America’s Lawyer E86: Illinois could become the latest state in the country to enact what is called a “Skittles Ban”, which is legislation that would ban harmful chemicals from popular foods and candies. The largest power company in the state of Alabama has purchased their own “news websites” to help spread propaganda and to downplay the health risks of the toxins that they are dumping in the state. And a new report suggests that major grocery store chains are propping up human trafficking as a way to score cheap labor. 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. Illinois could become the latest state in the country to enact what’s called the Skittles ban, which is legislation that would ban harmful chemicals from popular foods and candies. The largest power company in the state of Alabama has purchased their own news website to help spread propaganda and downplay the health risk of the toxins that they’re pumping into the state. And new reports, they suggest that major grocery store chains are propping up human trafficking as a way to score cheap labor. All that and more, it’s coming up. Don’t go anywhere. America’s Lawyer starts right now.
Lawmakers in Illinois have proposed legislation that would ban five different chemicals in food, all of which have been linked to serious health problems in human beings. And most of the chemicals, well, they were banned overseas for decades. I’ve got Farron Cousins with me to talk about this story and many more stories. Farron, this Skittles, we did this story how long ago?
Farron Cousins: God, I think it’s been a couple years, really.
Mike Papantonio: Oh, two or three years ago. And what we started seeing is we started seeing that this is Japan, Asia, was banning Skittles. Europe was banning Skittles. And so we took a deep look into it and said, why? And it’s because they figured out that the additives that were going in this would cause cancer, all kinds of chronic disease, ADHD, and FDA ignored it as they usually do. They totally ignored it because industry was pumping so much money into the FDA.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. Europe was big on just immediately getting rid of these chemicals. And like you said, we’ve got cancers, we’ve got cognitive disorders, we’ve got nervous system disorders, reproductive issues. I mean, across the board, any horrible thing you could imagine as a side effect of a chemical is listed for these five chemicals. And the common places you find ’em, Skittles, PEZ, Peeps, Sun Drop sodas, any kind of colorful candy or or sweet type thing, whether it’s a beverage or a food, most likely has at least some of these chemicals. And what really got me about this story is that the US banned it from cosmetics in the nineties.
Mike Papantonio: Right.
Farron Cousins: But not from consuming it.
Mike Papantonio: Not from kids candy.
Farron Cousins: Right.
Mike Papantonio: In other words, the FDA says, oh, well, we’re gonna make some movement here, but we’re not gonna interfere with the food industry. Well, if you do anybody watching this, if you take a look at brominated vegetable oil or potassium bromate, or take a look at red dye number three, and you’re gonna see that this is really bad stuff. And not only that, we’ve known it was bad stuff for a long, long time. This isn’t guesswork. The scientists, the clinicals on this stuff have been around forever. So how did it make it this far for so long?
Farron Cousins: Well, again, I think you kind of nailed it there, is we have a regulatory system that is completely captured by the industry. So let’s compare, you know, over in Europe what it takes for something to be taken off the market in Europe is suspicion. If we suspect that this could be causing negative health effects, we remove it, then we run our tests, so that nobody in the interim gets hurt. We’ll run our tests. If it’s safe, hey, welcome back. If not, ha, we told you so. We gotta do something else. In the US, we wait, we wait and wait and wait and then we test while the product is still out there potentially harming millions of people. We let the industry come in, we have our 90 day comment periods, the industry can submit their own testing, they can object to our final testing results. A process that literally takes decades. And if the final determination is, yes, it hurts people and we take it off the market.
Mike Papantonio: It’s still not done.
Farron Cousins: It’s been 20 to 30 years already at that point.
Mike Papantonio: Okay. First of all, it’s worse than that. Okay. Because even after you make it all through those hoops, when things start really getting tight, what the industry does is goes out and hires all these science whores. A science whore is somebody that works at a university or works with some type of foundation. And they say, we did the studies and we can’t be sure. Okay. That’s all they have to say. We can’t be sure. In Europe, if you say we can’t be sure it’s gonna be pulled anyway. In the United States, there’s just not enough. We need more studies. So it’s just completely backwards. We know that this stuff is causing all kinds of cancers, all kinds of neurological injuries. But we say, well, you know, there’s some cat there at Princeton and he says, well, we can’t be sure. So that gives the FDA the chance to even hang on longer for the folks that are making this product. Ugly process.
Bernie Sanders has sponsored a bill in the Senate that would impose a severe tax penalty on any company that pays their CEO more than 50 times what the average worker makes. The law, it’s not gonna pass. But don’t you love that Bernie Sanders says, I don’t really care. I wanna make this, I want the public to understand that there are companies that are paying their CEOs 500 times what the average workers making. And he’s saying, I wanna put this on the table. And I wanna say, I wanna show you what it’s doing to these workers and how these folks making 500 times what the workers making. They don’t even need the money. They’re already living in massive mansions. They’re flying jets. They’ve got yachts. They’ve got all this stuff. They don’t need anything else. But we’re still paying ’em 500 times what the worker makes.
Farron Cousins: Back in the sixties and the seventies, when we actually had a robust middle class here in the United States, the CEO to worker pay was about 25 to 35 to one. So you make a dollar, your boss at the very top of that company was making 25 bucks. But today it is 400 to 500 times more. And we have allowed that gap to just grow exponentially. And Bernie Sanders, like you said, he knows this isn’t gonna pass. He’s not gonna get the 60 votes to clear that filibuster hurdle. But what he’s doing is he is making sure that the country knows one, that this is happening. Two, that legislatively we could do something about it. And three, that, listen, I do understand your problems and here it is. Here is the solution. Y’all gotta get all these other folks in here to follow suit.
Mike Papantonio: Well, and he says, look, if we do this, it’ll generate, first of all, $150 billion in tax revenue for the United States. Of course, the people screaming Walmart, Google, Home Depot, JP Morgan, McDonald’s, they’re having conniptions right now, even though they know the chances. They’ve spread so much money around. I mean, you get some lame brain legislator that is, the guy comes into Congress and he’s making, maybe he’s making a hundred thousand dollars a year. He’s making a ton of money from all these political donations. They’ve changed his life. He’s making tons of money with insider trading. This is not an issue that these folks worry about. They know they can make this go away. But I just love that Bernie Sanders says, well, you know, I might not win. This might be DOA, this could be totally, but we’re gonna have the discussion. Now, I want you to watch, this is Reuters. Okay. What, five paragraphs, maybe five paragraphs. Watch what corporate media does with this story. If you can find it, please let us know. Send us on a comment, wow, we actually found MSNBC and CNN talking about this. You won’t see it.
Farron Cousins: Well, and they may talk about like, oh, Bernie’s wasting everybody’s time. He knows he’s not gonna pass it. Listen, this is the kind of stuff that Biden should be talking about this year.
Mike Papantonio: Of course, of course.
Farron Cousins: He should be holding press conferences, doing speeches publicly, talking about these things. That’s I think mostly what Bernie’s trying to do is he’s trying to push him because Bernie is a great smart politician. And he
Mike Papantonio: He’s a good speaker.
Farron Cousins: And he is, and he’s trying to kind of give it to Biden. You’re spoon feeding him, but he’s not taking it.
Mike Papantonio: Oh, Biden could sit in his cellar like last election and do this. He doesn’t have to bumble his way up onto a stage in front of a podium. He can say, he can deliver these messages cleanly. Where we’re not worried about is he gonna fall off stage? He can do it down in his cellar with a great message to the American public. This would be a great message.
Farron Cousins: Yep.
Mike Papantonio: It’d be the kind of thing we want to hear from a president.
The largest power company in the state of Alabama has purchased their own news website to help spread propaganda and to downplay the health risks of the toxins that they’re dumping in the state. This is such a crazy story. Okay. First of all, you have to start off with the analysis. What’s the heart of this story? The heart is LA Times, layoffs, going outta business. Washington Post, barely hanging on, but for Bezos owns it. He’s got more money than 10 Nations. He can keep it alive. Vice, Vice News, under. Sports Illustrated. You know, so there’s layoffs, thousands of journalists are being laid off. We’ve already been, for the last 20 years, there’s been no such thing as investigative journalism. It doesn’t exist. They can’t afford it. They don’t wanna pay an investigative reporter to go study anything. And so this is the state of the American media right now. Now add to that, you’ve got a utility company, one of the biggest utility companies in the nation. In one of the poorest, poorest states in the nation, with the highest bills in the nation, that they own the news in Alabama. Is that an overstatement?
Farron Cousins: No. And in fact, they’ve gone to the next step of, originally what they could do is they could do all the advertising on the local channels. They get in good. They know these people. They can get the favorable coverage they want. But Alabama Power decided to take it a step further. You know what? We, because of the internet, anybody can run a news website. So they said, why don’t, let’s just build our own news website where we put out what they call the good news. Because we don’t wanna focus on the bad in Alabama. They wanna focus on good things and all of the good things are about how amazing Alabama Power is, even as they just made an agreement where they’re now allowed to import coal ash toxins from other states and dump ’em into the poor communities in Alabama. And that’s a good thing.
Mike Papantonio: Well, okay, residents of the seventh poorest state in all of America, have the most expensive monthly electric bills in the United States topping $700 a month. Now, these are people barely hanging on. But the story really started where these people said, Alabama Power and light, you’re killing us. You have this dust that’s causing lung disease. It’s causing neuropathies. It’s causing really health problems for our children. It’s giving our children asthma. And would you do something about it? It’s got mercury, it’s got arsenic, it’s got cadmium in it. And they said, nah, I don’t think we’re gonna do anything about it. I think we’re just gonna make it sound good. We’re gonna give you some good news. That literally, what you just said is literally the words they used. That is that we’re buying the News Center Operation. That’s what it’s called, News Center Operation. And it’s entirely paid for by the electricity customers. You understand? They’re charging these customers that are complaining, you’re killing us with the environmental disaster you’ve caused and you’re killing us ’cause we can’t afford to pay for this. But then they have those same customers paying for this thing that’s called the News Center Operation, which is supposed to be good news. We’re only gonna report good news, right? Did I get that right?
Farron Cousins: Absolutely. And a lot of times, well, in the past, I guess these corporations, what they would do is instead of buying their own news website, they would send money to think tanks or industry front groups. And those front groups would be the ones that would run these websites and do these phony studies saying that, oh, climate change isn’t real, or these chemicals, yeah, they’re giving you cancer, but they sure taste good. They would give it to these other companies that would then do it. But Alabama Power decided to streamline the process. We’ll cut out the middleman. We don’t have to send $20 million to this think tank. We can spend a million and fund this website for five years.
Mike Papantonio: You understand that they’re actually writing the news stories.
Farron Cousins: Yes.
Mike Papantonio: They’re writing the news stories and then they’ll send it to something like the, this is really, this is doubly bad, The Birmingham Times. The Birmingham Times, historically, all the way back to 1964 has been an avenue that African Americans in Alabama would rely on because it would give them the news that affects them. Not anymore. Now, these stories are created by The Birmingham Times, and sometimes written by the power company. And then they’re just passed on, the good news is passed on that, hey, you’re really not gonna die of this stuff. It’s okay. Or, hey, yeah, your costs are going up a little bit, but we have to do that so we can bring you better service. It’s the sickest story. And again, it’s the poorest state in the union in some of the poorest counties within that poor state. And nobody’s doing anything. Have you seen this story anywhere?
Farron Cousins: No, no. This is the first time I’ve seen it.
Mike Papantonio: It’s Guardian.
Farron Cousins: Yeah, of course.
Mike Papantonio: So, the truth is, this is one of the dirtiest power plants in the country, and nobody’s paying any attention to this.
Farron Cousins: No. And what this is really is this is a blueprint for other corporations to start doing the same thing. You know, Exxon is not gonna have to send money to all these think tanks to write their stories. Hey, let’s start our own Exxon news website. And just like Alabama Power, and Pfizer could do it, Merck could do it, DuPont could do it. But what they do is they get their news site certified, and once they get it certified through Google News, through, all the other news services, whatever, it then becomes legitimate. So it goes into the PR newswires. Once you get it in the newswire, you can get it published anywhere in the country.
Mike Papantonio: Exactly. Now you understand that this is the other part of it. I’m not making this up. The employees for the Alabama Power plant company, they’re the people that are going to work for the news sources. Do you understand that? They’re saying, okay, I can give you a better job. You’re only making $25 an hour. How about you go to work for our news origination source and you’re gonna make more money. And then you have the folks that are actually printing this stuff, Birmingham Times, for example, his quote is that, you know, we got a small staff. It’s hard to cover these studies, the editorials hard. How do we make decisions about it? And the point is this, they’re owned and operated now. All these news sources are owned and operated in Alabama by this company. And there’s not a, there’s no way to break through.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. Jeff Bezos is gonna look like an idiot paying billions for the Washington Post when he could have just started his own little website and accomplished the same thing. But it does worry me with all these journalists that are getting laid off. They need jobs. And some of them they’re gonna say, listen, I know it’s horrible, but I gotta go work for Alabama Power News because I’ve got nothing else. That’s what’s so scary is if they get legitimate journalists to start putting their names on stuff, it’s all over.
Mike Papantonio: Question is how many legitimate journalists are around? This again, this is the kind of thing you read, this is in Guardian, but this is what you read in maybe The Lever or the Guardian or where they still have investigative journalists. I mean, it’s still a real journalism entity. In the United States everything from CNBC to CNN, to MSNBC, these aren’t journalism organizations. They don’t have, all they do, they’re talking heads. If you wanna move into the journalism business, just practice in front of a camera. Can you read a teleprompter? Can you show up to work on time and read a teleprompter? Because it’s all gonna be spoon fed to you anyway by management. That’s what’s happened both to CNN and MSNBC and Fox, you know, these are places where they show up at work and they say, this is the angle we want to take today. We want to go after this politician. We want to talk about this issue. And this is what you must talk to. I remember when I did, Ed Schultz used to have me on his show often, and I remember when we started talking about TPP and management came unglued, man. They came unglued because it tied into Hillary Clinton being a bad candidate, tied into TPP being a threat to American workers.
Farron Cousins: Comcast, who was buying them at the time.
Mike Papantonio: Exactly. Comcast didn’t like it.
Farron Cousins: Ed, just so everybody knows, Ed was down here in Pensacola having this conversation with us in person. These are real things.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. This is really happening to me. I can’t tell a story. And the talking heads that will go along with it, you know, here, Joe, how about reading this? Read the teleprompter. We’ll worry about what you’re gonna say. That’s not journalism. There’s no investigation into it. There’s not even a deep understanding of the story most of the time.
When most people think of human trafficking, they likely immediately think about sex trafficking. But there’s another form of human trafficking that’s taking place right in this country and some of the biggest companies in America are taking advantage of it. Wow. What a heyday, right? For the US Chamber of Commerce, with all the immigration, this is, man, they’re high-fiving each other. This is the greatest thing that’s happened. Now all these immigrants are coming in, they’ll pick our vegetables, they’ll pick our fruit. If they die, hell ship ’em back to Guatemala. Nobody knows about it. We don’t have to pay ’em wages even close to the minimum wage. We have all kinds of ways to exploit them, right? This is all about immigrant exploitation. That’s what this story’s about, isn’t it?
Farron Cousins: It is. And this one actually came about because Kroger, you know, huge grocery store chain here in the United States is trying to merge with Albertsons. So, okay, you gotta go through all the regulatory process. We’ve gotta do background checks on everybody here. And part of that background check that was pretty much ignored by everybody except for The Lever, is, hey, Kroger, you’ve actually been boasting about how you’re using these local, independent farmers and whatnot. But you got one here and you actually use it for several stores, they’ve literally been caught using trafficked humans to pick their fruits. And when we talk trafficked, we are talking about the, what you would see in a movie type thing. People thrown into the car, their documents stolen from them, beaten, tortured, some of them killed.
Mike Papantonio: Oh, yeah.
Farron Cousins: And all just so you can have somebody go out for $5 an hour to pick your blueberries.
Mike Papantonio: These are, some of these people are kidnapped. Their, the stories that are endless about being repeatedly raped, being locked in your living area where you can’t leave, to where you’re working, there’s, they will have what they call stores where the owner of the organization will sell food to ’em at a hundred times the rate that it should be. And then they’ve gotta pay off the store to get food or clothing, or whatever it may be. And so at the end of the day, they may pick a thousand bags of whatever, and you would think they’re gonna make some money, but no, you owe the store. You can’t do anything until you pay the store off. This is a truly ugly story. Southern Press hired Maria Leticia Patricio, she was prosecuted for trafficking and what she was doing, everybody understood it. I mean, everybody knew exactly what was going on, but they just turned the other way and said, well, these are only immigrants. They’re making a little bit of money. They’re better off now than they were in Nicaragua. Let’s let it happen.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. And so this woman you’re talking about, she owned this labor consulting and contracting company. And so these farmers would go and hire her, and she would say, oh, don’t worry. I’ve got lots of workers. I’ll find you some workers. So the farmers didn’t know because they didn’t want to know. Kroger’s then goes, hires the farmer to give them the produce. And Kroger doesn’t know, because Kroger probably doesn’t want to know. And it’s even pointed out, by the way, in this article, that Kroger is not a part of the organization of other grocery stores that actually do vet these farmers to make sure that there’s no trafficking. So Kroger did not traffic people, but they certainly, through this chain here, we’re making money off of it. Willingly, unwillingly, we don’t know. We’ll have to wait and see what comes out on this. But it’s a disgusting story and definitely not good for them.
Mike Papantonio: Farron, how difficult do you think it is for Kroger to go on site and say, look, let’s take a look at all this. Let’s see what’s really happening. They would see these conditions, they would talk to workers, they would know what’s happening. But no, it’s just, let’s ignore it. They have, this statement to me just is so disgusting. These folks are out there bragging about how they’re excited to provide more opportunities for local producers to grow their businesses. That’s their headline. And we’re excited to provide work for immigrants.
Farron Cousins: You know, everybody always wonders, well, why doesn’t Congress do anything about immigration? This is why. Because these corporations, like you pointed out the Chamber of Commerce, we will never have a solution to any of the immigration problems because these corporations love to exploit these people, and they will keep the status quo the way it is forever.
Mike Papantonio: Farron, thank you for joining me. Okay.
Farron Cousins: Thank you.
Mike Papantonio: That’s all for this week. But all these segments, well, they’re 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 advertisers won’t let ’em tell the story, because if they do, they’re gonna pull advertising dollars. Or their political connections don’t allow for it because, well, they’re spokespeople for the Democrats or they’re spokespeople for the Republicans. And if you tell a story that makes ’em mad, maybe you won’t have access to the people who wanna speak for those parties. I’m Mike Papantonio and we’ll see you next time.
