A new report has found that eating a single freshwater fish is the same as drinking dangerous PFAS chemicals for an entire month. Plus, businesses across Florida are panicking as workers pack up and leave the state following Ron DeSantis’ anti-immigrant legislation. Companies say that workers are growing scarce and they aren’t sure how much longer they can keep their doors open – and DeSantis is pretending that everything is going perfectly. 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: A new report’s found that eating a single freshwater fish is the same as drinking dangerous PFAS chemicals. Okay. First of all, most people don’t know what PFAS is. You, do you agree with that?
Farron Cousins: Oh, absolutely.
Mike Papantonio: It’s been knocking around out there. We tried the first case, the first time PFAS ever got into the public domain were the trials that I had up in West Virginia. They made two movies out of it. One was called The Devil We Know, it’s on Netflix. The other one was about the lawyer who brought the case to me, brilliant lawyer, named Rob, Rob Bilott. It’s called Dark Waters. Begin by watching those movies to understand how bad this is. Okay. PFAS is so dangerous that, if you take one drop, one drop, put it in an Olympic size pool, it’s going to have the propensity to cause the physical problems that the, that we’re talking about. Which are what?
Farron Cousins: We’re talking about neurological problems, cancers of every imaginable kind for the individuals, birth defects. And, and the big problem here too, and you’ve discussed this plenty of times, is that it’s bioaccumulative.
Mike Papantonio: Mm-hmm.
Farron Cousins: Which means once it gets in you, it’s in you. So every PFAS chemical you drink after that is just compiling and building up inside your system.
Mike Papantonio: And explain why it’s in fish. Explain why it’s in our drinking water. Talk about that.
Farron Cousins: Exactly. It’s, it’s the waste from these massive corporations that have been dumping it for decades. Our, our EPA right now still doesn’t know exactly if we’re gonna stop this because it’s still happening. They’re still debating on what the proper limits are, but there’s no limit.
Mike Papantonio: 50 years. 50 years the EPA has known that PFAS, the first cases we tried was C8. It was a type of PFAS. So, so we found the documents, the EPA understood that all of the rat studies were a disaster. All of the beagle studies, they all died. All the monkey studies, they all died. And it was caused by this stuff that is in our drinking water right now. The second phase of this case that we’re handling right now is all these drinking water facilities. The, the delivery facilities. They have so much PFAS in their water it would take a hundred to $200 million per facility to get it out of the water.
Farron Cousins: And so now what we’re looking at, this new study from the Environmental Working Group says, one freshwater fish, just one, if you were to eat that right now for lunch, that’s the equivalent of drinking nothing but PFAS basically for an entire month, one fish. And these freshwater fish they’re talking about, these supply foods to, to communities. They’re a huge source of food for low income Americans who always bear the brunt of all of these environmental toxins.
Mike Papantonio: Mm-hmm.
Farron Cousins: Native populations. All of these groups heavily dependent on these fish. And we’re finding out now we’re poisoning you even faster than the rest of us are being poisoned. Because everybody’s getting it, but they’re getting it worse.
Mike Papantonio: You wanna know how it happened? You know what came out in the trial? Okay. It’s 3M and DuPont were the big, big folks in this. They did all this testing. They saw that all the tests were a disaster causing kidney cancer, causing testicular cancer, causing neurological problems, causing birth defects. All of this information they had. Now for a little while, they hid it from the EPA. But then at some point they handed it over to the EPA. EPA did nothing. They, they, there was nothing that was done by the EPA. All right. Working Groups, Environmental Working Groups gave it to the media. Don’t you think, this was like, this was 40 years ago. Don’t you think this is an important story New York Times? Don’t you think this is important Washington Post?
Farron Cousins: It should be.
Mike Papantonio: No, it wasn’t because obviously advertising money was moving into those entities. Television wouldn’t do it. 3M, check your TVs, 3M advertisers like crazy people. So even the, even the so-called investigative corporate types weren’t doing anything on this project. Then regulators, we found out that the regulators that were supposed to be in charge of all this were moving from, from being regulators to going to work for 3M in million dollar jobs or DuPont, going to work, going from regulation to DuPont. It was this revolving door and it went the other way. People who worked for the industry was put, they were putting people in, in administrative positions with the EPA to slow it all down. And, and, and Farron, I swear God, if you say, isn’t that PFA, PFAS a problem to 10 people, if you get one of them to even understand it’s in their body. It’s in their drinking water. They don’t get it.
Farron Cousins: No. It, it’s, what is it at least 98% of all life on Earth at this point?
Mike Papantonio: Yes.
Farron Cousins: Has PFAS chemicals in it.
Mike Papantonio: Polar bears have it. It’s so bad that they had to find blood that they could do epidemiology studies with. They, they couldn’t find it with contemporaries. They had to go to the soldiers that were in Korea to look at their blood samples to even be able to compare because they didn’t have it in their blood because it hadn’t started then.
Mike Papantonio: Companies say that workers are growing scarce. They aren’t even sure how much longer they can keep their doors open. And DeSantis is pretending like everything is perfectly normal. Well, you know, we’ve been doing this story soon as this started before it actually was signed, we started doing this story. We said all this is gonna happen. We made the prediction that businesses are gonna close, that they’re gonna leave the state. And sure enough, it’s happening. It’s being reported all over the state right now.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. We’re looking at, you know, some of the major, you know, hubs down there in South and Central Florida. We’ve got Bradenton. We’re seeing it in Miami. We’re seeing it down in the Florida Keys. We’re seeing it in Orlando. And it’s because these migrant workers who come to the state of Florida and bail out our economy, we’re dependent upon them and now they’re saying, I’m not coming. I can’t, I’ll be arrested.
Mike Papantonio: But isn’t the story, isn’t the story really this. I mean, we’ve done every iteration of this story. I don’t want to overkill this story. It’s a shame. It’s deplorable that this happened. But we’re not politicians. But when we did the, we first saw the legislation, we said this is gonna happen.
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: Surely somebody in Tallahassee said that they’re gonna be people that are writing in the Bradenton Herald after this starts. This story comes with Bradenton Herald, said, it’s not speculation anymore. It’s actually happening. But don’t you think those politicians had a duty to at least think about that? Think about what the impact was? I mean, what do you think?
Farron Cousins: Well, they do have a duty to do that. But look, you and I have had plenty of conversations with these lawmakers. We’ve seen how legitimately crazy some of them are. They are not smart people.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. I think that’s part of the problem.
Farron Cousins: They’re people that have, you know, either family connections or they come from old family Florida money or Florida lineage in the House and they get elected. And so then you enable this creep here to do whatever the heck he wants to do and that’s what’s happened.
Mike Papantonio: Again, I don’t wanna beat this. I mean, we’ve done several stories now. We started doing stories before it ever really came into fruition and we made these predictions. And to think that over in Tallahassee, there weren’t politicians that were smart enough to understand what the net effect of this is. We’ve always said, look, immigration is about Chamber of Commerce, it’s about Wall Street. They wanna bring in cheap labor. Their idea is, hell, if we kill this worker, we’ll just ship them back to Mexico. That’s the ugly side of it.
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: But it’s all driven by Wall Street. This is all driven by Wall Street. It’s driven by the Chamber of Commerce bringing in cheap labor and everything’s gonna be good for Americans. That’s the ugly part of the story. The other side of the ugly story is most of these people come here because they want to do better. They want a good life for themselves and their family. They’re willing to do, handle jobs that nobody else will handle, and then people have the audacity to say, well, they’re taking my job. Really? It’s a ridiculous argument.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. And the problem is too, we’ve now made our economy, not just here in Florida, but across the country, we’ve made it dependent upon them.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah, exactly.
Farron Cousins: We’ve made it to where we can’t survive without them. And Florida by the end of this year, we are gonna see this horrendous negative effect.
Mike Papantonio:Yeah. This story that we just called on down in Bradenton, these stories are gonna be all over the state. I wanna see what the reaction is. Farron, thanks for joining me. Okay.
Farron Cousins: Thank you.
Mike Papantonio: That’s all for this week, but all of 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 stories that corporate media won’t tell you because their advertisers don’t allow for it or their political connections simply don’t permit it. We’ll see you next time.
