The state of Florida is considering new legislation that would ease child labor laws in the state, and a new report has revealed that this legislation was written by a right wing think tank that has been pushing these rule changes in states all over the country. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.
Transcript:
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Mike Papantonio: The state of Florida is considering new legislation that would ease child labor laws in the state and a new reports revealed that this legislation was written by a right wing think tank that’s been pushing these changes for a long time. Well, it’s not just a think tank. It’s paid for by billionaires, isn’t it?
Farron Cousins: Yes.
Mike Papantonio: We are run, if you could visualize the United States as a chess board, what you have is you have these billionaires making all decisions. On one side, you got Soros, right. Soros is the so-called Progressive that, oh, by the way, was run out of Hungary because of some issues that he had. But then you have, on the right side, you’ve got this guy, right? Talk about it.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. A guy named Dick Uihlein, who started the company Uihlein and billionaire based out of Florida now. And he is funding this group, they’re called the Foundation for Government Accountability, which sounds great, right? Oh, everybody wants government accountability. But what they do is a lot like what ALEC does, they ghost write legislation. They go and shop it around to whatever kind of friendly lawmaker they can find in that state. They finally find somebody dumb enough to just take the legislation that they wrote. Put their name on it.
Mike Papantonio: Oh, they don’t even change a comma.
Farron Cousins: Right. Then file it as new legislation.
Mike Papantonio: So Dick or Soros, it’s both. It’s both of ’em. I’m saying we are like in the midst of this billionaire chess board where Soros, he wants to change the American justice system. So he spends a gazillion dollars getting the right prosecutors in place, or whatever it may be. Uihlein on the other side hates labor. So he attacks everything that’s labor with a billion dollars. Here’s the point. Almost 15% of the total contributions that go to politics come from these billionaires. Now that’s an impressive number. And so they’re able to accomplish whatever the hell they want to accomplish. They just exploit the American public into believing, oh, Soros is our savior because he talks like a progressive or Uihlein is our savior because he talks like a right winger. These people, they could not care less about how this affects us. They want their political agenda from beginning to end and they spend billions doing it. Right?
Farron Cousins: Yeah. And what we’re seeing right now happen in Florida with what Uihlein and his group have done, they’ve put forward new legislation that’s identical to about, I think 16 other states have done this too, loosening child labor laws. They basically say if you’re 16, 17 years old, you can work in industries where, hey, you’re probably gonna lose a finger or two, but you’ll be fine. You can work eight hours, you can work an overnight shift, even when you have school at 7:00 AM the next morning. And these laws were put in place to protect these young people so that they could get an education. But these billionaires want these laws destroyed because you don’t have to pay people under 18 the same kind of minimum wage. You don’t have to give them any benefits. There’s no health insurance, there’s no pension, nothing.
Mike Papantonio: Moreover, they lose an arm, ship ’em back to Venezuela. No problem. They’re on the next plane back.
Farron Cousins: And you got a steady supply of labor with every high school nearby.
Mike Papantonio: And you hear, for example, Soros, well, both these guys. Soros, yeah, we want as much immigration as possible. Why does he want that? Look at the companies that he owns. Look at the industry that he’s involved with. They want cheap labor working, this is nothing, this is not benevolent. Soros is out there, oh, this is a benevolent thing. Soros is just an extension of the US Chamber of Commerce. That’s all it is. So is this Uihlein guy. So we all think, well, these guys want this because they’re so big hearted. No, they want it because rather than having to go out of the country to hire cheap labor, they’re bringing the cheap labor in. And you know what, like I said, you lose an arm, little Joe, I know you’re 16 years old, you shouldn’t be working around this machine. We’re gonna ship you back to Venezuela. That’s exactly how this works.
