The Department of Justice says that Boeing has violated a non-prosecution deal that they gave them years ago because the company has refused to make changes to help save lives. Plus, a new study has found that micro plastics are so prevalent in the body that 100% of the men who were tested had the cancer-causing plastics present in their reproductive organs. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.
Transcript:
*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
Mike Papantonio: 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.
Mike Papantonio: 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.
