America’s Lawyer E82: The adult website PornHub was recently hit with a fine of less than $2 million dollars after it was revealed that they were profiting off of human trafficking, and this fine is an insult to every trafficking victim in this country. A school district in Florida is under fire after they banned dictionaries in order to comply with the book bans that Ron DeSantis has signed into law. And the economy is getting worse for young Americans, and that could have a serious impact on this year’s presidential election. All that, and more is coming up, so don’t go anywhere – America’s Lawyer starts right now.
Transcript:
*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
Mike Papantonio: Hi, I’m Mike Papantonio, and this is America’s Lawyer. The adult website, PornHub, was recently hit with a fine of less than $2 million after it was revealed that they were profiting off human trafficking. And this is the fine, it’s an insult to everybody that’s been a victim to the trafficking industry. A school district in Florida, well, they’re under fire after they banned dictionaries in order to comply with the book bans that Ron DeSantis has signed into law. And the economy, well, it’s getting worse for young Americans, and that could be a serious impact on this year’s presidential election. All that and more, it’s coming up. Don’t go anywhere. America’s Lawyer starts right now.
The Department of Justice recently announced a settlement with the parent company of adult website, PornHub, after the company was found to be profiting off of human trafficking. This settlement is an insult. It’s a slap on the face of everybody that’s been a victim. I’ve got Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins with me to talk about it. Farron, when I saw this, I was appalled that the Department of Justice again, drops the ball. Opioids, nobody goes to prison. 32 pharmaceutical cases where there was clear, clear fraud, clear tampering with clinicals, nobody goes to prison. PFAS case, nobody goes to prison and the documents were overwhelming of the intent and the conduct. But this Department of Justice is so frigging useless. And this is another example, isn’t it?
Farron Cousins: And it’s getting worse. A lot of these things that you’re talking about span several different administrations. And now here we are, we’ve got this group, Aylo, used to be called MindGeek. They changed their name as if that solves problems. So they say, okay, you’ve been profiting off human trafficking. It’s pretty obvious you knew what was happening. You just decided to look the other way. Make hundreds of millions of dollars. So give us $1.8 million and we’ll call it good. We’re not gonna prosecute you or send you to jail. I mean, I don’t know that I’ve seen a fine this small for such egregious behavior. This is insane.
Mike Papantonio: It’s like this department, this prosecutor completely was terrified. I promise you this prosecutor was terrified to take these people to trial. I’d take ’em to trial tomorrow. As a matter of fact, I’m taking the deposition of these folks at the end of this.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. You will be taking ’em to trial very soon.
Mike Papantonio: I am taking to trial, but I can’t get ’em to criminal trial. And they need to be criminally prosecuted. Listen, let me give you the how bad this is. My client that I’m representing that represents the entire class, okay, it’s a mass tort case. These cases are taking place all over the country constantly. My client, 15 years old, she became, well, she was trafficked by some cat out of Mobile, Alabama, big trunk dog. Something such as that is what he called himself. Created 58 videos. 58, where she was being sodomized, raped. Every iteration that you can possibly think of, of sexual attack took place on this little 15-year-old girl. Okay. These videos were sent to PornHub. They were sent to MindGeek. The titles on ’em were overwhelming. I mean, a typical title for something like this that we see all the time, that now they say, oh, we’ve stopped doing it.
How about tiny teen is sodomized in a hotel room? Petite teen is gang banged? Or how about virgin teen is crying as she’s raped? Those are the headlines that this company says, oh, yeah, we’re gonna put that out there. They know it’s all about, make it outrageous and we’re gonna attract more money. But in there, these kids that are, they don’t do this voluntarily. Hell, they got videos where some of them are unconscious. They don’t do anything to find out. Once they find out that it’s clearly a teen, they don’t call the police. They don’t take any action to interrupt that process. And this Department of Justice says, yeah, yeah, we’re gonna fine you $1.8 million. Hell, it’s a $600 million a year industry, just this company. It’s just so infuriating, Farron.
Farron Cousins: I did the math on this. When you look at their 2022 profits, this comes out to about 34 to 36 hours of just net, net profit for that company. So you lose a day’s pay, basically. And you still get over $400 million in your pocket at the end of all of this. And one of the things they do here too, is they hide behind section 230.
Mike Papantonio: Yes.
Farron Cousins: You know, section 230, which says, you are not liable for what gets posted on your platform. So these companies, they go to the DOJ, to these idiot lawyers they have working there, and they say, hey, listen, you’re gonna have a hard time coming after us because we didn’t produce the video. We’re just the host. And we will argue all day that section 230 protects us. So if you don’t wanna be embarrassed, maybe we can work out a better deal.
Mike Papantonio: This case is so winnable. If you just had some prosecutors with the Department of Justice that had some guts and did their job, this guy did not. He gave them a deferred prosecution deal. That is, we’re gonna let you go. We’re gonna make you pay $1.8 million. If you mess up again, we might do something. This guy ain’t gonna do anything. Look, here’s what these companies do. They can’t possibly review the material. There’s so much material coming in, millions of videos coming in, in a year. The numbers are staggering. So what they do, rather than spending the money to actually have a good review process, they cut the numbers of reviewers down. Now what happens? It gives ’em deniability, doesn’t it? They say, well, we had people doing it. They just didn’t catch it. You had a fraction of what you needed that you can, there’s no question, they can see the faces. They understand what a 14-year-old looks like.
And they understand really that the big gain for them is that those are the videos that make the most money. And so they keep ’em out there. And once they’re out there, even after they take ’em down, if there’s a video shot of this child, a 15-year-old being raped, sodomized, it’s out there. Now they say, we took it down. Oh, hell no, you don’t take it down. It’s somewhere in the web. It’s never gonna go away. So I don’t know. We’re gonna do, we’re gonna try to do what the Department of Justice fails to do. We do it every time. We did it on opioids. They failed. Nobody prosecuted on opioids. PFAS killing thousands of people all over the globe, no prosecution there. We took the case, we did as much as we could without, we don’t have the right to criminally prosecute. All we can do is take their money away from ’em. And I could go on dozens and dozens of cases where pharmaceutical, where we have documents that are overwhelming, that the pharmaceutical industry is gaming the clinicals, hiding material, destroying documents, overwhelming. Give it to the prosecutors or the Department of Justice. Eh, you know.
Farron Cousins: Seems like a lot of work. We don’t want to do.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. We don’t wanna do the work. We just wanna do the low hanging fruit, whatever the hell that is. I don’t know what they do anymore.
New audio tapes have emerged that show that the NRA agreed to hide certain luxury expenses for their outgoing president. And these new tapes could be the final nail in the coffin for that group. Interesting story, again, this is ProPublica that did this story. Of course, they’ve never liked this guy. But lay this story out for us, would you?
Farron Cousins: Yeah. This story goes all the way back to 2009 where they uncovered this audio of a meeting where the organization was trying to figure out, hey, we got this guy Wayne LaPierre, he’s been running the group for decades. He likes to spend money. He likes to go on these lavish vacations. He likes his private jets. He likes these luxury resorts. But we’re a nonprofit and there are rules that say we can’t do this. So they came up on this audio call with the brilliant idea, they’ve got this PR group, what was it, Ackerman?
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: Ackerman McQueen. And they said, okay, so the PR group, that’s an outside company, they’re gonna get these American Express cards, the Platinum American Express, and they’re gonna be the holders of those accounts. We then use the cards. And this again is everything in a nutshell. We use these Amex cards, and they started passing out what they called the Ackerman Amex. They were handing them out to executives like crazy at the NRA.
Mike Papantonio: This is special account.
Farron Cousins: Right. And so what happens is Ackerman pays the bill that has the itemized expenses, private jets, luxury resorts, fancy meals. And then the NRA just pays PR expenses on the Amex.
Mike Papantonio: But I want to tell you something. We’ve seen this in a lot of cases besides this.
Farron Cousins: Oh yeah.
Mike Papantonio: I mean, big pharmaceuticals, Wall Street. It’s just a scam. They’re all doing it. They’re all doing it. And he got caught.
Farron Cousins: He did. You know, this is a good Icarus story. Right. His greed went on for so long that it just increased and it increased and it increased along with the hubris. And eventually you come crashing down because you’re gonna slip up every now and then, you’re gonna screw things over. And look, they’re facing a pretty big trial that actually started just a few days ago in New York.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. If he had another prosecutor, I’d feel better about it.
Farron Cousins: But LaPierre, even NRA members have been sick of this guy forever. He’s doing nothing but just running an organization to put money in his own pockets. He’s not actually doing anything to help the members of the NRA. I mean, the members of the NRA, if you look at the polls, they’re normal people. They’re not.
Mike Papantonio: Well, they pay a lot of money into it. We’re talking about tons of, tons of money coming in here. And so this idea of, well, let’s have this special account that our donors don’t really know about. That if we do an audit, it’s really not gonna show up as a ridiculous expense like Ritz Carltons and Jets and million dollar parties, that kinda stuff. It’s not gonna show up. So let’s not worry about it.
Farron Cousins: And the big thing too is it’s not just that he was pulling the wool over the eyes of the donors. It’s that because this is a nonprofit organization, you are legally not allowed to do this.
Mike Papantonio: You can’t do that. Right. Exactly. See this with hospitals a lot, by the way. Nonprofit hospitals.
A school district in northwest Florida has drawn the national media spotlight after it revealed that they were banning dictionaries and encyclopedias in order to comply with Governor DeSantis’ book bans. Unfortunately, this is our, it’s happening in our county.
Farron Cousins: It’s our backyard.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. And I’m looking at this thing and first thing, I was looking, did they ban Grapes of Wrath because there’s some sexual content? Or did they, you know, To Kill A Mockingbird, you go through all these and you can nitpick and find just about anything. Go ahead and pick the story up.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. This is, again, it’s so horrible because it is literally in our backyard right here. But we’ve got the Escambia County School District that has banned 2,800 books as part of DeSantis signed HB 1069, which says any book that has any kind of sexual content, mentions of sex, can’t do it.
Mike Papantonio: It’s not gonna stand.
Farron Cousins: Absolutely can’t have it.
Mike Papantonio: You agree, it’s not gonna stand?
Farron Cousins: Oh, right.
Mike Papantonio: I mean, as a matter of fact, the judge, I don’t know what they’re gonna rule, but we had some of our attorneys there listening to the argument, and it’s just so unconstitutional. It’s vague. You can’t even figure out what it is that you’re trying to accomplish here. Right?
Farron Cousins: Right. And that is, of course, one of the biggest issues with this. It’s you’ve written it in a way that gives you the ability to ban anything. Which is why this district has pulled several versions of dictionaries off the shelves because they have a definition of the word sex. They’re pulling encyclopedias off the shelf. Guinness Book of World Records comes off the shelves in this county right now, because, uh oh, it may have mentions of any kind of sexual activity or perhaps this person is of a different sexuality and they’re being, I don’t know that it’s really the fault of the school district.
Mike Papantonio: It’s not, it’s not.
Farron Cousins: Because they have the liability if a parent complains.
Mike Papantonio: It’s not the school district.
Farron Cousins: So they overreact and just say, everything’s gone. No books.
Mike Papantonio: Okay. You know what I thought about as I was reading this story, is I’ve thought about the number of times you and I have stood here, and we’ve talked about censorship in general. So this has got two sides to it. Okay. Here you got a bunch of right wingers, we don’t want the word sex, but you also have the other side of it where speakers show up at a college campus and they’re gonna say something that some segment of the campus disagrees with. So they censor the speaker. They say you can’t show up, or the comedian standing up on the stage and he’s just doing a show. But they say, oh, we don’t like what he’s saying. So we’re going to, we’re gonna boycott him. We’re gonna make his life miserable. It’s same kind of censorship. I mean, it’s exactly the same thing. It’s just the other side of it. But I don’t see, or websites. Somebody puts up on a website something. We do it all the time. Hell, on this show, I insult plenty of people. And rather than analyzing what I’m saying, the easiest thing is to do is attack. Censor it. But that’ll never happen with us because we’re in a unique situation. We don’t need advertisers. We don’t need subscribe. We’re independent. But what about the folks that feel that kind of censorship pressure? This is kind of the other side of that. I think.
Farron Cousins: Well, I will, just to address the point, if students wanna call for a boycott because they disagree with the speaker, I’m okay with that. Call for the boycott if you want to do that. It’s when there is some kind of rule that comes down saying, okay, we can’t have people that will say this or say that. That’s when it goes into full blown censorship. So that obviously is a problem. With what’s happening in this district right now, again, they’ve cast such a broad net so that they don’t get in trouble. Even conservative books. There’s books by Bill O’Reilly that have now been pulled off the shelves.
Mike Papantonio: Anne Frank’s, Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl, censored.
Farron Cousins: Right. It’s laughable. And these are books that we all read growing, I mean, the school told us, you have to read this book.
Mike Papantonio: Guinness Book of World Records, censored. Biographies of Lady Gaga, censored. Thurgood Marshall, you know, one of the best jurist in history, censored. But you see, it’s both sides. It’s not just one. You can’t look at this story and not say, this is the danger of censorship. Because even though they may not have a policy at a university when a speaker goes and they don’t like what the speaker says, well, you don’t have to have a policy to say it’s censorship. It’s defacto censorship because they make that speaker go home or they don’t allow ’em to speak. So that’s the danger. I mean, to me it’s a such a slippery slope. This, first of all, this is unconstitutional. There’s no way this is gonna stand. I have zero doubt that this is gonna be held unconstitutional. So, it’s not really a problem. I think the real, to me, the real problem is, is when we have a culture that is so unable to listen to something that they disagree with, where they have to move into a safe space. They have to move in a safe space because they can’t, uh, I don’t wanna hear that. That’s dangerous as hell to me. That is dangerous as hell.
Farron Cousins: Well, to me it’s, listen, if you don’t want to hear something, you don’t wanna watch something, you don’t watch it. You don’t hear it. If you don’t wanna read these books, don’t read the books. I don’t understand why people don’t understand that they can just not do it.
Mike Papantonio: How do you explain, first of all, I don’t know whether agree with me or not, you know, you and I agree or disagree on a lot of stuff. Do you see at least the point I’m trying to make here? That it’s a two-edged sword. It holds true for both sides. And these right wingers are just as loony as the snowflakes that show up and say, I don’t want this comedian to show up because he’s insulted whatever. I don’t like what he has to say, so I’m going to make their life miserable. You see, it’s the same kind of censorship. Only it’s a defacto censorship.
Farron Cousins: Well, look, only one side’s trying to make it illegal and that’s coming from the right. So we see DeSantis has done this, other states have picked up on this, Sarah Huckabee Sanders in Arkansa is working on it as well. And so, yeah. There’s a lot of people on the left, especially with the comedian issue. They’re like, listen, we get that you have your own sense of comedy. We don’t like it and we don’t want you here.
Mike Papantonio: Then don’t go.
Farron Cousins: But at the same time, I bring up this thing from George Carlin, comedy’s never supposed to punch down. You gotta be attacking the ones in power. Don’t attack the marginalized people. So that’s, I like that old statement from George Carlin. And I think it holds true. It’s easy to mock a small community because you know everybody is not a part of it. But when you take on the powers that be, that’s when you make a difference.
Mike Papantonio: Do you think Chappelle ought to be able to go on stage and part of his routine is to talk about trans or gays, that he’s able to do that? Or should we say you may not do that?
Farron Cousins: He’s able to do that. Absolutely.
Mike Papantonio: And people go.
Farron Cousins: And people go.
Mike Papantonio: And some people choose not to go. And that works.
Farron Cousins:Yes.
Mike Papantonio: That’s not censorship. Okay.
After a door plug blew off during a flight recently, questions have been asked how this could have happened. All you have to do is follow the money and it becomes crystal clear, doesn’t it, Farron, about what Boeing’s up to. They’re just paying off regulators. They’re paying off pros. Uh, I was gonna say, I started say prostitutes.
Farron Cousins: You didn’t get it wrong.
Mike Papantonio: Prostitutes. I was going, I was thinking Congress, congressional prostitutes. So they’re paying off, they’re paying these people off. I mean, huge money. Mega $40 million, $60 million kinda money.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. Boeing, and just for anybody who’s not aware of it, even though it’s been national news, you had that door in the middle of a flight, you’re 35,000 feet in the air, door plug blows, door comes flying off airplane. And this is the latest in a string of mishaps, we’ll call them, that Boeing airplanes have suffered in recent years. We’ve had two very fatal crashes. We had the woman that almost got sucked out of the plane and now the door plug. And so a lot of people are wanting answers. And well, if you want answers, go to the Lever because the Lever put it all together as per usual.
Mike Papantonio: As usual. I mean, these guys are great.
Farron Cousins: And they followed all of this dirty money that bought them deregulation.
Mike Papantonio: It’s just amazing, the capability. I don’t think in corporate media there’s such a thing as investigative journalism anymore. But you have people that are doing it. You’ve got the Lever, you’ve got some folks just like that. I mean, we’ve got about five sources that we go to, and this is one of them. And they just always get it right. Look, Spirit, what happens, there’s Spirit corporation which supplies, I think it’s 70% of the parts for Boeing. In other words, they basically build the airplane.
Farron Cousins:: And it’s a spinoff of Boeing. So they are tied right at the hip there.
Mike Papantonio: Exactly. So you have employees that are saying they know what they’re doing. We’re complaining all the time about defects. We’re complaining all the time about shoddy workmanship. And they’re telling us to shut up. Don’t say anything, conceal it. This is coming from their own employees. The Lever was smart enough to get a few of them understatement and this is what they’re saying. How about 2018 and 2019, what 346 people killed? 346 people killed by the very kind of thing, it was something wrong with the airplane, some defect with the airplane. Somebody didn’t do their job in making the part, whoever it was that distributed the part covered it up, concealed it. It’s the same thing, man. Every time.
Farron Cousins: And when these things happen, what Boeing does is they get their lobbyists, they get their checkbooks out, they go to Washington, DC and they say, hey, listen, we’ve got the FAA or whoever it is, sniffing our tail right here. We need them to not be. Uh, hey, you’ve got this rule right here that says we’re not allowed to do this, or we have to go through X number of safety checks. Cut that down. Cut it down to one safety check or maybe we just fill it out ourselves and send it into you. That’s all we have to do. You don’t even have to send your people, oh, by the way, I totally forgot. Here’s your $5 million. And these lawmakers, Democrats and Republicans, both of them, they make the phone calls to these federal agencies and they say, get off their backs.
Mike Papantonio: Ron Estes from Kansas Republican, pressures the Federal Aviation Administration say, look, you need to have, you need to move this faster. You need to deregulate some so Spirit who supplies the parts can continue making defective parts. That’s just one Republican. Here’s Democrat, Democrat Maria Cantwell. Well, she holds herself out as this really, I’m really a consumer oriented individual till you go looking behind the curtains and then you find out that she’s creating legislation that says that the 737 looming safety problems, that we need to move on and we need to give them a break. Really move on? This is a airplane killed 270 people, you know.
Farron Cousins: And it’s almost crazy when you think about the fact that, okay, Boeing is a company,
Mike Papantonio: Excuse me, 346 people.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. So Boeing is a private company that makes products, and they’re working on legislation to say, this specific product from this private company, we gotta get this on the market immediately. Why? That doesn’t make any sense. That’s like a toy company lobbying Washington, hey, we gotta get this new Elmo doll out there. You’ve gotta pass legislation. When you look at it in those simplistic terms, this is insane because lawmakers are lobbying for a plane to make it to the market faster. We have planes. We got good, safe, decent planes right now. And Boeing is cutting corners, paying off everybody.
Mike Papantonio: Because they’re making so much money.
Farron Cousins: Exactly.
Mike Papantonio: They’re making so much money and Spirit’s making so much money, and they’re putting people’s lives at risk as we become a frigging Banana Republic. You wanna hear real crazy. I don’t know if you caught this story, I just caught it yesterday, maybe day before, where Buttigieg, of course, their transportation guy who brought us multiple derailments, brought us inability for the airlines to even get people from point A to point B, a record more cancellations, more failure of the airlines to deliver what they’re supposed to deliver then we’ve ever seen in history. Okay. The same guy that couldn’t even keep trucks moving and ships moving in the cargo areas. And we had a supply problem. This is the guy who now, I don’t know if you, I’m not making this up. He really has proposed that we, for diversity and inclusion, we need to start hiring people that have mental disabilities. Did you see this article?
Farron Cousins: I haven’t seen that. No.
Mike Papantonio: It’s there. Yeah. It’s just coming out by the FAA, FFA, FAA. Sometimes it’s easy to confuse the Future Farmers with the aviation department. But the point being, mayor Pete is behind this diversity push. Now if they’re not working in the control area, great. I’m all for it. But there’s no delineation. I used to, as you know, I used to be a pilot. I flew for a lot of years. But this is not the kind of job where you can put somebody up in a tower or working radar that has a history of mental illness. And this, for some reason, he specified that in this diversity request.
Farron Cousins: Well, I think this isn’t even something that Buttigieg needs to be talking about. You are the head of the agency. This sounds like an HR issue. Like, HR should be hyping that up. They should be promoting it. You should be worried about the fact that we’re back to the point where airplanes are crashing. They’re blowing up in the middle of the air. That’s what Buttigieg or anyone at the top of that agency needs to be focused on. And they’re not. And that’s what drives me crazy about this. I’m all for inclusion. But again, let the HR people deal with that. Let the lower people on the ladder there, they get to do that and great for them. You have to go out there and you have to put pressure on Boeing. That’s what you should be talking about. You should be talking about all of these companies still price gouging us, alleging that, oh no, the supply chain. Supply chain’s fine right now. We’re being gouged by corporations. You should be on a better message than talking about things that most people are gonna roll their eyes about anyway.
Mike Papantonio: This last story, I mean, I looked at four different sources to see if this was true. But it really is psychiatric disabilities and intellectual disabilities. We wanna reach out and bring ’em into the FAA. And great, there’s probably places where they can work. Don’t put ’em in a tower. Don’t put ’em in a control radar setter. So maybe it’s a good idea, but the way it’s written and the way that it’s going, it specifies this is what we’re looking for. I don’t know, man. This guy gets creepier and creepier. Every story that I do, it’s just another crazy story about this Buttigieg cat.
Farron Cousins: Well, to me, it’s just, he has been, I think out of everyone I’ve seen from this administration, the worst. In terms, if you look at what’s happened from the transportation department since he’s been in charge, it’s been a disaster. There is no way to spin that. It’s not because he’s a gay man, it’s not because he’s a man. It’s because he sucks at his job and he should not have that job. He was grossly under-qualified.
Mike Papantonio: Oh, he’s a mayor.
Farron Cousins: He was a mayor of a town of under 200,000 people. He should not be in charge of transportation for the US.
Mike Papantonio: Mayor Pete for president. I literally see that. Mayor Pete for president.
Farron Cousins: It’s sick.
Mike Papantonio: The Biden administration keeps telling us that the economy is humming along just fine. But for young Americans, things are really getting worse. Huge percentages of young voters being forced to move back in with their parents because they can’t afford rent or mortgages, even though they’re working two jobs to make ends meet. That’s the state of affairs moving into the 2024 election. How does it affect things?
Farron Cousins: Uh, it’s horrible for Biden. And here’s the thing. I’m on social media all the time and that’s, you got a much younger crowd, especially over on Twitter. But a lot of them talk about how sick and tired they are of hearing this administration tell them that the economy is doing great. Because when you look on paper, you look at the numbers, yeah, the economy is doing great. We’ve got record low unemployment, stock market going through the roof. Inflation’s coming down, prices still way up and a lot of that is price gouging. But get down on the micro level, not the macro level. Get down to the micro level. And that is where you start to see how bad the divide is in this country. Because if you’re somebody who’s over 40.
Mike Papantonio: Are you talking about age divide?
Farron Cousins: Right.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. I think it is bad.
Farron Cousins: If you’re over 40, you’re feeling the recovery, you’re doing pretty good. You’re under 40, it’s hell for these people right now.
Mike Papantonio:: Here are the numbers, Farron. Almost 30% of Gen Zers reported they can’t afford rent and they had to move back into their, with their family. It’s one outta three adults between 18 and 34 today are living with their parents. And that’s not that they just don’t wanna work. Some of ’em are working two jobs. And part of it is we’ve talked about before is you’ve got Wall Street coming in, buying up houses, buying up entire neighborhoods so they can jack the rents up. But this, I don’t see this getting any better. And I don’t know how you can in one side of your mouth saying, this is really good. We got a great economy. You have more movement right now with minorities and younger voters moving away from Democrats. They’re moving away. You’ve got, I think every week you’ve got some high profile minority leader coming out and saying, you know, we’ve all invested in the Democratic party. What’s it done for us? And so this is another one of those stories, isn’t it? And I think it has to be addressed. I mean, you can’t move into the election and put your head in the sand and say everything’s okay. Bernie Sanders, I think really handled it well, didn’t he?
Farron Cousins:: Yeah. Bernie came out recently and essentially, he said Biden has to change course. It was that simple, he said, he has to change the course. And of course, Bernie’s big thing is always these economic inequality issues. And this is where Biden has plenty of leeway to do something. He could go out there, hold a press conference in 10 minutes from now and say, look, we got a problem in the country where we’ve got Wall Street bankers moving into small town America, buying up all your homes and then charging you double what the rent should be, triple what the rent should be. I wanna make that illegal.
Mike Papantonio: And they could make it illegal. There’s all kinds of ways to stop that, but he won’t do it. The other part of it is with minorities, what you’re hearing is you’re bringing in tons and tons of immigration and what that’s doing is it’s driving down wages for us. They’re taking jobs that we used to be able to handle for $15 an hour, and now these folks are replacing for $5 an hour. So that’s the minority argument, and it’s affecting the way they see economics. That’s a big factor. The millennials, well, they’re losing ground to things like AI and technology. So I think it’s something you can’t just, you just can’t say everything’s okay and say, we can hold this position. We don’t have to address it. But you gotta be out there talking about it, don’t you?
Farron Cousins: Yeah, absolutely. And they want to talk about, hey, look at unemployment. It’s so down. Yeah. How about we talk about the number of people that are working two jobs. Let’s look at those statistics.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. 46%. 46% of Generation, I think it was Z’s.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. So, more people have jobs, but more people have more jobs too. So there’s a lot of things. Overall are things better? Sure.
Mike Papantonio: What are the jobs they have?
Farron Cousins: They’re waiting tables still. And a lot of them.
Mike Papantonio: Service industry.
Farron Cousins: They’re service industry, they’re retail industry, and even those are already being automated. We’re seeing more self checkouts. We’re seeing, you know, they can’t get these office jobs that they went to school for, because we do have older generations that don’t have money to retire. So I gotta work until I’m 70 or 80. I can’t retire from this job and create an opening for the college graduate. It’s a horrible workforce.
Mike Papantonio: You know what the statistics show now? Used to be where we wanted, if you’re interviewing two people, one of them is 55, the other one is 25, you would lead, right around here we would also say, okay, we want that 25-year-old that’s got some ability and can be trained and can do a good job for us. It’s not just us, but the statistics show that people are favoring the older workers now. And so that’s another hit that the Z’s and millennials are having to deal with. I don’t see a quick solution to it.
Farron Cousins: No, I don’t either. Like I said, there’s things he could do. At the very least, talk about these things. Let’s stop pretending that the economy is working great for everybody. But if he doesn’t start getting out there and using that podium, using the pulpit, then he is gonna be in for a really sad year.
Mike Papantonio: It’s working great for millionaires and billionaires. It’s working great for millionaires and billionaires, but most generation Z and millennials are not billionaires and millionaires.
Farron Cousins: No. And they’ll never get close to it, unfortunately.
Mike Papantonio: Thank you for joining me. Okay.
Farron Cousins: Thank you.
Mike Papantonio: That’s all for this week, but all these segments are gonna be posted right here on this channel in the coming week, so make sure you subscribe. I’m Mike Papantonio, and this has been America’s Lawyer, where we tell you stories every week that corporate media won’t tell you because their advertisers won’t let ’em. If they tell the story and it hurts the advertisers, the advertiser’s gonna pull the money, or their political connections are just so strong that there’s no middle ground. If they’re Democrat, they can’t talk about Democrats. If they’re Republicans, they can’t talk about Republicans. We, as you can see, don’t have that problem here. We’re gonna call balls and strikes regardless. Hope to see you next time.
