Nestle isn't satisfied with just sucking all the water out of California. Now they're moving into
other environmentally sensitive parts of the country. Joining me now to talk about this is
Farron Cousins. Farron I have to tell you this, I get more emails that say, and I believe this and
I stick by it, you honestly are one of the best progressive talkers in this business.
Well thank you. I, and I, I have no reason
to say that other than the fact, I get covered up with emails, Pap, this guy's great. He's great.
You are. You just do such a great analysis and thank you for that. So, so let's hit this. We've
talked about Nestle in the past. They're like a moving mob, aren't they? I mean, they're locust.
They, they, they, they really are. And as they continue to suck all the water out of California,
now they're coming down to these environmentally sensitive areas of the state of Florida. And, you
know, you've got this hyper-partisan Suwanee river management board that gave them the green light
to start pumping, I think 400 million gallons a year from Ginnie Springs, right around Suwanee.
Even though you had a public in this entire area that said, no, we do not want Nestle
to move in this area. We've seen what they've done up north. We sees what they've done out
west. We've seen how Nestle operates. Don't let them come in. And this nine member panel
said, well, we hear your concerns. But we're going to ignore them.
But we're going with the money. Yeah. And so what this, what this
panel of buffoons is the best way for me to say it, they're absolutely buffoons. I'd like to,
matter of fact, I have a list. Maybe we'll put it up on the screen. But this panel of buffoons,
this is the deal. Nestle, you can come in here and take 400 million gallons of water from our spring,
from our aquifer, every year. And you know what, all you have to pay is $115,
$115 is what they're paying to get this. Right. I, I mean, that's a little
cheaper than the permit they got out in California to take billions of gallons.
But what Nestle is going to do here, the same thing they're doing in California,
you pump water out of the source, which they're going to go to the source of Ginnie Springs.
And they're going to argue that, look, look in the immediate area around Ginnie Springs,
you still have just as much water. And that may be true because that's what they argue in California.
But it's what happens downstream. You're not starving the immediate area, you're starving
the flow of the body of water, the flow of the aquifers, and you end up starving the
people downstream that depend on this. So, okay, California, let's, let's
change. California has been in the worst drought that they've seen in decades. They, they can't
do anything about it. The state is burning up. It is in embers. And so Nestle is still sucking
hundreds of millions of gallons out of their aquifer and nobody seems willing to push back.
What is it about Nestle that, that, where they simply dominate the environmental policies of
these states? What's going on? Well, I think what Nestle has
working for them is being a multinational corporation with billions of dollars at your
exposure, or disposal, excuse me, they have one of the most sophisticated PR machines that I think
I've ever seen. I recently did this big expose on Nestle and I dig into it. I go to Nestle's
website, they have for every kind of environmental damage they've done, they have their own separate
website talking about why, oh no, we're actually helping the local environment in California. They
have a page dedicated to the destruction they're doing in Florida. They have it for other areas
of the United States and Canada as well, fully coordinated PR campaign for everything they do.
I got an early look at the article that you wrote for the trial lawyer magazine. As a matter of
fact, it's the cover story. It's excellent. One thing you point out is it's not just about this.
Let, let's talk about the Nestle story. You have a list. It talks about the de, deforestation. I
mean, there, it's South America, man, if they need it, the trees don't matter. Environment doesn't
matter. We're going to take it. The, the, the idea of melamine that they found in, in children's milk
in China, very dangerous. But they were busted on that greenwashing. They figured out best
greenwashing in the business. These people are excellent. This really got me, the relationship
to Robert Mugabe called the butcher. You want to add anything to that? This list was incredible.
You know, there's so many more things I couldn't even fit into this piece. But they, they've
basically been having indentured servants is what they've been described as over in Southeast Asia
that go out there and they do all the fishing. They work for pennies a day and if you don't
meet your quota, you know, bad things happen to you. You die, they dump your body overboard.
Nobody ever sees you again. And that's all for Nestle's Purina brand. This is for your cat food
and dog food. The fishermen are dying just to give, you know, fluffy a couple extra more treats.
This, this. This is that panel of geniuses. I just have to throw a few names out.
Virginia Johns, Charles Keith, Richard Schwab, Virginia Sanchez, Harry Smith, Larry Sessions,
William Lloyd, Larry Thompson. These are the people, these are the politicians that said,
yeah, we know about your terrible history. It's all been presented to us. It's been, we've been
told right off the bat, what this is going to do to our aquifer, what it's going to, how it's
going to absolutely affect our aquifer. But you know what? We're going to let you do it anyway.
Right. It, it's absolutely disgusting with these individuals did not just allowing the
corporate locusts to come in, but completely ignoring the constituents in the area.
The justice department has notified several journalists that the Trump administration
secretly obtained their phone and email records in 2017. The disclosures highlight
how the justice department increasingly targets news organizations, social media companies,
and individual journalists. Brigida Santos, who is a wonderful journalist, joins me now
to talk about this. Brigida, which reporters were targeted by the department of justice under Trump?
The justice department has informed a CNN Pentagon correspondent, Barbara Starr,
that the justice department secretly obtained her work and personal phone and email records in 2017,
even though she personally was not the target of any investigation. Three reporters with the
Washington Post have also been notified that their work home or cell phone records were also seized.
The DOJ secretly collected what's known as toll records, meaning information about communications
made to and from the targeted phones or email accounts, including the duration, recipients
and dates. But it reportedly did not obtain the content of any phone or email communications.
Now, a DOJ spokesperson says the target of these investigations was not the news media,
but those with access to classified national defense information who provided it to the media.
Yeah. We'd like to think it's just bumpkin Trump, but this has been happening
administration after administration. You recall, I think one time we did a story on the Frank
Church hearings that took place in the 1970s, where they found out that the government was
following journalists. They actually were threatening journalists. Seymour Hersh,
as a matter of fact, was threatened with death and it all emanated from the FBI,
it emanated from the department of justice. Does the justice department have free reign
to seize a journalists' data? Is that where we are right now in America?
Pretty much. The DOJ is legally allowed to obtain journalists' records through a court
order without journalists knowing as long as the attorney general authorizes subpoenas
related to news gathering activities and the DOJ has determined that the case falls
under extraordinary circumstances, by typically citing harm to national security. By doing this,
the government might not exactly learn what was discussed between a journalist and their source,
but it might actually reveal who that source is or provide clues. Now, after doing this,
the DOJ must inform journalists that their records have been seized, either 90 days after
the government receives any subpoenaed data, or after the justice department determines
there's no longer a threat to the investigation or national security. And that could be many years.
Yeah. So it's, so sorry we did this. We, we got everything we wanted. We're so sorry we did this.
But you've been spied on, your family's been spied on, and it's been going on for years.
Gee, it is, it is the Frank Church kind of saga that we saw in the seventies where the FBI was in,
CIA, NSA, in everybody's backyard. The DOJ's war on whistleblowers didn't start under Trump. How,
how has the criminalization of news gathering gotten worse over the years? It's certainly
gotten worse and I don't think you can blame one administration. I think it's administration after
administration where this expands more and more in this Orwellian kind of way. What's your take?
Yeah. Over the past two decades, at least, the government has increasingly
cracked down on whistleblowers. Now, before president George W. Bush only one person had
ever been convicted under the espionage act for leaking classified information to the press.
And remember the espionage act was designed to go after spies during world war one, not people who
expose government crimes and corruption. During the Bush administration, the espionage act was
used to jail reporter, Judith Miller, for refusing to reveal her source in a CIA leak investigation.
The Obama administration then ramped it up using the espionage act to prosecute more people than
any prior administration combined for leaking sensitive information.
President Trump then of course, inherited that blueprint that was laid out by his predecessors
and continued the war on whistleblowers, further undermining press freedoms that are
guaranteed under the first amendment at a time when trust in media has fallen to historic lows.
Yeah, she was a target because she was trying to tell the world that Iraq was based on an
absolute lie. That the administration, the two administrations had lied about it. That it was
killing, killing American soldiers, killing Iraqis by the, by the hundreds of thousands
and it was all based on a lie that was created by primarily the news media. It was created by MSNBC,
CNN, along with the weapons industry and of course driven by the FBI and the CIA.
And so she wanted to expose all that and, you know, if you think about it,
that's real journalism. So she was certainly a threat. Brigida,
thank you for joining me. Okay. Anytime, Mike.