A court has ruled that Johnson and Johnson can NOT hide behind bankruptcy to avoid lawsuits. Plus, a special needs school in New York is being sued for running, what one former employee calls, a complete scam operation costing taxpayers millions. 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: They don’t know the history of Donald Segretti and Richard Nixon and how he put these folks together to do these cultural dirty tricks. And then Ronald Reagan wins for President. George Bush one wins for president, solely based on the type of culture war that he’s trying to promote here.
A court has ruled that Johnson and Johnson can’t hide behind bankruptcy to avoid the lawsuits, to avoid being responsible. This company, look, they have known, they’ve known, let’s see, for four decades that their product was causing cancer in women and they knew the exact mechanics of how it was causing cancer. Wasn’t any guesswork. Their lab studies showed it. Pick it up from there.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. They would go in, in their own studies and, and take the tumors out of the women who they were marketing these products to and find their own fibers that they could trace back. They knew it was their stuff. They knew what it was causing. They knew the, you know, asbestos was in some of these. They knew 100% for many, many decades. Told no one. And actually moved into a more aggressive marketing approach with it, going to, you know, predominantly minority communities advertising this product as, hey, you don’t have time to take a shower toss on the baby powder. I mean, I’ve gone through just like you have. We’ve seen the advertising documents. They’re sick.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. They actually, they, that it was a cultural issue.
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: They knew that their, their marketing was primarily for African-American women, for whatever reason that was passed on generation to generation. So they didn’t want to change the formulation, which all they had to do was put something in there besides what they were putting in there to kill people. They didn’t even need that thing to kill people. But they kept it on the market only because they invested so much into the branding of the market. And the documents show that. I mean, they, there was no, there was no problem fixing the problem. They knew they could do it. But, you know, what I find interesting about this, first of all, they go into bankruptcy. It’s $140 billion company. Okay. Thank God we had good judges that reviewed that and said, really? I mean, you know, you’re really coming to us and saying, you have to declare bankruptcy with $140 billion. And the judges that wrote that opinion are brilliant. I’m telling you, it was one of the best written opinions. I mean, it was so smart the way they approached it, basically saying, have we just left our common sense at the door here? You know, and so this judge that did, the judge that agreed to accept this was humiliated. I mean, absolutely humiliated.
Farron Cousins: Was it, was it New Jersey the judge was originally from?
Mike Papantonio: Yes, yeah. Yeah, exactly. So, I mean, I think it’s an important decision. One thing it does is we see all of these companies trying to move there. They’re all trying to say, well, we have to declare bankruptcy. We’re, I think the next one we are gonna hear about was 3M. Okay. 3M has caused so much suffering in this country with PFAS, with the, the ear hearing loss cases for servicemen. We were getting ready to see them make the same move. Let me tell you this, this opinion written by these brilliant, absolutely brilliant judges, I think put it, I think they put a stop to it. So.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. And what people have to understand is that these major corporations, what they’ll do is they create a new business entity and they’ll spin off this, you know, the bad product to the new entity that has zero money.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: So they’ll say, no, no, no. We, we don’t own the talcum powder. That’s owned by, you know, Johnson, Johnson and Johnson.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: And then the judge will say, okay, well clearly they have no money. So all the liability pool, there’s no money to pull from.
Mike Papantonio: Let me segue into a, in a story you know about because we did this story. There’s this woman out there, her name is Susan, Suzanne Spaulding. Okay. She comes from Homeland Security Cybersecurity, CIA, Corporate America has, has grabbed her. Okay. What they’ve done now is they’re out on, they’re out talking about the idea of how dangerous it is to be critical of the justice system or the judiciary. Matter of fact, I’ve been under personal attack by this woman.
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: Because we did a story on her. We uncovered the fact that she’s so connected to corporate America, it’s just a scam. She shows up at judges, at judges and lawyers conferences and talks about the idea how dangerous it is to talk about judges. We looked at the cases that, the stories we’ve done, it’s more than 95% of the time. We’re talking about good job. Like this case. Good job. But the, what’s happening, and I think it’s important to the viewers because they’re gonna see some of this, it used to be 15 or 20 years ago, the Chamber of Commerce, who she’s an extension of or associated injuries, industry who she’s an extension of, used to go around and they would talk to the public about how bad trial lawyers were. They’re trying to keep verdicts down. Now, the new thing, let’s convince judges that these lawyers are bad. So we’re onto this. As a matter of fact, there’s gonna be a cover story magazine, a cover story in National Trial Lawyer Magazine about her and we’re gonna tell this story more and more. But I, in this situation, how can you say anything but, but say, these judges did a wonderful job?
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: I mean, they’re brilliant and if you’re, if you’re an attorney reading their opinion, you see how critically smart they are. And it’s amazing to me. I mean, I always love to see that. And we see it in this case for sure.
Mike Papantonio: A special needs school in New York is being sued for running what one former employee called a complete scam that caused taxpayers millions of dollars. Lay this story out. I, you and I may have similar angles on it. I, I want to take another track on it. Go ahead.
Farron Cousins: This, this is an absolute, just start to finish every part of this story is, is horrendous. You have this iBrain school in New York is what it’s called, iBrain. And what they are is it’s a special needs school. You know, give us your, your your, you know, mentally disabled individuals, you know, physically disabled. We’re gonna get them, we’re gonna give them an education. And finally, eventually, one of the workers there came out and, and has sued them because they said, among other things, and I’m gonna try to get the whole list, but there’s roaches and spiders everywhere. There was a dead rat carcass on the floor for days before anybody even bothered to move it. The smell is horrific. The black mold is dripping off of our ceilings. There are roaches in the children’s wheelchairs. Oh, and by the way, you’re, they’re performing illegal surgeries on these students with people that it turns out aren’t actually doctors. They lied about their credentials.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. So here, so, so, so what you have going here is you have the, there’s, there’s supposed to be oversight here, right?
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: There’s supposed to be regulatory oversight. This goes on, apparently for years. The, the whistleblower described it as the most, as a filthy environment. Then she points out that, that part of the lawsuit anyway, you know, it still hadn’t gone to court. But the lawsuit is that, the people running it were, the guy running it was a chiropractor. He wasn’t even a doctor. And the one person that he had working as a technician was an ex-felon that had been, you know, actually given this job, make sure everything runs right here, is acting as a doctor in, in many capacities.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. They, they gave him a fake name, you know, fake credentials. None of it was real. The guy had, you know, spent a lot of his time in prison. And so the parents who would go and, and get their children into this place assumed, okay, well we have doctor number one who owns it and runs it, who says he has perfected this unique treatment.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: Which turns out to not even really exist. And then they’ve got the other doctor, you know, the former inmate that, oh, okay, well this guy went to Harvard and he went to all these places. Nope. He went to prison. He didn’t ever go to medical school.
Mike Papantonio: No.
Farron Cousins: And, and then the, they’re getting $235,000 per student from the state each year, this school is. It is a, it’s a money making scam.
Mike Papantonio: Well, it is. But it, which leads you to the problem that is bigger for New York. It’s bigger for a lot of big cities right now. And that the regulate, regulators, forget it. There are no regulators. There’s nobody watching anything. And it goes to the idea of, of other things that are happening with the infrastructure in New York, the garbage collection that ties right into the story. What’s happening there? Our regulators aren’t regulating. Social services are not working. That’s why this happened. Subway services, I mean, you know, we can’t even get our subways working without crime problems, without delay problems, without breakdowns. You’ve got an epidemic of homelessness going on up there. When I looked at this story, and I, I talked, I, when I compared what is different about what’s going on in some of these bigger cities, this is it. This story to me is the metaphor for the entire infrastructure. When you have this going on for apparently years, you have it going on for years.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. I mean.
Mike Papantonio: And, and, and there’s no regulator there. There’s no politician there. There’s nobody looking at what the hell’s going on. It kind of ties into the rest of the things that are going on in, in cities like LA or New York or Chicago. This, this is part of the problem right now.
Farron Cousins: Well, it really is because an organization like this with this many problems, this many fake credentials, phony surgery.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: And, and, and kids going to the hospital because the phony surgeries. This should have been shut down after about six months. But you’ve got a city that is so plagued with so very many problems and so few people to deal with them if they want to deal with them at all, that it, it’s almost, you know, sitting here thinking about it. Is that city too big now?
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: Do we need to break it into two cities to be able to function,
Mike Papantonio: That, that, you know, interesting thing. American, it was American Experience. It’s a PBS show. They analyzed it the same way you do. You probably haven’t seen that. But they came up with an analysis. Are cities reaching this point where this kind of thing’s gonna happen because there’s nobody watching? Like it’s a Mad Max movie taking place right there in the city. PBS, American Experience, it talks about New York City chaos and what’s happening there. Why does this kind of case arise? How could this go on where you got doctor, who’s not even a doctor, he’s a chiropractor.
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: Experiment, doing experiments that aren’t even legitimate experiments with a friend who’s an ex-felon, living under an assumed name, who are taking care of kids as special needs children with mental disabilities. How does that happen for years? It happens because there’s a breakdown in the infrastructure and that, that I think goes to the heart of this case.
Farron Cousins: Maybe time to break ’em up.
