America’s Lawyer E91: Tyson Foods has been facing calls for boycotts after they announced that they want to hire 40,000 migrants to replace American workers at their factories. An online group is preying on children and blackmailing them into committing acts of self harm – we’ll tell you what’s happening. And a new study has found that there are only a handful of working class people serving in state legislatures across the country, with most Americans being represented by trust fund babies with no real-world experiences. 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. Tyson Foods has been facing calls for boycotts after they announced that they wanna hire 40,000 migrants to replace American workers at their factories. And there’s an online group that’s preying on children and blackmailing them into committing acts of self harm. You won’t believe the story when we tell you what’s happening. And a new study, well, they found that there are only a handful of working class people serving in state legislators across the country with most Americans being represented by trust fund babies with no real world experience. All that, and more, it’s coming up. Don’t go anywhere. America’s Lawyer starts right now.
Tyson Foods recently announced that they want to hire 40,000 migrants to work at their factories in America instead of hiring American workers. This is what corporate America has been waiting for for decades. These workers are cheap, they’re replaceable. If you cause ’em harm, cut off an arm, send them back to Guatemala. That’s their attitude. I’ve got Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins with me to talk about it. I hate to say this so many times, we have been doing this story about what Tyson has been up to and what corporate America has been up to with the migration issue. Every time we do it, they say, ah, that’s, you know, everybody wants to believe, yeah, we’re letting everybody cross the border, what, 3 million, I don’t even know what the number is anymore, across the border, because we’re trying to be kind. We’re trying to be compassionate. It’s all about the Chamber of Commerce and associated industry getting cheap labor into America so we don’t have to go overseas anymore. We can bring ’em over here. Right?
Farron Cousins: Yeah. We don’t have to go make a new sweatshop in Saipan when we can make sweatshops right here in the United States. That’s the whole thing. And Tyson, when they got popped for this, because they did have a spokesperson to come out and said, oh yeah, we’re gonna hire 40,000 migrants that are coming in because we care. We want to help these people. And then Tyson, after facing calls for backlash or for boycott, said, no, we, no. That, we never did that. That’s not true. Oh, by the way, we’re also gonna be closing, what is it, a factory in Iowa, Arkansas, Virginia, Indiana, Missouri. They’re just saying, we’re just gonna shut everything down instead.
Mike Papantonio: Because they were caught.
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: Okay. So in other words, it got out that what we’ve been saying all along is this migration issue is not about compassion. It’s not about these bring us your huddled masses. It doesn’t have anything to do with that. It has to do with the fact that corporate America saw a way to make a lot of money. Cheap, cheap labor. You don’t have to pay ’em but a fraction of what you pay American workers. If they’re harmed on the work, if they lose arm, great. Ship ’em back to Guatemala. You don’t have to pay all that extra money for taking care of them. It’s really an ugly story. Tyson simply got caught, right?
Farron Cousins: Yeah, absolutely.
Mike Papantonio: And when they denied it, no, you can deny it, but tell us this, if that’s not what’s going on here, why did you just shut down five plants? Because you can’t keep ’em operating. Right?
Farron Cousins: Yeah. And they specifically said, one of the groups of migrants they’re targeting are the asylum seekers, which those people are far more vulnerable. Obviously, they don’t want to be sent back to their countries. So if they can come in here and show like, hey, look, I’ve got a job. I’m working this job, I’m contributing, I should be given asylum. Tyson can abuse those people even worse and say, listen, you’re facing two things. Either you’re gonna do what we say, you’re not gonna raise any alarms about what we’re paying you, which is pennies on the dollar. You’re not going to say anything about the safety issues that may be happening because if you do, you’re going right back to that country where you’re likely to die. So you open your mouth, you’re outta here.
Mike Papantonio: Stories, they literally show up at their houses at night, put ’em in a car, drive ’em away, and they’re gone. They’re disappeared back to their own country. And the chances of them coming back are almost non-existent. Look, we’ve done so many stories on the corruption of Tyson Foods all the way back to the water contamination where the aquifers were being contaminated so badly in North Carolina, South Carolina, that people were getting sick from drinking the water. It had contaminants, it had biological contaminants in it. We did the story on the fact that, you remember during the COVID issue where they were making workers continue to work with Covid? You did that story.
Farron Cousins: Yeah, absolutely. And Tyson was doing that. Smithfield, Pork was doing that. Because, oh, we gotta keep this out. And then when they.
Mike Papantonio: For the American public. They need more chickens. Right?
Farron Cousins: Right. And then of course, they got in trouble for that. And so I think that’s one of the reasons they’re going to the migrants and saying, okay, well, the American workers told on us. We got in trouble for that. They’re still facing some litigation about that. So we’ll go to the people who know if they open their mouths.
Mike Papantonio: They’re going back home.
Farron Cousins: You’re gone.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. That’s exactly what. Tell me, you have such a great memory, and you and I did this story years ago, who was the senator who went to Saipan, and he says, this is a great model for America?
Farron Cousins: Was it DeLay, Tom DeLay?
Mike Papantonio: It was Tom DeLay. Okay. Tell that story. Give us, because this is come to fruition right here. Right?
Farron Cousins: Yeah, absolutely. Wasn’t it when he went with, did he go with Abramoff on that or was that?
Mike Papantonio: Yeah, he went with Abramoff.
Farron Cousins: So Tom DeLay goes to Saipan and sees literal sweatshops. The people were working for $1 and 13 cents a day. I do remember that number.
Mike Papantonio: Children.
Farron Cousins: Children. And he says, this is such a great model. We should be implementing this in the United States.
Mike Papantonio:: Okay. So this come full circle. This is it. He liked the kids because they had small fingers and they could do things with their small fingers that grownups couldn’t do.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. And he marveled at how quickly they can manufacture these shoes that they were making.
Mike Papantonio: And he was bragging about the fact that they were paid less than a dollar a day.
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: Whatever, did this guy die?
Farron Cousins: Thinking about it. I have not heard from Tom DeLay. I mean, never heard from him, but.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: That is a name that disappeared and I’m glad he’s disappeared wherever the hell he ended up.
Mike Papantonio: Well, he was a powerhouse at one time, a Republican powerhouse in the Senate. And I’ll never forget him coming back and just gloating about the fact of how great the sweatshops were in Saipan and how we can duplicate that in the United States. Here it is. Tyson Foods.
An online group of thugs calling themselves 764 has been black mailing children and teenagers into committing acts of self-harm, and then forcing them to post videos online. I don’t think, God, we’ve been, I don’t think I’ve seen a story this evil. I mean, when I think of incarnate evil, these sites that we’re gonna be talking about , they’re just a safe place, they’re a safe place for psychos. These are the future of American serial killers and mass murders, when you hear the story of what these people did, let’s lay it out.
Farron Cousins: Well, this story involves a young girl who was 14 at the time in Oklahoma, and she was on Discord, which is a social media site, video site. So she meets this guy, and the guy is very nice and friendly to her. They met in a little chat room, and after they had developed a bit of a relationship where this guy started treating her, as he says, like his girlfriend, he got her to send him some pictures of herself. We don’t have much indication of what they were, but based on what followed, it seems there were probably photos she didn’t want getting out to the public. So once she sent the photos, the guy then came at her, and he’s the founder of 764. He said, all right, listen, um, I want you to carve 764 into your thigh. Carve those letters. I want you to film it. I want the blood, and we’re gonna post it online. Well, I don’t want to do that. Okay. Well, if you don’t do that, these photos that you sent me, I’m gonna send it to your school principal. I’m gonna send it to your parents, to every member of your family. I’m gonna send it out to your entire school.
Mike Papantonio: You’re gonna be humiliated and you’re gonna have to commit suicide. Which is ultimately what they were trying to get her to do.
Farron Cousins: They asked her to do it. Yes.
Mike Papantonio: They asked her to commit suicide. That’s after they asked her to strangle a cat, which she did, to cut off the head of her hamster, which she did. And what they’re doing is filming all this, and they have these little clubs of psychopath killers. That’s what they are. It’s just, they call themselves gamers. Did you see?
Farron Cousins: No.
Mike Papantonio: They like to think of themselves as gamers, because a lot of this goes on the gaming sites, which is ridiculous. I mean, they’re not gamers, they’re psychopaths. And the point is, is it’s this club of people, of kids that are between 15 and say 30 years old, and the idea is to see how bad, what horrendous thing we can make a child do that we can videotape. In a perfect world, they were successful in getting kids to commit suicide. They filmed the suicide and they laughed about it among themselves. What proud parents these people have to have. Right? What proud parents. I mean, how does a parent raise a child to this point? 764 is the name of it. What’s the kid’s name that started this.
Farron Cousins: Cadenhead.
Mike Papantonio: Cadenhead. I want to see a picture of him up on the screen when we show this, but name is Cadenhead. He’s in prison now, what, for 30 years?
Farron Cousins: 80.
Mike Papantonio: 80 years. And they’re fighting desperately to get him out. But he created a whole bunch of followers and they were so proud to be part of this 764. What it is, it’s the zip code, it’s the first or last letters, last numbers in a zip code where he grew up, where his little home was in Texas. It spread California, big spread in California. Big urban areas it spread like crazy. And the point is this, it wasn’t just Discord. Right?
Farron Cousins: Right. Telegram was also involved in it. He was posting on there as well. And these social media sites, they said, oh, well, when we found this out, we would ban his IP address, but then he’d just get another IP address and start again. And we were trying and trying. And we just couldn’t keep up with it. Absolutely.
Mike Papantonio: Okay. There’s something in the law called strict liability. Okay. And here’s what it means. If you have, let’s say you have a nuclear plant, and the nuclear plant is leaking radiation, and it’s killing people around it. Well, inherent in that plant is the fact that you got radiation there. And if you can’t control the radiation, there is no, you have no defense. Okay. It’s that dangerous. It’s become so dangerous that you can’t do anything about it. This is the same thing. Okay. These sites understand they’ll never control these little thuggish psychopath, you know, they’re young murders. That’s all they are. And so they’re, in 20 years, these are the people that you’re gonna see on the cover of the magazine and newspaper that have created mass, you know, engaged in mass shootings. They’re psychopaths. And there’s a lot of ’em. That’s what really scares the hell outta me. There’s a lot of them.
Farron Cousins: It really does. But it also scares me, just the fact that they are able to so quickly gain the trust of these naive young people. It says they go after kids with a history of mental illness or depression, but they can do this to any kid. Because when we look at young kids today, and I know because I’ve got children in this age range, my kids will come to me all time like, hey, I just saw that online, somebody said this. Wow. That’s crazy. I have to say, well, that’s not even close to being true at all. But there’s no more critical thinking. And I try my best, and I know other parents do too, but there is, we are two parents fighting against children that have access to more misinformation than at any other point in human history. So it is so easy to dupe these kids, to gain their trust and, hey, look, I do funny videos. And then, hey, what if we, instead of being funny, what if somebody got hurt? Hey, what if instead of just getting hurt, what if you cut your finger off and you filmed it?
Mike Papantonio: That’s what I’m saying, Farron. There are some things that you create the setting, and you’ve created a setting that’s so dangerous that you can’t control it. Okay. Nuclear waste that’s leaking out of a nuclear plant killing people by the thousands. Okay. We know that that nuclear plant is in and of itself a dangerous facility. There’s all kinds of analysis that you can go through where it comes to analyzing strict liability. There’s some things that you do, you choose to do, and you know that it’s gonna result in this kind of thing. So here we got Telegram, Discord, Roblox, that also came up in the Washington Post story.
Farron Cousins: Yeah, and that is very popular among the young people.
Mike Papantonio: Talk about it a little bit.
Farron Cousins: It’s a lot like Minecraft, but it’s this online world that you create and you can interact with other users. And most of it seems fun, innocuous, harmless. But if you get somebody on there with malicious intent, it is very easy for them to meet up with a kid that’s seven years old. Because there are a lot of, I mean, obviously they’re not toddlers, but they were just recently toddlers on Roblox. It is exceptionally popular with elementary school children. And it is so easy to manipulate these people. The way I explained it with Cadenhead here, hey, let’s be friends. Hey, I kind of think of you as my girlfriend. Send me pictures. Now I got you. You’re trapped.
Mike Papantonio: So their goal is to have as many videos of corpses as they can send around. As many videos of child pornography where children are being abused and tortured. That’s a real home run for ’em. This girl, they had, as you pointed out, they had her carve 764 into her thigh. They had her drinking from a toilet bowl. And they said, if you don’t do these things, we’re gonna make your life hard. We’re gonna kill your brother, is what they told her at one point. The pet hamster, we want you to cut his head off. We want you to strangle cats. These are kids sitting around on a computer saying, wow, we’re really having fun now. Right? What the hell? I mean, how is it that we give them any source of information? Now, I will tell you this, the thing I love about this is if the FBI would do their job, which they haven’t done, you know, matter of fact, they wouldn’t even talk to the mother of this 14-year-old about how bad the situation, wouldn’t even talk to her. And so what what ended up happening is we don’t, if you think about it, we could trace who they are. There’s ways to do that.
Farron Cousins: Oh, yeah.
Mike Papantonio: We could have a list of names that we could put up on this screen and say, this has been, these psychopaths have been identified. Here’s what, is there eight groups of ’em? Eight or nine groups of ’em?
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: Here’s the psychopaths in the US. Here’s the psychopaths in Germany. Here they are in Belgium, wherever. They’re all over the world. But this movement was started by this psychopath kid.
Farron Cousins: 16-year-old kid from his mother’s basement. Literally, that’s what the report says. And it’s these people who hate their lives. They’re unhappy with themselves, and they try to bring everybody down to their level. And unfortunately, they have been insanely successful with it. And it’s terrifying for these kids. It’s terrifying for parents. And this report from the Washington Post, I will give them full credit, this used to be what newspapers were about.
Mike Papantonio: I know. This, let me tell you, I’m not a big fan of the Washington Post because I think, but you know, when they do, when Washington Post does a real investigative story like this, this is good stuff. You can tell they worked very, very hard to put all this together. And I think it’s just the beginning of it, I think Discord and these other sites there shouldn’t, look, we’re trying to get rid of TikTok. Okay. This isn’t taking place on TikTok. This is taking place on these other sites. And we’re saying, oh, yeah. We’re not talking about about making them go away. We’re not talking about banning them. But we’re talking about not banning these psychopaths.
Farron Cousins: Well, and this report right here, this should be mandatory reading for every elementary, middle and high school child in this country.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. What’s the title on it? What is the title on it? It’s in the Washington Post and like I say, again, we have to give credit where credit’s due.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. On popular online platforms, predatory groups coerce children into self-harm.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. You almost, it’s hard to even finish the article, isn’t it?
Farron Cousins: Yeah, it really was.
Mike Papantonio: I found it hard to even finish the article.
Farron Cousins: It’s something that I’m not gonna forget for a long time.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. It’s almost like I was reading incarnate evil. I mean, really, absolutely incarnate evil.
The federal government is trying to escape liability for contaminating entire neighborhoods with dangerous chemicals for decades. You know, as I’ve said this, again, I tried the first cases in America on PFAS. I tried ’em up in Ohio, and that was what, 5, 6 years ago. And out of there came, okay, after we got the results, we shamed the EPA, we embarrassed the hell out of the EPA in that federal court up in Ohio. And we sent that, I say we, I was the trial lawyer on that case, one of the trial lawyers.
RUFFALO: Rob Bilott was the guy that put this case together. They made a great movie, as a matter of fact, in next month, well, next month I’m interviewing Mark Ruffalo, who played the lead in the movie Dark Waters. There was also a movie made, The Devil We Know, tells you how evil these bastards are.
Mike Papantonio: But the point is this, the government is saying, we want total immunity. We have destroyed entire aquifers. You can’t even use the water anymore. And now we’re having to pay to have the water, you can’t clean it up. It’s there for a million years. All you can do is hopefully you can process it to the point to where it’s a little cleaner, but it’s never 100%. But the EPA, this is another situation where the EPA absolutely dropped the ball. They were owned and operated by DuPont and 3M. 3M and DuPont captured the EPA. That’s what happened here.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. And with these PFAS chemicals, they’re using ’em in the firefighting foam on military bases where they go through these training exercises where they just dump gallons and gallons of this at a time, throughout all of these training exercises. And as soon as it hits that soil, it’s going down and it’s gonna reach that aquifer. And we are seeing in these towns and communities where these military bases are located. I mean, we’re surrounded by three of them where we are now. Uh-oh. That’s weird. Everybody on this street has testicular cancer. Everybody over here is having coronary issues. They’ve got kidney cancer. They’ve got liver problems. Uh-oh. And it’s a ring around the military base that you can see for the contamination.
Mike Papantonio: Just so you know, there’s never been a chemical in American history that has had as much attention from an epidemiological study that went on for almost more than a decade. Epidemiology and all the scientists looked at it. They said, okay, we’ve looked at everything. Here’s what we know. We don’t have any doubts about this. Testicular cancer, kidney cancer, gastrointestinal problems, whole host of issues that they said, yeah, this is what’s causing it. The real problem, Farron, that I see with this is the government just said, ah, we didn’t do anything wrong. We were just using it to practice. And what they would do, they’d practice situations where there’d be a fire on a runway or on a ship. They didn’t need to use this stuff. They could have practiced with anything else, you understand. 3M and DuPont convinced them, oh no, you have to practice with this, or it won’t be accurate. It was nonsense. Total nonsense. They could have practiced with any other thing that would not have been toxic.
Farron Cousins: Right. And right now, the government, as you mentioned, they’re telling the courts, hey, we shouldn’t be a part of these lawsuits. We’re your government. We’re trying to clean it up right now. You can’t hold us responsible when we’re doing the right thing. That is one of the things they’re trying to argue is, hey, we’re trying to make it right by cleaning it. We’re real sorry that you’re gonna die from cancer next year. That’s a bummer for you. But hey, we’re over here digging up the soil and bringing in new dirt. So you should be fine.
Mike Papantonio: $400 billion worth of damage. That’s what took place just on these sites. $400 billion worth of damage. And we’re gonna look the other way. I don’t know how it’s gonna come out. But the point is this, it’s something that you have to understand. You know, if you, today, if you line up 10 people and ask ’em, are you still using your Teflon pan? Oh yeah. What’s the problem? They don’t know anything. They have no idea what PFAS even is. They have no idea what the relationship is between Teflon and PFAS. And so I don’t know. I guess it takes a while. It was kinda like asbestos. It took a while for the American public to understand just how serious it was.
Farron Cousins: Which, the EPA only just came out in the last week or so, banning asbestos finally.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah, I know. I know. And they haven’t even called this a hazardous chemical. Can you imagine? EPA is owned and operated, if you think the EPA or the FDA is on your side, you are absolutely out in the stratosphere. No way. They’re not on your side. They work for corporate America.
There’s a very good reason why legislators don’t actually do anything to benefit average Americans and it’s because legislators aren’t average Americans at all. A new study has found that only a handful of legislators in all 50 states actually come from working class families. You found this story. I was captivated by this. I had no idea it was this bad. But to sum it up, out of 7,400 state legislators, 116 can be described as people who come from a working background, a working class background.
Farron Cousins: Right. And those are people, they describe working class as you were in a factory or you were in manual labor of some kind. Basically your average blue collar American. And what’s funny is that I actually came across this story a day after I had mentioned, you and I had been filming this show. I said, hey, the problem with legislatures is that you don’t have working class people there. And then the very next day I saw this story, I was like, oh my God, that’s, we gotta talk about this because it lays out the numbers beautifully. 1.6% of.
Mike Papantonio: Where did you find? You found this story from a site called News From The States.
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: How did you find, I mean, this is incredible. I would’ve never found this story. I never would’ve known that 116 out of 7,400 legislators.
Farron Cousins: Well, I actually get most of my news, I go to Reddit politics. It just aggregates what users find to be important news.
Mike Papantonio: Okay.
Farron Cousins: And it’s a great resource. It’s nonpartisan. It’s whatever the people want to talk about, they talk about. But this one got me because out of all 50 states, 1.6% of these lawmakers are actually from blue collar backgrounds. And, what that does is it limits the number of people that are in these state houses making decisions about your life who have shared life experience. So if you have somebody that’s sitting in the capital of your state, or even the capital in Congress that was born with a silver spoon in their mouth, you know, I’m a politician because my daddy was a politician and his daddy’s daddy was a politician, but his daddy’s daddy was an oil baron. And that’s what it is. And so those people do not know what it’s like to go to the grocery store and have your debit card be declined. They don’t know what it’s like to not drive for a couple days because you can’t afford the gas.
Mike Papantonio: Or you can’t pay for medicine.
Farron Cousins: Exactly. And when you have people with the shared life experience, they take those issues seriously. And this report even confirmed that.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. It didn’t just say it, there was a good confirmation. What I thought was interesting is most of the time they can’t afford to even run. Okay. They can’t take four months outta their lives and go run. These, you know, that class of folks that have never lived a life of really working, they can, they come from a different background. They can’t raise money like those other folks can. The working class can’t go out and talk to a corporation, hey, give me money for my campaign. They know the other guy can, because the other guy works for the corporation in some capacity. He delivers for the corporation. There are these natural obstacles. And the other part is some states where you have, where they pay legislators, they only pay 18, $19,000 and somebody may be working in a shop where they’re making 50, $60,000, it’s hard for ’em to say, okay, I’m gonna go run for office right now. There’s a lot of inset obstacles aren’t there?
Farron Cousins:: Oh, absolutely. And one of the reasons I think that you and I have been so effective at what we do, especially talking about these consumer issues, talking about these economic issues, neither you nor I were born into a life of privilege by any stretch of the imagination.
Mike Papantonio: That’s the understatement. I was raised by eight different families growing up, and there was a reason for it.
Farron Cousins: Exactly.
Mike Papantonio: And I know you didn’t at all.
Farron Cousins: Right. And so we know what it’s like and those are values that we have carried with us throughout our lives. Yeah. And I think we’re both very comfortable at this point. But we still can talk about these things with passion, because it may have been five years ago, it may have been 40 years ago that we went through these, but those memories are still just as fresh. And so we understand what it’s like for these people and that makes us effective because we care, because we’ve been there. And if you don’t have that, Ed Schultz was another perfect example of that.
Mike Papantonio: Oh, I loved, I used to do a show with Ed and we had so much in common because that’s where he came from.
Farron Cousins: Exactly.
Mike Papantonio: A working class.
Farron Cousins: And nobody else had his passion.
Mike Papantonio: No. Oh, good God. I mean, the show ponies they have up there have no, they don’t have anything in common with working class. They’re almost in an elitist bubble. The same way that some of these politicians are in an elitist bubble.
Farron Cousins: They all are.
Mike Papantonio: And so 1.6% that is a staggering number, Farron. This is a good find. I want to explore this a little bit more because I think it’s essentially part of the big political process that we’re having to suffer through right now. You don’t think these, most, these people go to go to bat for things like school lunches. We need to pay for school lunches. They go to bat for equal wage, for better wages. They go to bat on things like safe work environments because they come from that. They’ve seen it. They’ve been around a dinner table where this stuff’s being talked about. These other folks, this elitist bubble that so often becomes the leaders in our political process, they have nothing in common with that, do they?
Farron Cousins: Nope.
Mike Papantonio: Thanks 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. Make sure you subscribe. I’m Mike Papantonio, and this has been America’s Lawyer, where every week we tell you stories that corporate media simply won’t tell you because their advertisers order ’em not to tell you. And they’re gonna lose advertising dollars if they say something the advertiser doesn’t want. Or their political connections just require that they can’t color outside the lines. They have to color, if you’re Republican, you gotta color within these lines. If you’re Democrat, you gotta color within these lines, and they can’t do anything but that. But as you can tell, we don’t have that problem around here. We’re gonna call balls and strikes whichever side you come from. See you next time.
Suspicious Activity: That it had helped dirty money flow through its branches around the world, including at least 800. Plaintiffs allege that the defendants provided money and medical goods to terrorist groups, Hezbollah and Jaysh al-Adl. This is a well organized business for these individuals that carry out these attacks. Terrorism is a business and they run it like a business. They knew about what was going on for a decade. They absolutely, absolutely no question about it knew that HSBC was washing money. They had every reason to understand it was for terrorism and it was for drug cartels. Took no action whatsoever.
These banks are involved, their accounts are connected, and they’re using them to mask the transactions. The more complicated they can make the transactions, the more distance they could put between the bad guys and a seemingly legitimate purpose of these funds. 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 know it’s 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. The die cast, the people that are responsible for it, are on Wall Street. And they don’t look like criminals. It’s almost a suspension of disbelief. Sometimes I’ll have people call me and say, is this, is this real? Do they really get away with this? Yeah, they do.
