A recent investigation found that Tesla vehicles are failing at an alarming rate, and now the Senate is demanding answers from the company about what they knew and when they knew it. Also, scientists at the EPA have been pressured for years to approve a dangerous pesticide that poses massive health risks to humans, animals, and the environment. 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 recent investigation found that Tesla vehicles are failing at an alarming rate. Now, the Senate’s demanding answers from the company about what they knew and when they knew it. Yeah. I gotta tell you something. I got problems with this story. Why don’t you lay this story out and I wanna tell you what my problems are. Okay?
Farron Cousins: Yeah. Recently, Reuters came out, they did this big investigation. They found that there were steering failures with these Tesla vehicles that would almost render the entire vehicle inoperable, would become a danger on the roadway. So Reuters goes in, does their due diligence, looks at the internal documents, talks to people that work there. And what they said was, it looks like Tesla’s trying to shift responsibility from themselves and just saying, nope, the drivers, thousands of drivers all screwed up in the same way. So that’s where we’re at with what we know.
Mike Papantonio: You know, this is almost unprecedented. I don’t know if you realize that. Coming from Congress, now they’ve got, Musk has got a big ol’ zero on his back. He’s got a big target on his back. Let me give you the truth. The other side of the story. Faulty hidden defects are American cars, Japanese cars, they’re everywhere. Just some examples that I saw before we came in here where you had unintended acceleration in Toyotas. Killed 300 people. That went on for years. And there were complaint after complaint, went to Congress, went to regulators, they did nothing. Faulty ignition switches that caused the car to shut down and the driver would lose control of the car completely. That was complained about. You had regulators, you had Congress, no word, nothing was done. Okay. So what’s the difference here? Defective tires. The Firestone case. You remember that?
Farron Cousins: Yeah. God.
Mike Papantonio: Do you have any idea how long people, and it was 700 injuries. On the faulty ignition, 300 people died. I mean, we’re talking about far worse than we’re seeing with the Tesla case. But the Democrats at this point hate this guy and they’re going after him. And now this is what he’s faced with. I just think if you’re gonna do it, do it with everybody. Don’t center on Musk. The other one was the, you remember the bucking Bronco? That was, I mean, what, it killed a thousand people.
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: 1000 people. And Congress knew about it. Regulators knew about it. The Pinto exploding gas tank, same deal. Plenty of notice what was going on. But Congress did nothing. And now they’re going after him. You gotta play fair. You gotta say, this is good for you and it’s good for everybody, and you can’t just pick favorites.
Farron Cousins: Right. I agree with you a hundred percent on that. And look, I understand Musk, he’s got his political leanings and yeah, he has off the Democrats. And they should be looking at this. But like you say, they ought to be looking at every single one.
Mike Papantonio: Everybody. Exactly.
Farron Cousins: There isn’t a single automaker in the United States that hasn’t, at some point, probably some of them even today, that are covering up significant dangers that eventually are gonna come across your desk here at the law firm. And you’re gonna have to deal with it and see the documents. But, I also wanna point out, by the way, the GM ignition switch, so everybody understands GM saved $2 and 13 cents per vehicle on that ignition switch that killed hundreds of people.
Mike Papantonio: 300 people.
Farron Cousins: For less than $3, is what they saved. But look, we could be looking at something similar with Tesla. It has all the signs of yeah, they probably knew something was screwed up and yeah, this many people could get hurt. It’s what they all do. But if you’re gonna call them in and say, come answer questions, say, oh, by the way, after you, we’ve got GM, Ford, Toyota, everybody coming in after.
Mike Papantonio: Exactly. I mean, play fair. As you know, I’m no big fan of Musk. I’m just saying, look, how many times have you seen us involved with a lawsuit that’s outrageous? I mean, completely crazy. Like the CPAP lawsuit that’s going on right now that we’re handling, that’s the mask that you put on because you have apnea, hell, it’s causing all kinds of lung diseases. So we take that kind of information. We put it in a box. We send it to the right people. Invariably they do nothing about it. Okay. So this bothers me a lot because this is targeting, and when you start targeting and weaponizing the process, that’s all that’s happened here. Whether I like him or not, you know what, doesn’t make any difference. Let’s be fair across the table.
Mike Papantonio: Scientists at the EPA have been pressured for years to approve a dangerous pesticide that poses massive health risk to humans, animals, and the environment. And when scientists raise these concerns, they were told that, you know what, we might have to cover this up. And that’s what’s going on. How many times does this story have to be told? You know, Paraquat, Roundup, Atrazine, I could go on forever, where the EPA, they just fall under political pressure. You know, some regulator calls ’em from another department, or some senator calls ’em and says, you know, we really need to make this happen. Pick it up.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. This is a pesticide called Aldicarb. And Aldicarb, the EPA has been going back and forth on it for 14 years at least. Oh, do we approve it? Do we not? Well, according to the EPA’s own scientists, this stuff is gonna give you developmental issues. It alters babies’ brains. It’ll kill people. It’ll kill animals. It’ll kill the environment. It’ll poison the water. Poison the food. Literally poison everything out there. So let’s not approve it. But every time they say that, the higher ups and sometimes the politicians, the industry insiders.
Mike Papantonio: It’s senators. I mean, it’s senators, it’s congressmen.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. They make the phone calls and they say, hey, run your test again, but this time only look for X, Y, and Z, things they know they won’t find.
Mike Papantonio: We see it all the time. As you know, I handled Roundup. I’m handling Paraquat. I handled PFAS. Every time, the department would phony up clinicals, they literally would phony ’em up and come up with a test that would make it look safer. They would just move some numbers, a decimal point here, a decimal point there, and they’d move numbers around. This thing is so bad, it even has a nickname in the industry. It’s called All De Crap. It is absolute poison where they can see functional changes on PET scans, neurological changes on PET scans with children, babies. So they wanna use this in orange groves. All the orange juice is gonna be contaminated. Where they use it, the aquifer’s gonna be contaminated. It’s gonna be in our water, it’s gonna be in our air. But the EPA is literally still considering after 14 years, they’ve been giving, everybody has told ’em, it’s banned in 100 countries, Farron. 100 countries have looked this and said, hell no, we can’t use this.
Farron Cousins: We see that all the time too. In a lot of those cases you’re mentioning that you’ve either handled or are handling, a lot of those chemicals have been banned across the planet. But here in the United States, because we have this industry regulatory capture, we keep putting it out there and poisoning our own country, when everybody else in the world looks at us and says, are you insane? We took this off the market 20 years ago because we knew it was killing everybody.
Mike Papantonio: Imagine the politicians making these calls. I mean, most of them, IQ about room temperature. Have no idea what the science is. Well, Mr. EPA, this guy’s in my district, he gives me a lot of money. Could you just give him a break? We’re talking about killing thousands of children. I mean, that’s what the conclusion is. You would cause brain damage for infants and young children, the most susceptible to this.
Farron Cousins: Orange juice in the store would become poison for everybody drinking it.
Mike Papantonio: We’re talking about hundreds of millions of pounds of this pesticide that’s already been banned around the world. And we have a dysfunctional, stupid unworkable EPA with the same morons involved that have given us Paraquat, they’ve given us Roundup, they’ve given us PFAS. At what point do you say this is not working? You know, Richard Nixon of all people started the EPA. How crazy is that? And he said, this is a good idea to have somebody looking over these guys’ shoulders. Well, it doesn’t make any difference anymore. It is absolute fraud. It’s EPA fraud. The scientists are frauds that make this happen. They move decimals around and they make it look safe. They know exactly what they’re doing. Congress knows what they’re doing. And you know what, have you seen this article anywhere? Have you seen the corporate media covering this anywhere?
Farron Cousins: Oh, heck no. And they certainly won’t. Absolutely not.
Mike Papantonio: No. They won’t cover it a bit. But it’s kind of the perfect storm. Politicians put their foot into it to make it happen. The media has, I mean, if it’s not a low hanging fruit story, they don’t do the story. They don’t even understand how dangerous. Dicamba, great example. Same thing. And then you have regulators who end up going to work for the industry. They talk to some regulator who’s making $50,000 a year and say, hey, how would you like to make $500,000 a year? Give us a break on this, will you, Joe? And that’s what happens.
