Drug companies tried desperately to get Twitter to block users who wanted poor countries to have access to the COVID vaccine. Plus, politicians in Iowa are actually trying to loosen child labor laws – we might be headed back to the days of children working in the mines. 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: Drug companies tried desperately to get Twitter to block users who wanted poor countries to have access to the COVID vaccine. Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins joins me now to talk about what’s happening. This is an ugly story, man. I mean the, the 10,000 foot, give it to us. It’s every, every time you hear this story, it’s nauseating to think that corporate America operates like this.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. What, what happened is you had a, a lobbyist for Twitter, who over in Europe was saying, hey, listen, we’re, we’re starting to see a lot of people calling for cheap vaccines, calling for waving the patents so that these poor countries around the world could get the vaccine. Twitter, what we need you to do is we need you to look and, and see how these people are violating your terms of service and get these tweets blocked. You had a lot of hashtags, you know, free the vaccine, things like that going around. So you also had lobbyists from the big pharma companies making these vaccines, Pfizer, BioNTech, Moderna, who jumped on this as well and said, okay, that’s a great idea. We’re gonna start sending Twitter these specific accounts because these people have the audacity to want the world to get vaccinated.
Mike Papantonio: Well, and, and that’s the headline. You had third world countries that said, can’t you please share this with us? Because we have people dying by the thousands. And then the company’s, I love this statement, the statement, their joint statement is, we take social responsibility seriously. That was their joint statement. How dare you, how dare you say we did this awful thing. Well, it, it, the proof is right there. Now we find out that The Intercept did all this work. Again, it’s the same folks. It’s Lee Fang with Intercept, great writer, great source of information. And he, he talks about how these bots were created by the industry. And every time anything would show up on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, any of them, the bots would go in there and attack. I mean, big numbers of bots would attack. And they would try to give a rationale so why it’s okay for folks in third world countries to die because the American corporation or the European Corporation won’t sell in, won’t share information with them. This story, to me, is just such an indictment of capitalism. I mean, it, it is. Capitalism, you know, I think capitalism works. But when you see this kind of stuff, and again, there’s nothing, no investigation of it.
Farron Cousins: Right.
Mike Papantonio: There’s no attempt to really understand it. Corporate media won’t do a thing about it. Corporate media doesn’t cover this story. You understand that?
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: You will not see this story in corporate media. It’ll show up on, on shows like this. But the truth is, this goes on all the time, doesn’t it?
Farron Cousins: It, it really does. And what is concerning here, you know, obviously with all of the releases of the Twitter files, we’ve seen, you know, the, the partisan stuff come out. We’ve heard reports of, you know, liberals being silenced, conservatives being silenced. This goes beyond that. This transcends left or right politics. And that is what people need to understand. Because that is, as, as we’ve talked about for years here on this show, that’s the slippery slope. Because if you’re okay with it, oh, well, it’s okay if it happens to this people, because I’m not this people. It’s gonna come eventually. And this is a absolutely horrendous continuation.
Mike Papantonio: This story would’ve never been told and Jack Dorsey would’ve gotten away with this again, with all the crap he did to try to censor Twitter. This story never would’ve come out if Elon Musk had not said, you know what, I’m gonna open my files. I want you to see what dirty freaks were running Twitter. The freaks that were running, at least my organization, I can show you. Those same things were going on with Facebook and all social media. But had, had he not done that, we wouldn’t know this story.
Farron Cousins: Well, and, and also huge credit, as you mentioned to Lee Fang here, because he had to go searching through this.
Mike Papantonio: Oh, I know.
Farron Cousins: It was not laid out for him. He had to find all of this specific info, put the pieces together, and came up with this remarkable story.
Mike Papantonio: Do you think Jack Dorsey would have released this information?
Farron Cousins: Oh, hell no.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: Politicians in Iowa are actually trying to loosen child labor laws. We might head, be headed back to the days of children working in mines. Okay. You know what this is about, right? This is about, we have this influx of immigrant workers coming into this country. It’s the Koch brothers, it’s US Chamber of Commerce, it’s associated industries. It’s, well, the, you know, it’s all of these groups that want these workers coming into the United States to work for no money. Cheap labor. And you know what? If you kill ’em on the job, it’s okay. Ship ’em back to Nicaragua, Guatemala. If they lose an arm, ship ’em back to Mexico. Here we’re talking about kids. We want kids working in jobs like mines. Right?
Farron Cousins: Yeah. And this is, this is just beyond disturbing. In fact, the ACLU said it, it is just crazy. They said, this is crazy. But you’re absolutely right. And I love the fact that you and I didn’t talk about this story before we came on, and we both land at the same spot. This is, it all has to do with immigration and sure we’ve got the big crackdown because you gotta send them back. You can’t keep ’em here. So the corporations are looking at this, well, if we can’t have cheap labor from south of the border, we’ve got cheap labor, labor sitting over here in the high schools. You know, these kids don’t know any better. We can put them back to work like those old pictures of the kids walking out of the mines. That is what they want. Because yeah, kids would be allowed to go back and be miners again under this new law. They’d work in animal slaughterhouses.
Mike Papantonio: Right.
Farron Cousins: Under this law. Jobs that back in the, I mean, a hundred years ago, we finally said, this is dangerous for kids.
Mike Papantonio: It’s worse than that. It’s worse than that. Okay. They lay out, we’re gonna allow kids to work in freezers, in meat coolers, in slaughterhouses. We’re gonna allow ’em to work in the logging industry. Some limited in the mining industry. But it’s crazier than that. We’re gonna let ’em work in demolition. We’re gonna let ’em work around circular saws, punching machines, all kinds of dangerous machinery. Why? The heart of it is this. You got the media, their only story is, oh my gosh, we, you know, we gotta let these immigrants in. You gotta let ’em in. Biden says, you gotta let ’em in. It’s the humane thing to do. It has nothing to do with humanity. It has everything to do with the US Chamber of Commerce and associated industries saying, we got a new workforce. And you know what? They’ll work for $3 an hour. And you know what? If they get hurt, it ain’t a big deal. That’s what this is about. You tell me, when’s the last time you saw corporate media do a story on that?
Farron Cousins: Oh, never.
Mike Papantonio: No, they don’t do stories. It’s, it’s either they’re too stupid, they’re too stupid to understand how this connects up, or they don’t want to offend their advertisers. It’s the same story, isn’t it?
Farron Cousins: Well, their advertisers are the ones who want to hire these children. I mean.
Mike Papantonio: Of course.
Farron Cousins: You’re gonna have kids sitting in high school next to somebody who suddenly doesn’t have an arm on Tuesday.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: Because they’re after school job in the logging industry, they got it hacked off. But I mean, that, but that’s what they want. Because with these kids, you can also pay them below minimum wage because they’re not full-time workers. There’s all kinds of loopholes that allow you to screw over this workforce. And so if they say, okay, if we can’t get it from Mexico, we’re gonna go get it from the high school.
Mike Papantonio: What are we hearing from corporate America? American workers are lazy. They don’t wanna work anymore. They wanna sit home and just collect checks and drink and smoke dope. That’s the message.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. That’s what they’re saying.
Mike Papantonio: Coming from the US Chamber of Commerce and associated industry and all of the people that wanna bring these kids in to do these jobs for, they wanna bring the whole family.
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: You know, they want the family to work picking oranges and strawberries for nothing. And then, oh, by the way, let’s let the kids work too. This is a sick, sick story, but it’s happening. And it’s not just happening in one state.
Farron Cousins: Right. There’s, there’s this nationwide push. We’re starting to see more and more of this across the country.
Mike Papantonio: Oh yeah.
