America’s Lawyer E99: Boeing is in even more trouble after the DOJ said that the company violated a settlement agreement to avoid criminal charges. Cancer-causing micro plastics have now been found in 100% of the reproductive organs of men who were part of a recent study. And Democrats are making the same mistakes they made in the 2016 election by ignoring the economic concerns of Americans. 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. Boeing is in even more trouble after the DOJ said that the company violated a settlement agreement to avoid criminal charges. Also, cancer causing microplastics have now been found in a hundred percent of the reproductive organs of men who were part of a recent study. And Democrats, well, they’re making the same mistakes that they made in 2016 by ignoring the economic concerns of Americans. All that and more, it’s coming up, don’t go anywhere. America’s Lawyer starts right now.
The Department of Justice says that Boeing has violated a non-prosecution deal that they gave them years ago because the company had refused to make any changes to help save lives. I’ve got Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins with me now to talk about this. And honestly, I say this all the time, you are without a doubt, one of the best progressive commentators in this business. I watch your stuff all the time. It’s just, you nail it. And what’s interesting to me is you nailed this story before it ever developed. Tell, let’s talk about his story.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. So about five years ago is when Boeing started to see all of these problems with the 737 max. You had two massive disasters that led to more than almost 400 people dying and it’s because Boeing had changed out a small part in the plane in the operating system. But they didn’t tell anybody. They didn’t tell the regulators like they’re supposed to. They didn’t even tell the pilots of the planes that, hey, we’ve kind of changed the electronics inside. Best of luck. So the planes crash. The DOJ looks into it and they say, well, we don’t want to prosecute you. Give us two and a half billion dollars. We won’t prosecute you, but you gotta change things. And Boeing said, oh, of course we’re gonna change things. And then here, five years later, they didn’t do anything.
Mike Papantonio: They never do. I can’t tell you the number of times with pharmaceutical companies, with Wall Street, with polluters that I have seen the same thing play itself out. We’re not going to really throw anybody in jail. We’re just gonna fine you now. Best example is the washing money for terrorists, HSBC washed a hundred billion dollars worth of money. They got fined $1.6 billion, and then they got one of these non-prosecution agreements. They’re meaningless. All it is, is the government trying to protect themselves. In this situation, I promise you, you had doors flying off, entire door segments flying off. You had wheels flying off. You had, they couldn’t even figure out why there were engine fires. You had the door plug where somebody is sitting completely coming off the airplane. And everybody looks at it and says, well, gee, maybe this is just a bad run of luck. No, it’s not. Its Boeing trying to save money by having their subcontractors cut prices, cut costs, that type of thing. And they were under this agreement with the government, don’t do that anymore. We won’t throw anybody in jail. We won’t prosecute you criminally. It doesn’t mean anything when it comes from the Department of Justice.
Farron Cousins: Right.
Mike Papantonio: They’re not gonna do anything to this company. I promise you they’re not. This is a company that makes missiles. You know, they’re in the war business. So they’re just gonna walk away from this and say, yeah, everything’s fine, right?
Farron Cousins: Yeah. The DOJ says, well, we’re gonna have a meeting the last day of May, and we’re gonna sit and talk about this and figure out what best to do now. The thing they’re gonna decide, like they always do, like they did originally is, we’ll fine ’em more money because we don’t want to go through the process of prosecuting them and years and years of this. Because if we lose, then we look bad. Oh, that could hurt my career when I leave the DOJ. I don’t want to prosecute a company I may have to represent in court five years from now. So we’ll fine you. We’re just gonna pretend none of this happened.
Mike Papantonio: But okay. You hit on something real important there. You hit on the fact that we have to look at who the lawyers are who make these decisions. Right? There are lawyers that are career lawyers, for one, they’re with the DOJ forever. They’re never gonna lose their job. So they don’t have to work. They don’t really have to reach out and work all that hard. And then you have the lawyers who are looking for the jobs when they get finished with the DOJ. So they’d like to be able to say, you know, we gave you a pass. Remember the pass we gave you three years ago? Don’t you need another lawyer? So this is disgusting to me.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. These lawyers will say, look, I don’t want to work for my hundred thousand dollar a year salary at the DOJ. Y’all are paying 10 times that for your lawyers. I’d love to be on that team. You know I’ve helped you out. You know what a good lawyer I can be. And that’s what happened. Whether it’s Boeing or pharmaceutical or a polluter, that’s what these guys are looking for, is the bigger payday.
Mike Papantonio: Farron Cousin’s prediction. What’s it gonna be? Are they gonna prosecute ’em?
Farron Cousins: Oh, hell no.
Mike Papantonio: No. I agree.
Johnson and Johnson’s been hit with a new lawsuit accusing ’em of fraudulently using bankruptcy to avoid paying the victims who got cancer, clearly got cancer, from their deadly product that they’ve known about for 50, 60 years. They’ve understood that what they were making would cause cancer in women. So, let’s talk about this lawsuit.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. This, to me, it’s absolutely a huge lawsuit because Johnson and Johnson, for many years now, after a stunning amount of courtroom humiliations with these talcum lawsuits, they go and they do what’s called the Texas Two Step. And that is you create a shell company that previously did not exist, and you spin off, you give the shell company all your liability saying, okay, we, the big Johnson and Johnson, we keep our billions of dollars, but this company now owns all the talcum litigation. And then that company that existed up, didn’t exist up until a day ago, they go to court, usually in Texas, very corporate friendly there and they go in front of the judge and they say, judge, uh, look, I’m poor little company here. I just started and now I’m facing tens of billions in lawsuits. I’m bankrupt. And those Texas judges will say, well, by golly, you are, you don’t have to do this. I’m so sorry for you, little company.
Mike Papantonio: Farron, it’s the equivalent of you being worth 400, you Farron Cousins, you are worth $450 billion, but you don’t want to pay $2 billion for something that you’ve, a horrendous issue that you’ve caused. So you don’t want to spend the 2, 3, 4, 5, $6 billion. You’re worth $450 billion. You know that you’ve killed people. You know that people are dying an awful death from cancer. And if you’ve ever done any research of what these women go through as they’re suffering for this cancer, I mean, the medical costs alone are in the millions every year. And the attentive care is, it just, but the problem is this is a company, and I think this lawsuit is gonna show this history, long history of fraud, all the way back to the time that they knew this was a problem. And so the fraud, virtually everything this company’s done becomes part of that fraud. You know, every element says, well, this you’re covering up and this you’re not completely telling the truth about to the American public. You’re not telling the truth to the courts. They’ve hustled the courts. There have been judges that, already a bankruptcy judge that was just attacked by the third circuit by saying, what in the hell are you thinking letting these corporate types get away with killing all these people? And just saying, well, we just can’t afford it anymore because we’ve moved all of our money, judge, we moved it into these fraudulent little holding companies. So we asked, and those fraudulent holding companies, when we moved it, we said, okay, little fraudulent company, you take responsibility for all of the future. And there’s not enough money to do it, you know?
Farron Cousins: Right.
Mike Papantonio: So this is important. The fellow that’s handling this, Andy Birchfield, has just been a warrior. They’ve done everything they can to get him kicked out of the case. I mean, you name it. They’ve done everything they can to make it difficult for this guy that’s been doing this now for 11 years.
Farron Cousins: Wow.
Mike Papantonio: He’s been fighting this war with Johnson and Johnson. This is after they were hit for $4.6 billion in a trial down in, just several years ago. So they’ve been hit time and now they’ve won a few. But after you’re hit for $4.6 billion, don’t you say, we must have done something wrong?
Farron Cousins: Right. And so the women that are involved in this lawsuit, obviously, because this is a class action, they’ve been victimized twice, right?
Mike Papantonio: Correct.
Farron Cousins: Because they got victimized with the product and then they got victimized again once this whole bankruptcy shenanigans took place. Is that what’s?
Mike Papantonio: That’s exactly it. Farron, you ought to be there talking to family members that have watched their mother or the sister die this horrendous death from the cancer. It’s, if it doesn’t bring tears to your eyes, there’s something inhuman about you. Well, this company, they’ve heard all those stories. But nevertheless, they’re doing everything they can to avoid just ponying up and paying what they should. They’ve offered money, but it’s not even close. The money they’ve offered is not even close to being able to pay for the damage they’ve done across this nation. And they have the ability to do it, but they just want to, let’s go to bankruptcy court. Let’s hide our money with these little fraudulent companies. This lawsuit is going to tell a big story. I promise you.
Farron Cousins: Well, best of luck with it. I really hope that this changes the way this works here.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
A new study has found that microplastics are so prevalent in the body that 100% of the men who were tested had the cancer causing plastics present in their reproductive organs. Wow. We’ve done this story a couple times, but this new study, it’s terrifying.
Farron Cousins: It really is. We’re looking at this study out of the University of New Mexico, and they said, okay, we’re gonna examine dozens of men who had passed away. So these were cadavers that they used from the morgues office. And they said, well, let’s check for microplastics. In every single one, not 99%, not 90%, 100% of these men, they found dangerous concentrations of microplastics in the testicles of these men. Absolutely just wreaking havoc on reproductive systems. And again, these were men that had already passed away, but the researchers say, this is kind of representative of what we’re dealing with in the general population.
Mike Papantonio: Well, they’re finding PVC plastics in the testicles of men. I mean, that’s unprecedented. You can go back just, you go back even 50 years, you’re not gonna find this. But there’s so much of it that, here’s the number, 329 micrograms per gram of tissue. Now understand, this is a plastic, the human body is taking on 329 micrograms in every gram of tissue in the human body. And right now, we don’t even know what the diseases are gonna be. You know, this Dr. Yu who did this study, to his credit, he said, look, I wasn’t even looking at this for the same reason that you might think. I was looking at it, because reproductive numbers have been decreasing more and more. And he said, I wanna go find out what is. Well, this is what they’re finding in mens, in human testicles. And they haven’t even really taken a look at what the effect is on female yet.
Farron Cousins: Right.
Mike Papantonio: They’re assuming there’s a parallel to it. But I guess the only way you can get around it is you’ve gotta change your lifestyle. You don’t have to drink out of plastic bottles. There’s all kinds of alternatives. But in a plastic, you did a story on just the plastic bottles. Remember the drinking bottles that we were talking about?
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: And the numbers were staggering of the amount of plastic, microplastic that would move through the body and now we know where it sits. It sits in the reproductive organs of males we know. And they’re now looking at how does it affect females.
Farron Cousins: Right. And they’re basically looking at this to go ahead, because this is kind of step one of what Dr. Yu was trying to find out because he’s looking across the world and we’re seeing decreasing sperm rates in men all over the planet. So he wants to find out why. So now finding this, it kind of opens another door for them to launch more research, saying, okay, well, is there cause and effect here? You know, is there this correlation? Do we have causation or is this just a weird coincidence that is unpleasant and could cause cancer? We don’t know yet, but we could be looking at massive spikes in cancers in the coming years from this. Definitely reproductive issues, failure to be able to conceive, anything like that is on the table right now, because we’re only scratching the surface on what these microplastics are doing.
Mike Papantonio: Stop drinking, at least do one thing, stop drinking out of plastic bottles. At least begin there. I don’t know what to tell you beyond that, because this is just now developing. We’re finding the sources that are being found in male testicles, and it’s gonna be found in women’s reproductive systems too. I’m convinced of that. But it’s hard to even advise, what do you do? It’s just so ubiquitous right now.
A new report’s found that CEO pay is once again skyrocketing while companies are slashing the median pay for the people who are getting the job done. The workers. I love this fact that Bernie Sanders seemed to be the only person that had enough sense to say, wait a second. There needs to be some cost for a CEO getting five or 600 times the amount of money that the worker’s getting. The worker is the person that’s making the CEO look good. The worker is delivering and the CEO is getting paid 500 times what the worker’s being paid. Pick it up.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. This new study found that over the last year, just the last year, CEO pay has gone up 11%, worker pay has declined by 9%. So there is now an even, a 20 point larger gap than there was before. So CEOs, not only are the companies making more money than ever, they have fully recovered from the pandemic numbers, but workers are making less on average,
Mike Papantonio: This number says 251 times, 250, now this is the median number.
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: Understand that’s the median number. That’s not with the typical CEO getting paid 500 times, but the median number, just the median number alone is 250 times. And so how do you solve it? What’s the solution there? And the solution is to say, okay, if we’ve got a company, and this is Bernie’s solution, it’s at least the beginning, if a CEO is making 50 times what a worker is making, there’s gotta be some tax. Now, the problem I have with that is that doesn’t really help the worker. You follow me. The tax, that’s where this all goes astray. The government collecting tax money still doesn’t help that worker. There’s got to be something more direct where the government’s not making that money, but the worker is benefiting. And to say, well, we know this, some people have already tried it. You’ve got places where they’ve already tried this. It doesn’t do anything for the worker. All it does is makes more tax money for that entity. Right?
Farron Cousins: Right. The cities that have done this, or the states that have done this, say, hey, well look, we are bringing in more revenue. And the workers at these companies say, well, okay, wonderful for you. What about me? Like, you said you were gonna help me and I have nothing. My life has not changed. And a lot of times also, these corporations, if they do get hit with a tax like this.
Mike Papantonio: They pass it on.
Farron Cousins: Right. They’ll look for loopholes too. And they’ll say, okay, well you’re talking about salary. So your base salary is gonna be a million dollars. Your bonus at the end of the year is gonna be 50 million and you can’t touch that because that’s not part of your regular pay. So they will find a way around it if that happens. But what has to happen here is that we have to get price gouging under control to help the consumers and we have to put some kind of protection in place for these workers to make sure that when the company does better, they’re doing better as well.
Mike Papantonio: I thought this was so San Francisco. San Francisco, they tried doing some variation of this. Well, San Francisco made $137 million in tax money for the city, but the workers didn’t benefit one dime. So as we look at this, you gotta say, okay, well what is really gonna protect the workers? What kind of mandate are we gonna give the CEO to say, look, no, 500 times what the worker’s making doesn’t make any sense? And it’s gotta be something besides a tax. Bernie at least is onto something here. It’s let’s do something. But it’s gotta be something not that the government makes money, but the worker actually benefits.
Democrats are making the same devastating mistakes that they made in the 2016 election by writing off large portions of the country as racists, as homophobes, instead of trying to understand the economic concerns that these voters have. You and I did a story on that buffoon who wrote a book, it was Tom Schaller, now Paul Waldman, Schaller and Waldman came out with this book, and it was just talking about how the rural south is just upside down. They’re racist, they’re homophobes, they hate everybody, they just love their guns and hate everybody else. Well, since then, some writers have come in, Les Leopold, who we’ve interviewed Les Leopold. A brilliant thinker. Said, you guys are absolute morons. Basically, that’s what he says. He says, Tom Schaller, you are a moron. Paul Waldman, you’re way off base. Pick it up from there.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. Les Leopold, who’s by the way, one of the best people on labor issues, working class issues, he is phenomenal. But he kind of almost reluctantly writes this big article because he has been doing research for one of his books because he researches things very thoroughly and he says, listen, I can basically pick apart every single argument you guys have made. You are not using actual empirical data. In fact, your points in this book go against the empirical data. Because what the data shows us, and Leopold lays this out beautifully, is that the South, the area this white rural rage is directed at, is actually becoming less racist, less homophobic.
Mike Papantonio: Xenophobe
Farron Cousins: Less right wing Christian zealot, all that. It’s actually going down. They’re becoming more accepting. They’re not the people you say they are. What the difference is, however, is that these people are absolutely getting crushed economically.
Mike Papantonio:Right.
Farron Cousins: And it does remind me so much of 2016 when Trump won that election. What did we hear? Oh, well, all these people are racist. And you had some people
Mike Papantonio: They’re deplorables. They’re Deplorables, which Hillary created, they’re all deplorable. They’re idiots. They don’t have enough sense of protect themselves.
Farron Cousins: Right. They’re all racist, they’re all xenophobic. But then you had some people say, well, hold up. Whoa, whoa, whoa. There’s this economic anxiety and what happened was that those people who talked about the economic anxiety, and that is the exact phrase they used, they got trashed by those of us on the left. Well, I don’t say us on the left. I didn’t do that.
Mike Papantonio:You did not. And to your credit, you did not.
Farron Cousins: But what they did was they wrote off an entire millions of people because they didn’t want to look beyond the surface. Because yeah, Donald Trump came out and he said, listen, you’ve got immigrants coming in and they’re taking your jobs and that’s why your economic situation is bad. But at least he was talking about their economic situation. He knew to tap into that.
Mike Papantonio: It was all about economics.
Farron Cousins: And give them someone to blame.
Mike Papantonio: It was all about economics. Look, they were living paycheck to paycheck. They had no way to control the economics of their life. Every day they turn on the TV, it was worse for them. And then you had the Democrats calling ’em deplorables rather than saying, no. Okay, what’s wrong here? It’s an economic issue. And you had every buffoon out there trying to say, let’s deal with this with one big brush. And you couldn’t do it. As a matter of fact, Leopold did exactly what he should have done. He said, let me look at the real statistics. Well, you’re gonna be surprised. White working classes, they favor on the issue of anti-gay. Okay. Oh, everybody in the rural South is anti-gay. No, 2020, the number was there for these idiots who wrote this book. All they had to do is look. It was 76.7, said, no, gays have a right, lesbians have a right to adopt children. They can do that. On the issue of immigration, these idiots that wrote this book, these documents, these numbers were clearly there and they’re reputable numbers. It said, on the issue of the legal status for immigrants, should illegal immigrants have the right to have a job if they pay taxes and they haven’t been convicted of a felony? You know what the number was of acceptance in the rural South that these people were going after? 61.8% said yes. Racist, I mean, you could go all day long. They didn’t do their job. And then you had this chatter monkey, this buffoon, Tom Schaller, showing up on MSNBC and CNN. He was like the chatter monkey of the day, just spewing all of this hate about the white rural South without ever addressing the real seams here, which is the numbers.
Farron Cousins: Because it’s easier to do that. If you can write off all of these people and say, listen, they suck. Which is basically what they’re saying. Like, eh, screw these guys. Then you don’t have to worry about the economic issues that they face. You don’t have to worry that the state of Alabama has a poverty level that the United Nations says is worse than most third world countries. You don’t have to deal with that Democrats, because there’s a lot of racists in Alabama. And sure, you know what, there are racists. I’m not saying they don’t exist. I’m not saying that hateful people don’t exist.
Mike Papantonio: Of course they do.
Farron Cousins: They exist all over the country. But you cannot lump every single person that doesn’t vote for your candidate into that box just to act like you don’t have to deal with them.
Mike Papantonio: You know what it reminds me of? When a book came out about the dysfunctional mind of the liberal. Do you remember? I don’t know if that’s the exact title, but it was years ago, they came out and they said that liberals are mentally unstable. And they gave all the reasons that liberals were mentally unstable. It was years ago. I think we might of all the way back to our early days doing the Ed Schultz show. But the argument was that they’re not clear thinkers, that they’re hysterical, that they are not constructive thinkers, and that they’re easily made fearful and the whole list was ridiculous. And they said, this is the mind of anybody who calls himself a progressive. Well, it was garbage. It was total utter garbage. And at least I remember us doing the show where we said, what a ridiculous take.
Farron Cousins: Savage. That’s the, Michael Savage.
Mike Papantonio: Michael Savage. Okay. You’re right. It was Michael Savage?
Farron Cousins: It took me a minute for it to click.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah, but you remember the story though, right?
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: And this thing was selling like crazy. And it was just like this list of things of how crazy progressive liberals were. And he said, I talked to these scientists, I talked to these psychiatrists, if you read it, it was a pretty compelling read. But then when you drill down to it, just like we were doing right here, it was nonsense. Absolute nonsense.
The American public is hugely divided on every issue according to the media. But the truth is that the public actually agrees on most issues. The media sells division to this country. They do it to juice their ratings. They do it to make more money. This is all about money. Let’s divide the country and we’re gonna make more money doing it. I’ll tell you what, this was handled by, I think one of the most, by a formidable progressive, wrote for Axios.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. And what’s interesting about this is obviously they did what Les Leopold had also done, they’re looking at the numbers. They’re stripping politics away from it because yeah, politics is divisive. But when you look at what people actually think, what they want and what they believe, pretty much everybody agrees on almost everything. Huge majorities left, right, and center agree that, hey, it’s okay to let immigrants come into this country. Hey, it’s okay for people to own guns. Hey, it’s okay for you to have your own religion, whatever.
Mike Papantonio: Or to be gay. Yeah, that’s what most people believe. But the media takes these talking points, and this is a media creation. They take these talking points from these fuzzy thinking hysterical fringe types. Well, on the left, it’s the snowflake fringe. Everything they read on a headline, they’re gonna accept. On the right is the snowflake fringe that buys into everything. And here’s what we miss. These are people that watch either Fox or they watch MSNBC and CNN. That is all they live by baby. That’s all they understand. Fortunately, it’s less than 2% of the population in America, less than 2% of these snowflakes are out there watching MSNBC saying, oh my God, this is the new talking point. And it just perpetuates itself. Right?
Farron Cousins: And look, the problem is with these networks that, again, only 2% of the country between the two of them actually watch.
Mike Papantonio: By the way, between the two. That’s right.
Farron Cousins: But the problem is the people who make the decisions about our daily lives, those folks in Washington, DC, they watch these.
Mike Papantonio: Yes.
Farron Cousins: And they get fed the division, and they help spread the division. Right? Your Republicans are going on Fox, your liberals are going on MSNBC, and each side is saying, these people are evil over here. No, you’re evil over here. And then when these networks push their agenda, whether it’s to help their advertisers get another war contract or help big pharma kill legislation, those lawmakers who only tune into those programs, they buy into it. So it is a small portion that watches this, unfortunately, it’s the powerful people.
Mike Papantonio: But they’re the loudest. If we do a show, the big mouths, the real snowflake big mouths will show up in the comments. If you look at the comments compared to the likes, the likes are huge. But the comments, you may have a hundred people who are just rabid. They can’t control themselves. They gotta, I’ve gotta respond to this. And the response generally is being driven by what they’ve seen on either Fox for when you do a show or when I do a show, it’s what they watch on the MSNBC and CNN. You know, Papantonio’s a Trump guy. Farron is a crazy communist because this is what the media tells them to say. The only good news, the only good news is it’s less than 2% of the population that fall into that, what I call real, real snowflake class. I mean, when we get the reports from our folks that follow this, yeah, you don’t even have to read the comment. The first two lines you understand, oh, yeah. All right. Yeah, they’re watching MSNBC, CNN, that’s all they’re watching or with you, they’re watching Fox. That’s all they’re hearing. And so we just have to rise above it, don’t we? We have to. We can do better than that. People believe we have a right to vote. They believe in equal protection of the law. They believe that there’s a right to freedom of religion. That there’s a right to freedom of speech. That there’s a right to privacy. That’s what most Americans, those types of things, what most Americans believe. But you have the crazy fringe that feed on all of this. I don’t know. Get a job. What do you wanna say? Go get a job. Do something besides sit in front of the computer.
Farron Cousins: Well, the media wants us to be divided between you and your neighbor. Because if you’re not, if you realize how much you have in common with that person next door to you that is a different political affiliation, realize how much you have in common, then you’ll realize, well, wait a minute, then who should we be mad at? You should be mad at those corporations. You should be mad at those politicians that are basically keeping these networks alive That’s why they sell you division. Go hate this person so that you don’t hate the person funding my campaign or my network.
Mike Papantonio: I call ’em chatter monkeys. It’s like James Carville, the chatter monkey of all chatter, coming on the air and telling young people that they’re stupid, that they’re lazy, that they’ve lost touch with reality, because they won’t vote for Biden. Like that’s gonna really help them turn out. But it’s this chatter monkey mentality, man, it’s just getting worse. It’s just getting worse.
Farron Cousins: It really is.
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 we tell you stories every week that corporate media just can’t tell you because their advertisers don’t allow ’em to tell you or their political connections, they don’t allow it, because if you’re too Republican, you gotta color inside the Republican lines. If you’re too Democrat, God knows you better not color outside the Democrat line. But we don’t worry about coloring outside the lines. Hopefully we’ll see you next week.
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.
