A new report has revealed shocking levels of dangerous heavy metals in baby food and
FDA has been asleep at the wheel as usual. I have Farron Cousins with me to talk about
it, he's the editor of the trial lawyer magazine and honestly, I don't, I just say this for
the right reason, one of the best progressive reporters in this business, I really do mean
that. Thank you.
Farron, I looked at this story and I wasn't all that surprised, you know, it's the FDA,
but lay this story out. Here we have, we have baby food that has cadmium, lead, arsenic
in it and the FDA has been diddling around with this for a generation, almost. Take it
from there. It, it really has. What this report tells
us and they've been looking into this for several years, because they had inklings,
they had reports, they had internal documents that showed, okay, well, these baby food companies
know they've got some heavy metals in their food. So let's find out how bad the problem
is. They didn't compel any of these companies to cooperate, which is a big, big misstep
by the way. But then we find out not only are there shocking levels, I mean, we're talking
about hundreds of parts per billion more than what would be considered safe, but the FDA
also has no limits. There's no limits on most baby food.
See, see that's the problem. They don't have limits on things like PFAS, for example, that's
in our water because they haven't studied it. They, the politics have, have prevented
it. They don't have limits on things like, like arsenic. They've got a limit on lead,
which is one part per billion in baby food, which is way crazy because lead, because,
because lead is cumulative. It's bio-persistent, and it's cumulative and it's bioactive in
the system, causes neurological disease. But who, okay, so who are these companies? Let's
call some names, Gerber, Beech-Nut, Happy baby, Campbell Soup and any time, by the way,
anytime I see Nestle involved. Yeah, Nestle’s Gerber.
Nestle is Gerber. What an awful company. I mean just the worst of the worst predator
company. And so here, here's the point, they're saying this, which I think is ridiculous.
Well, you know what, we tested each of the components. If we used rice, we tested the
rice. If we use whatever we tested it, doesn't make any difference.
Right. They never tested the end product, which is
the composite of all of these metals. Right. So, so they would take like, okay,
well, the rice has some mercury in it. The, the, the carrots have some arsenic in it.
The peas, they've got some lead, but we're just going to mix them all together and add
all of these horrible things into this horrid concoction that you're feeding your child.
We're not going to tell you about it. The FDA doesn't care about it. And it took Congress
to finally say, hey, uh, companies, could you, would you be willing to hand over your
studies? You don't have to if you don't want to.
Yeah. This, this is systemic failures across the
board. Yeah. Please do it voluntarily.
Right. You understand they do the same thing with
the pharmaceutical industry. Yeah.
Please, please would you please, oh, would you please give us this information? This
is what they're doing here. Now, just to give you a sense of it. Okay. Beech-Nut, 800 parts
per billion in lead, 800 parts per billion, 300 parts per billion of cadmium. Now we,
it doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand, go Google it. See what cadmium can do to the
neurological centers of your, of your body. See what lead can do. See what arsenic can
do. These are all heavy metals. They collect in the body. They stay there. They don't move
through the body and it's here today and gone tomorrow. That's why every time you see these
lead paint cases, these kids that have been eating paint off the side of the wall, they're
permanently damaged the rest of their life. Right.
The IQ is affected. Looks, they, they develop Asperger's disease, things that look like
autism and so we know what the problem is and these companies, they know that they could
go to certain places in the world where we have less cadmium in the rice, less lead in
the rice. They could go there, but they say, oh, no, let's go over here because we get
a better deal. Right.
They're going to send us rice that, yeah, it might be infected with, with lead or mercury,
but we're getting a good deal. Well, and people need to start asking questions
as to why are there no limits on these heavy metal toxins in baby foods? You're talking
about the most vulnerable portion of any population anywhere is these developing children. You
know, from the time they are, most of them about three months old, when they start eating
foods like this, they're still developing. Their brains have not finished. You know,
their neurological system has not finished being put together and you're already putting
toxic metals into them. Why did the FDA never decide, wait a minute, maybe we shouldn't
poison kids? Yeah. Farron, how about this. So Campbell
Soup and Walmart said, no, we're not giving you our stuff and the FDA has said, okay.
That's ok. The FDA needs to be completely just start from scratch again, get all of
these political pimps, all of these corporate pimps that worked for the FDA that all they
care about, they're always looking for their next job. If I get mad at Campbell Soup, or
I get mad at Walmart, they might not give me a job when I leave the FDA. And we see
it all the time in pharmaceutical cases, you know, we see, we see, hey, here's your way
out of the FDA. You'll see Pfizer or Merck, here's your way out of the FDA. Because if
you work with us on this Joe or Mary, you know what we can't promise you, but when you
get out, we might have a job for you that pays a million and half dollars and it's better
than your $125,000 a year. Right. And the, the person who goes and fills
the vacant spot at the FDA also typically comes from that company too. That's the revolving
door. Yeah.
You know, Pfizer will send their people to the FDA, they'll take in the FDA's people.
It's, it's worse with all the drug companies. It is so corrupt. It is just so corrupt and
the American public, maybe they'll pay attention to this. I mean, these are their children.
Because most people say, ah, I don't want to get involved. I don't understand it.
Congressional hearings with CEOs from big tech have cast antitrust violations in the
spotlight and the Supreme Court is about to tackle multiple other cases, which revolve
around corporate accountability. Executive director, from Public Justice Paul Bland,
he's going to join me now to talk about this. First of all, Bland, Mr. Bland, the first
case on the docket is against TransUnion and its, it has to do with terrorist watch list.
Now from a, let's avoid legalese, walk us through why that's important for the average
American. Okay. Okay. So TransUnion is a credit reporting
agency. So they keep information about you and they sell it to anyone who's thinking
of giving you a loan, people who might hire you. If you try and get an apartment, you
know, most landlords check your credit report. So they put in 8,500 people's credit files
that they were members of either terrorists. They were either on a terrorist watch list
or drug dealers, and they were wrong for all 8,500 people. But they don't keep records
of who they sell information about you to. So what they say, what they're arguing to
the Supreme Court is that a $60 million jury verdict against them has to be thrown out
because the plaintiffs could only prove that 1500 of the 8,500 people who were falsely
on this list, that their information was actually sold. But TransUnion is the one who should
be keeping that record, not, not the consumer. How would you know if they sold your information?
And what makes it so unusual, Paul, is the idea of punitive damages usually are not quantified
like that. If a company's done wrong, the punitive damages is across the board. It's
a really unusual analysis that I saw. The courts they need to, they need to rework that.
They need to come up with a solution that says, A, you can't do that and B, you're going
to be punished if you do. It's pretty clear. Next up though, is a case against the NCAA
for refusing to compensate college athletes. We've done this story so many times. We, we
just are so down on the NCAA, and, and their position here. Talk to us a little about that
and how do you see this playing out? So, so I mean, the argument, it's an antitrust
argument. They say these companies, these, these entities, the schools get together and
they set a price and they set the price for zero for the athlete. So the schools make
a lot of money. I mean, there are schools that make tens of millions of dollars off
their football program and they aren't paying the athletes. So the lower court said, well,
you know, the argument that they've, that they were con that they were getting together
and conspiring and setting prices, that's, that depends on the facts. Let's look into
what the facts are because we just got together and we have rules for ourselves. It doesn't
matter any other facts. The only thing you need to know is that we decided that this
is the right thing for the students and therefore we're exempt from the antitrust law. So they
had this really sweeping, crazy theory that would just blow a hole through the antitrust
laws. Hasn't there been a, there's been this effort
year after year, Paul, to go after the NCAA, it seems like they're almost bullet proof.
I mean, case after case, where you say, A, your, your idea of saying that we're, we,
we can't let athletes get any extra money because of the amateur protection. This, this,
this theory that they've had, they're trying to make it sound like it's the high ground.
Like, well, we're giving them an education. Well, no, they're not really giving them an
education. Most of these students can't even buy food. They're doing everything they can
just to hang on because they have to do practice. They have to do all these other parts and
yeah, they may say, well, we're not going to let you pay for a tuition and we're going
to give you a place, place to live. But when you drill down on the quality of life for
these athletes, it's pretty disturbing. This might be the first end road let's hope. And,
and finally, we've got a case with Goldman Sachs, attempting to stop investors from banding
together. I mean, come on, what's the motive here? Goldman Sachs, anytime you hear their
name, simply follow the money and you will find corruption after corruption. Give me
your take on this case. So this one comes out of the 2008 financial
crisis and basically what they were doing is they're selling a bunch of securities to
investors and they say, these are really safe. They're in mortgages. You know, if, if the
person doesn't pay, then we still have the house and so forth. So they knew privately
internally that there was tons of fraud in the mortgage market and that a lot of these
securities were in bad luck. So at the same time, they're urging investors to buy them
and they're saying, these are great investments, they're shorting them themselves. And they
have a few select investors who they're shorting them for, you know, selling them for less.
So they know these things are not worth that much and they're betting against their own
investors. So it gets to the Supreme Court and they have two arguments, essentially.
One is they're arguing that the court shouldn't be able to assume that, that securities markets,
you know, the stock market relies on information. So that if there's false information, each
investor has to come in and like testify separately that they relied on the fake information.
Then the other thing they say as well, you know, some of the statements we made that
you're saying are untrue. Like we told investors, we would always put their interests first.
That's so general you can't sue us about it. Well, that's crazy. How can it be so general
that they can say, we will always put you first?
Yeah. Paul, thank you for joining me. We're going to continue covering these stories in
the Supreme Court. Let's see how, let's see if there's a change. Thanks a lot.