about all this. And instead of being smarter, they’re stamping his name on a gun, sending ’em out the door faster than they can make ’em.
Mike Papantonio: 44 straight months of more than a million sales every month in Trump guns. And this, the statement is, they’re going so fast we can’t even keep ’em in stock. They need to make more. Okay.
The restaurant industry and their lobbying group have been revealed as the major pushers of legislation that would weaken child labor laws as the industry hopes to exploit this source of cheap labor. Now that’s what it is, right? You got, we’re on a big, big cheap labor effort by corporate America right now. Whether it’s hotels, whether it’s restaurants, whether it’s in industry of every kind. You got two things going on. You got people coming, children coming across the border, expendable, all the folks coming across the border are expendable. Use ’em up, ship ’em back, kill ’em if you have to, ship ’em back. But here you’re talking about children, both immigrant children and US citizens, that they’ve figured out, we can make a lot of money by having these kids work in these dangerous jobs. We don’t have to pay ’em as much. Right?
Farron Cousins: Right. And it’s just like back in the old days, oh, well we hired the kids to go into the printing press because they’re smaller and they can dislodge things and get this big machinery going again. That’s how kids were losing fingers and arms and lives. But what we’re seeing here with the restaurant industry behind the push, when I saw this story, it clicked for me. The restaurant industry itself is a massive employer of undocumented immigrants. It’s typically an industry where you can manage to have a couple people where you just strictly pay in cash. There’s not a lot of oversight. So to expand this to where they can bring in the migrant children, well, they know, okay, listen, I’ve got a couple folks in here who are undocumented. They’ve got kids, I can bring their kids in too. Pay them $5 an hour instead of $10 an hour. They can’t say anything to complain about it. So it just expands this cycle of abuse that the migrant workers are facing.
Mike Papantonio: I wrote a book, last book I wrote, it’s called Inhuman Trafficking. It’s fiction, but it’s based on the cases that we’ve handled. And what we saw there was they were doing, they’re recruiting workers in the restaurant business in Europe. Right. They’d go to Ukraine and they would say, you know, you want a job in the service industry, come to the United States. We can put you in a restaurant. Okay. The get ’em over here. They take all of their IDs away, they isolate ’em, they put ’em in a room with 20 other kids. They then say, you know, you’re not making enough at the front desk. I mean, you know, you’re a greeter, you can make a lot more serving.
So they move ’em to serving. Oh, you can make a lot more if you can come over here, serve during the day and dance on the pole at night. And oh, by the way, you can make even more money than dancing on the pole if you will just meet Ted here. This little freakish guy, Ted. And all of a sudden the human trafficking goes into that. This is not exactly the same thing, but it’s the same mentality. You’ve got an entire restaurant industry that says, we want these kids working in industrial freezers. We want ’em working in meat coolers. We want ’em to do an industrial laundry. We want to expand the hours, you know, well, let’s expand the hours that they’re able to work. It’s nothing but exploitation.
Farron Cousins: It really is. And corporations also know that even for US citizens under the age of 18, for the first 90 days, you can pay them any wage you want. It does not have to be minimum wage.
Mike Papantonio: And then fire ’em after 90 days.
Farron Cousins: Exactly. Well, what’s the 90 day period? Well, that’s the summer period for these kids that are still in school. So you get cheap summer labor, which is typically the busiest time for all these industries.
Mike Papantonio: You’d be glad to know that the Koch family is behind this.
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: The Koch family, they’re the ones really pushing this. So this is taking place in Ohio, Minnesota, Arkansas, Wisconsin. And nobody’s gonna stop it. You know, nobody’s gonna stop it. And we’re gonna see more deaths. You know, kids arms, when it comes to the immigrants, their arms are gonna be cut off, we’ll ship ’em back to Mexico or Guatemala. With the US kids, well, you know, let’s put ’em on hours that are like 12, you know, 12 hours a day day because they wanna work as much as they can before school starts again. Right?
Farron Cousins: Yeah. And eventually, you know, now that we’re in the 2020s, we’re gonna have to go back and repass the legislation we passed in the 1920s to get the kids out of the coal mines again.
Mike Papantonio: Right, right, right. Farron, thanks for joining me. Okay.
Farron Cousins: Thank you.
Mike Papantonio: That’s all of this week, but all these segments are gonna be available throughout next week. And make sure you follow us on Twitter @AmericasLawyer. I’m Mike Papantonio and this has been America’s Lawyer where we tell you the stories every week that corporate media can’t tell you because their advertisers don’t allow ’em to tell those stories. They’re making too much money from their advertisers or their political connections to Republican or Democrat won’t permit them to tell the story because it just wouldn’t fit to their agenda. We don’t have that problem. So we’ll see you next time.
