There have been multiple attacks on power stations across the country in recent months, and the corporate media couldn’t care less. Also, the 6-year old boy who shot his teacher earlier this year apparently had a history of aggression towards teachers that school administrators completely ignored. 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: There have been multiple attacks on power stations across the country in recent months and the corporate media, it’s almost like they could not care less. Are you seeing any stories about it? I’ll see a story, well, the weather got so bad and the grid, the grid collapsed. Here’s the truth about this story. In this case, give us the case and then let’s talk about it.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. You had a couple of idiots up in Washington State who had the brilliant idea, we’re gonna attack the power grid, knock out the power, and then we’re gonna go rob a bunch of stores. So they, they do, they successfully attack the power grid. They go into a store, they empty out the cash register.
Mike Papantonio: What was $3 million worth of damages or something like that? Yeah.
Farron Cousins: Yeah, to the, so now they’re both facing possibly up to 20 years in prison, just to take a little bit of cash out of a register there. But it does underscore the bigger problem. We have seen half a dozen attacks in the last month and a half. This is becoming a very serious problem.
Mike Papantonio: We’ve been, we’ve been doing this story for five years, Farron. We have, we started doing this story long time ago. And this is what people don’t understand. First of all, in most countries, the state or government owns the power grid. In this situation, we’ve given it to private industry. And because we’ve given it to private industry, corporations, you have folks like NextEra are the biggest corporations on the planet that are saying, gee wiz, you know, we don’t wanna spend money to upgrade the grid. Why should we? So it’s in, it’s in, it’s in disarray. They need to take and build infrastructures. But the private corporation wants to pay dividends. They wanna buy stock back. Why should they rebuild infrastructure? This isn’t something private corporations ought to be doing. And so right now, here, here’s how bad it is. There are 50, these numbers are crazy, but there are 50,000 key transformers in the country. Okay. Under this grid. If you take 10 of those key out, of those key transformers out, the entire grid system collapses.
Farron Cousins: And, and I’m sure most people have seen, you know, driving through your cities or, you know, traveling on the roads, you’ll see these little substations. And usually what kind of protection do they have? There is a chainlink fence around the little power substation. So if you can overcome a chainlink fence, you can knock out a power to an entire city in a matter of minutes. And of course, what we’ve seen so far has been a couple of, you know, radicals all the way from Washington to North Carolina attacking these grids. But if we have people that want to do real harm, people that are competent criminals, I guess, or terrorists.
Mike Papantonio: Mm-hmm.
Farron Cousins: They could knock out the power to this country in a heartbeat and we’d be powerless to stop it.
Mike Papantonio: No question. Now, the real question in my mind, it’s not a question in my mind because we’ve done the other side of it. The reason the media doesn’t report it, the reason corporate media doesn’t report it, take a look at the advertising. It’s gonna come from the big power companies, whether it’s local, whether it’s regional, or whether it’s national. The big power companies are a big part of the local television programming. So they’re not gonna say, you know, we’ve got Florida Power and Light and their disaster. The grid system’s a mess. We’ve got NextEra that owns Florida Power and Light. Maybe they should pay better attention to the grid system. You don’t see it. It all comes down, down to the dysfunctional nature of corporate media. Advertisers drive it and politics drive it. And otherwise, you’re not gonna see a story like this. Go turn through the, turn through the stations today, see how many times they’re talking about, it wasn’t just about these, these nut jobs that were breaking in and trying to rob stores. It’s about the power grid in general.
Farron Cousins: Well, you know what, that is a great point because when you watch tv, especially local tv, you know, your local ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, you see commercials for the power companies.
Mike Papantonio: Of course.
Farron Cousins: All the time. And you have to start thinking to yourself, wait a minute, I don’t have a choice. Why are they advertising to me? I already, they’re the only ones here. So if I want electricity, I have to go to them. It’s not because they’re trying to get you to buy the product, it’s because they’re paying off the media.
Mike Papantonio: That’s a great, that is a great angle. It’s the same way with weapons industry with McDonnell. Well, you know, Raytheon goes on and they’re talking about their, their patriot missile, or whatever the missile of the day is. Am I gonna go buy a missile? Why, why is Raytheon up there? They’re trying to buy access to the media. That’s what it’s all about. Same, same things happened here.
Mike Papantonio: The six year old boy who shot his teacher earlier this year, apparently had a history of aggression towards teachers that school administrators totally ignored. This is a little psycho man. This, this little kid needs to be not in school. You know, this story, he tried to choke, he tried to strangle another teacher the year before.
Farron Cousins: When he was five.
Mike Papantonio: When he was five years old, tried to strangle another teacher. And this, the people in charge, what was her name? Parker. Yeah. Ebony Parker said, ah, we, we gotta work around it. Didn’t his parents used to have to come to school with him or something like that?
Farron Cousins: Yeah. And, and it was, I mean, this is just truly a disturbing story because those warning signs were there for a year. All of the other teachers had expressed concerns. The students had expressed concerns, and the parents go in and argue, well, you know, the, well it was the administrators of the school said, well, we’ve gotta protect all parties.
Mike Papantonio: Oh God almighty.
Farron Cousins: Including this, you know, five year old. And you want, you almost want to feel sympathy for him. But then you look at this and you say, something’s not right here. This, this is a kid that just, maybe is just evil. I don’t know. But this is horrible.
Mike Papantonio: Well, I mean, don’t you put ’em in an institution? I mean, don’t you at least try the institution route? This is a kid tried to strangle a teacher till the teacher almost passed out.
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: The year before. He was five years old. Now, the day that the shooting took place, he was chasing other kids around the playground with his belt trying to whip them in the head. Okay. And this Ebony Parker, this genius says, oh, well, we just have to give everybody the opportunity to go to school. Really? How about the other parents? How about the other kids? They have, they have the stake in this too. Right?
Farron Cousins: Well, how about the three teachers on the day of the shooting before the shooting happened that told administrators, this kid has a gun. And so what happened was the, after the second teacher told administrators, we’ve heard reports, he’s got a gun. They searched his backpack. But then one teacher said, well, I saw him before you searched it. He took something out and put it in his pocket, but they didn’t bother to check his pockets. And so they looked.
Mike Papantonio: He’s six years old.
Farron Cousins: They looked, they looked in the backpack and said, well, there’s no gun. And then a third teacher said, he has the gun in his pocket. Nobody looked in the pocket. Later, I mean, that school, everybody there should be fired.
Mike Papantonio: Oh.
Farron Cousins: But they’re gonna be sued, I hope, to hell and back.
Mike Papantonio: Oh my God. If Ebony Parker is still on the job right now, buddy, I’m telling you, this.
Farron Cousins: I’m pulling my kids out, if they were.
Mike Papantonio: Well, not only that, the lawsuit just gets better, not firing this woman and everybody that was involved, the lawsuit just gets better. There’s gonna be a lawsuit. Hadn’t happened yet, but there’s gonna be a lawsuit and I just don’t get it. Yeah. Do we want a kid to be able to, but not if he’s got those kind of psychological problems. If the parents come in there and say, oh, well my child needs a public education. Well, put him somewhere where there is better institutionalization, I guess is the best way to put it. There’s something really wrong here, man.
Farron Cousins: There, there are public school programs that do deal with, you know, more problematic children. They deal with the extreme aggression behaviors. I know, my wife does it. Not that I want that there, but.
Mike Papantonio: Have you ever heard of anything like that around your, with your wife?
Farron Cousins: No. I, I mean, in any school that, you know, she’s worked in, any school I’ve been to, if a kid choked a teacher that would be that kid’s last day at that school.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. I can tell you, the lawyer that’s gonna handle this lawsuit is hoping that they don’t fire Ebony Parker and her staff. Because if they don’t, and she’s still in place when this lawsuit takes place, whoa be that, you know, that, that there’s gonna be some bad stuff happening.
