The Department of Labor and OSHA are conducting an investigation into the death of a 16-year old at a poultry processing plant. Also, as lawmakers in Washington ban TikTok in the United States, angry constituents are lobbing death threats at them. 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 Labor and OSHA are conducting an investigation into the death of a 16-year-old at a poultry processing plant. The company has been cited countless times for the damnedest things where they’re just ignoring safety of these kids. First of all, how many times have you and I done this story?
Farron Cousins: Oh my God, at this point, we’re talking about dozens of times in the last year.
Mike Papantonio: How many times have you seen it on corporate networks?
Farron Cousins: No, you don’t ever hear these.
Mike Papantonio: Why? Tyson is a big advertiser. These poultry folks are big advertisers. They sell all the chicken in the country. They sell all the beef in the country. And so what happens is, you’re not gonna hear it from corporate media, but we did this story because we were talking about, I remember Tyson. You remember the Tyson story we did a few weeks ago? Tyson’s closing down plants all over the country because it was discovered that they were getting ready to hire 40,000 immigrants to step into those shoes, right? Talk about it.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. And so now we’ve got this MarJac poultry processing plant, and they have multiple plants across the country.
Mike Papantonio: Oh, all over the place.
Farron Cousins: But the issue with them is they did the same thing, said, okay, let’s bring in the migrants. But they went a little step further. They said, we’re not just gonna bring in the migrants, we’re gonna bring in migrant teenagers.
Mike Papantonio: Yes.
Farron Cousins: And we’re not gonna have any kind of safety regulations. They didn’t even have railing up where the, what is it called? The pulverizer.
Mike Papantonio: Yes, yes.
Farron Cousins: Which can, if you get stuck in that, you are dead. And that’s what happened to this 16-year-old.
Mike Papantonio: Well, it’s either that or you’ll have a system that they know fails all the time. We’ve had people losing their arms. Sucked up into the system. We’re talking about kids. Now, who they really love is the unaccompanied minors that are coming across the border. Alright. They love that because you got a 16-year-old that’s gotta figure out how to live. Right. So he’s gonna do anything. He or she’s gonna do anything to keep kicking. And so this is what they do. They go out and they understand bring in more, bring in as many as you can because if we cut off an arm or we blind them, or they’re hurt some way, we send ’em back to Guatemala. This kid Guatemalan, 16-year-old and this failure that took place that killed this kid had taken place dozens of times. They had been put on notice dozens of times that this can happen. Right?
Farron Cousins: Yeah. This wasn’t even the first time somebody died in the last two years at that particular plant, almost in the same way. So two years prior to this child dying, you had another person die. They knew the failures. OSHA looked into it and said, hey, you did some bad things. We found about 10 other violations. Give us a hundred thousand dollars and we’re done.
Mike Papantonio: Well, human life is cheap, isn’t it?
Farron Cousins: It is.
Mike Papantonio: I mean, in their minds, human life is cheap. Used to be, we had to go to Honduras, Nicaragua, India, China to get slave labor. But now under the headline of compassion for immigrants, that’s what really ticks me off. The American public, oh, we gotta do this. This is compassionate America. This doesn’t have anything to do with compassion. It has to do with US Chamber of Commerce, associated industry, and every major corporation in the world, bringing these folks in so we can move folks out that we’re paying minimum wages to and have these people work for slave wages. That’s what’s going on here, isn’t it?
Farron Cousins: Yeah, 100%. And like you said, these are people who routinely get hurt. They’re not told how to operate these things properly. And they know that, the CEOs, the corporations know that if this person does get injured, they can’t do anything because they risk exposing themselves as an undocumented immigrant. Or they know they’re gonna get shipped back. They could lose their asylum status if they can’t hold a job. So these people will lose fingers, they will lose their vision, they will lose other parts of their body and keep on going. And that’s what corporate America wants. Work until there’s nothing of you left and then we’ll just grab the next person and replace you.
Mike Papantonio: Farron, you and I have done this story, you’ve done this story. Sometimes I’ll watch your story, I’ll go, God, that’s brilliant. It is a great attack, Farron, thank you for doing the attack. And then I’ll say, well, surely somebody’s gonna pick it up. Surely, because I know what happens. Corporate media looks through this stuff. I can promise you. Little producers are always looking for new material. So those producers are looking for new material. Oh, we can’t tell that story. Even though Farron laid it out item by item. Farron made it very clear what was happening. We’re still not gonna do the story. That’s how this all works. And so when we start raising hell about it, you know, like I say, if you believe this about we’re the compassionate types bringing in all these folks, this is all about business. It’s about bottom line. Has very little to do with compassion.
Mike Papantonio: As lawmakers in Washington push to ban TikTok in the United States, angry constituents are lobbying death threats at ’em. These threats aren’t going to change the minds in Washington and it could actually make things worse. It’s gonna, anybody who gets a death threat says, really? You want to threaten me? Let’s mix this up. The pushback is incredible. First of all, TikTok story, it ain’t about China. It’s about Facebook and Instagram and all the competitors want TikTok out of the way because they’re just, it’s a flood to TikTok. And so best way to do it is get rid of ’em. Right?
Farron Cousins: Yeah. And that is exactly what’s happening here. Look, you’ve got the intelligence agencies here are the United States, there was a great report in the Intercept, Ken Klippenstein.
Mike Papantonio: By the way, that guy, I gotta say this. Ken Klippenstein is one of the best, I think he is one of the best progressive investigative journalists. I say progressive because if you look at his stuff, he doesn’t take a side. I mean, Klippenstein takes it right down the middle, but when he does an investigation, you can sure count on the fact it’s good. Right?
Farron Cousins: Oh, he’s absolutely phenomenal. And so what he’s got here is that these intelligence agencies are also admitting, listen, we don’t exactly have evidence that TikTok is really connected in any way with the Chinese government, but you know, you could imagine what it would be like if it were, and they could get your personal data. I mean, they could get your location. The same thing that the phone in our pocket is doing to us right now, TikTok might be able to do, and we’re supposed to be concerned about that, but not Apple or Meta or any of the other places.
Mike Papantonio: Look, China right now could buy everything that these politicians are saying TikTok might do. Now, I love the use of words. Do you realize since this has been gone, there’s been no evidence at all. CIA has looked at it, FBI has looked at it in, NSA has looked at it. There’s been no evidence that’s presented to anybody that’s looking at this story in Washington that says, this is happening. The words are, this could happen. Be very afraid because this might happen. Be terrified because it’s possible this could happen. That’s all the wording, isn’t it? You gotta look at what these people are actually saying. They’re not saying this has happened, but this could happen. This is all being fed by the lobbyists from Facebook, lobbyists from Instagram. They’re pumping this up as big as they can. Right?
Farron Cousins: They are. And I will say, it is a shame that you do have these people that are calling in these death threats now, leaving these horrific voicemails because that doesn’t fix this situation at all. If anything, it makes these politicians more angry and only encourages them that, okay, we’re doing the right thing. Look at what TikTok has done to these people. Ordinary people now saying they wanna murder me. That’s the threat of TikTok. Like, don’t give them ammo. You know, there’s right ways to do these kinds of things, and there’s wrong ways and the death threats are wrong. Calling your members of Congress, leaving them normal voicemails, encouraging them not to ban this. That’s a great thing to do. Flood their voicemails if you have to, but keep it not illegal.
Mike Papantonio: What I love is they’re gonna promote propaganda. Okay. Hell, all you gotta do is call up Fox News if you wanna promote propaganda, call MSNBC, call CNN, give those producers who are too lazy to get to the truth of the story. Call them and give them propaganda. There’s no worse propaganda than Fox, MSNBC and CNN. And so all of a sudden they’re saying, we might have to worry about propaganda in the next election cycle if we don’t do this to China. Right?
Farron Cousins: I mean, we’ve got, there is so much propaganda in the United States right now, originating from this country, we don’t need to worry about other countries flooding us with propaganda or AI images that try to fool voters. That’s coming from here. The calls are coming from inside the house at this point, folks. The real threats are in this country, but our politicians don’t want to acknowledge it. They don’t want to acknowledge the threats that Facebook and Instagram and Twitter pose to youth, to election cycles, to misinformation in general. So all the ire is on TikTok to distract from the badness of the others.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. It’s being sold as a grave national security threat to America. And this cat calls up a senator, a Republican senator, okay, listen, if you ban TikTok, I will find you, hunt you down and shoot you. I mean, God almighty. Have we really gone this crazy? Yeah, I guess we have.
