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. Also, as Deke’s lawsuit to uncover the deceit and bring white collar criminals to justice progresses, the sudden appearance of IEDs and EFPs on US highways cause death and destruction. Who is behind this evil? Farron Cousins is joined by Mike Papantonio, along with attorney Chris Paulos, to discuss Pap’s new book, “Suspicious Activity,” which is a continuation of his Law and Disorder series.
Click here to order a copy of Mike Papantonio’s new book, “Suspicious Activity.”
Transcript:
*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
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.
Farron Cousins: This is obviously coming out at a time where we are seeing more terrorism, or at least it’s making the news more frequently. So why this book? Why right now?
Mike Papantonio: Well, Chris, I’ve been fascinated, our firm handles these cases, and I don’t think there’s nobody literally in the world that’s more of an expert than Chris Paulos. And he’s one of my law partners, and we’re continually talking about new ideas, what’s happening in the law firm that would convert to a book, you know? And so it’s impossible to watch what he has done with this litigation, the way he’s figured out, how does it get from, how does this IED get from point A to point B? How do we follow where the money started? Where do you find experts that can identify that IED to a particular terror organization, whether it’s Hamas? But he’s done all that for years. And he was technical advisor on it and just did a wonderful job helping shape the facts. Everything you read in the book is true, except the murders or maybe some of the incidents aren’t quite true, but they add some interest to the book.
Farron Cousins: And so, Chris, you and I have talked about this in the past, interviews, I’ve spoken to you many times, and I think it’s worth repeating here so that everybody understands, and it obviously ties into the book here. When we talk about these terrorists and we talk about the banks, there’s this misconception that all started in the war on terror during the Bush years, where everybody thinks, okay, well these terrorists, what are they, they’re hiding out in the little huts. They’re in caves, is what we heard. As I mentioned earlier, this is a legitimate, for them, business.
Mike Papantonio: Business. Yeah.
Farron Cousins: These are not just people who sleep on the ground in tents. These are people with full fledged bank accounts. They’re sitting on millions and millions of dollars, if not more than that. They’re recognized in many cases by local government as, okay, we don’t touch this person. Same thing with the cartels. They have so much power. They have the computer awareness of some of the best IT professionals. We’re not dealing with these, again, as people thought back then, just, oh, they sleep in the tents, they’re in the caves. You know, these are savages, we were told. These are highly sophisticated and highly intelligent people.
Mike Papantonio: The government has done a lot to help them. As I said, the comptroller’s office knew about what HSBC was doing for 10 years, and they knew everybody else was doing it too. But the political strings, the influence that these folks had, people were willing to look the other way. And while they looked the other way, thousands, thousands of US contractors and soldiers were murdered with IEDs. So one thing Chris had to overcome is even working with the government is very difficult on this. Do you agree?
Chris Paulos: Yeah. I mean, it’s.
Mike Papantonio: The book goes into that a lot. But go ahead.
Chris Paulos: It does. I think what we’ve seen, and a lot of Pap’s books go into this, and what you’ve talked about with some of the guests on your show is that there’s a lot of the fox guarding the henhouse and the revolving door between regulators and industry and that is exemplified in the banking and financial industry. You’ll see folks who have worked for the government going into, essentially, private practice for the very banks that they were involved in investigating. And you’ll see, essentially, the DOJ making a statement about a fine that is even less than a slap on the wrist in terms of the wrongful conduct of these banks. And there’s very little doubt that the fact that they have these relationships and there’s this incestuous relationship between the government and the banks, so to speak, that go into that. We heard that banks were too big to fail, and we have to prop them up.
And the end of the world would happen if we lost the banking industry and at certain times, over the last 20 years. However, the banks shouldn’t be too big to jail. And the individuals that were responsible, the account managers, the departmental managers that were responsible, I think feel shielded because they’re part of a global bank. They’re not necessarily within the United States. However, after September 11th, there were changes in the law that do give us the ability to go after those individuals, hold them responsible and accountable. And, the DOJ could do more.
Mike Papantonio: Farron, the book spends a lot of time, not all at one time, but you get an understanding, for example, why the Department of Justice, they had these people dead rights. They’re criminals. They’re absolutely criminals. And in the United States, we have a two-tier justice system. If you don’t look like a criminal because you got a three piece suit on, Armani suit and you’ve got a Rolex watch, you don’t look like a criminal. You got an MBA from Harvard or Yale. So they don’t treat you like a criminal, even though your conduct is responsible for thousands of deaths. We treat them different than a child that might be out on a street corner selling 10 ounces of marijuana, that kid’s going to prison for 10 years. Do you understand when the Department of Justice fined these people, they had to sign a document, HSBC, they had to sign a document, and the document said, yes, we were washing money, and here’s how we did it, laid it out.
Yes, we understood what the repercussions of that would be. We understood that people were gonna be killed because of our conduct. It’s all right there. So they signed the document. They pay $1.9 billion, which is a drop in the bucket compared to what they’ve made. And nobody goes to prison. These CEOs, these bankers that made this decision, they’re safe at home. They know what they’ve done. They’ve known its resulted in the death of Americans, contractors and soldiers, not just hundreds but thousands. And we look the other way because they don’t look like criminals. And we see that basically in every book that I’ve done over the last 15 years. I’ve tried to point out that we’re so naive to the fact, as Americans, we’re just so naive to the fact that there is this special system, that the judges in the eastern District of New York.
I don’t wanna talk about this case in regard to that, but if you look at their history, these judges don’t come from mom and pop consumer oriented law firms. They come from silk stocking law firms, man, where all they’ve ever done is represented corrupt corporations. Well, then they end up being the judge that has to make a decision about something like this. What do we do with the banks? Well, hell, they let ’em go here, and the only thing we can count on is an appellate decision to turn it around. So it’s, as Chris has pointed out, it’s all, the die is cast in every case, whether it was the Yaz case that I talked about, whether it was PFAS, whether it was the gun industry, all these stories, the human trafficking trafficking cases, the die is cast. The people that are responsible are on Wall Street, and they don’t look like criminals. And people are, it’s almost a suspension of disbelief. Sometimes I’ll have people call me and say, Mike, is this real? Do they really get away with this? Yeah, they do. And these are the cases we handle. This is the case he’s the head of in the entire nation right now, the number one lawyer on this litigation and he sees it firsthand. I see it firsthand every day.
Farron Cousins: And readers, you can get it firsthand. The book, Suspicious Activity, it’ll be coming out mid-March and until then, Law and Disorder, Law and Vengeance, Law and Addiction, and Inhuman Trafficking, make sure you check all those out. Pap, Chris, always a pleasure.
Mike Papantonio: Thank you, Farron.
