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old people so they have to find a way to stay relevant as their audience leaves this world. So now they're going after our children by airing
propaganda videos by John Stossel in public schools. Joining me now to talk about the Fox News plan for our kids is author Alex Zaitchik. Alex,
John Stossel in our children's classroom. I can't imagine anything scarier than that. How has this come about?
>> ALEX ZAITCHIK: Well, the program has actually been around for a long time. It began when Stossel was on ABC back in the late nineties. He got a
little bit of seed money from a libertarian think tank and it's grown over the years to now what he claims is 150,000 classrooms around the country.
And most of it is content from his Fox business show.
>> PAPANTONIO: Okay, so what is the idea of what he does in the classroom? What is it that he's supposed to project on behalf of Fox News and every
neocon in the country? What can we expect?
>> ZAITCHIK: Well, he's sort of Fox Business's in-house libertarian now that Judge Andrew Napolitano is off the air. So he's sort of the face of
libertarianism for the network. And his lessons, the modules that he's promoting through this program, Stossel in the Classroom are essentially
packaged libertarian ideological lessons. And each one addresses a different aspect of government regulation which should be abolished is the
implicit message. So together you have not just a critique of government regulation of the private sector but you have an assault on the very idea
of government legitimacy, even government's right to issue a currency for example.
>> PAPANTONIO: So I saw some of the topics that you talk about. One of them is why does Hollywood hate capitalism debunking food myths and the real
story of Thanksgiving where he explains that Pilgrims were actually hurting us by sharing with us. So I'm wondering, do teachers have a choice? Do
teachers say, "No, I don't want to use this, this is insane, this is crazy talk?" I mean it's not just because of Fox News. It seems like a teacher
could be a clearing house and say, "I don't want this nut in my classroom."
>> ZAITCHIK: Right I mean teachers do have to sign up for it. It is optional but I think it's worth considering this program in a large context of the
education privatization movement which is one of Stossel's hobbyhorses. And he works for a man, Rupert Murdock who has a large entertainment company
and it's growing which just last week at South by Southwest announced he was gonna start making these little tablets for teachers around the country
called Amplify. Well the company is called Amplify. The tablets don't have a name yet. But basically the idea if these are distributed they could
one day hold content such as Stossel in the Classroom. I don't think it's too dystopic to imagine this at some point in our lifetimes.
>> PAPANTONIO: It's so crazy that it is. You want to laugh about this. It's actually pretty scary stuff. So where we are, Fox News and the neocon
right realize that they have a generational problem, that the people who ever took them seriously for any period of time are dead or dying. And so
now they're moving into our classroom to try to create a new level of propaganda. The children growing up can believe that Ayn Rand was really a
great hero. Is that kind of where this is all headed?
>> ZAITCHIK: John Stossel certainly admires Ayn Rand and she's definitely someone who would occur over the course of these lessons. I think it's worth
noting though that Stossel would certainly distance himself from the neocon label. He actually promotes a very isolationist, very radical extreme
isolationist foreign policy although his ideas about business and the economy are very much aligned with the mainstream right, absolutely in the hard
right.
>> PAPANTONIO: I remember Stossel doing a segment, I guess we'll see in the classrooms where he was talking about the value and the need for robber
barons in America and how they did so much good. He actually called Jay Gould a hero. Jay Gould you may remember is the person that says, "I have
enough money to buy half of America's workforce to be willing to kill the other half." That was Jay Gould. That was the robber baron that John
Stossel thinks is so important. So who is the gatekeeper on this? How do we - if you're listening to this broadcast watching this segment, how
does somebody say is this taking place in my school? What do they do about it?
>> ZAITCHIK: Well, I mean you can talk to your kids and find out if there's any sort of political lessons like this going on. It's still a pretty
limited program but I think again, to keep an eye on the education privatization movement in your state generally because as that movement breaks
down the common core of curricula requirements, you're gonna see more things like this start to trickle into the curriculum. Teachers aren't gonna
be given things they have to teach and as their budgets are slashed to pay for these other education reform ideas and agendas, their teachers are
going to become more and more reliant on outside materials that maybe can't been filtered as carefully.
>> PAPANTONIO: In other words it's a time-filler. It's a way to say I've got a course already filmed. It looks slick, it looks good. Real quickly in
less than 30 seconds, where does the money come from for this?
>> ZAITCHIK: It comes from an organization in Philadelphia called the Center for Independent Thought which is sort of a boutique libertarian funding
foundation run by Howard Rich, real estate mogul and his wife, Andrea. And they distribute pretty much the entirety of the funding Stossel needs to
keep this a professional operation.
>> PAPANTONIO: And to this day we don't know really how much Stossel has paid for this, do we?
>> ZAITCHIK: There's $230,000 listed on their tax filings as other for this program.
>> PAPANTONIO: Other could be just damn near anything. Anyway, Alexander, thank you for joining us. We'll stay up with this story, okay?
>> ZAITCHIK: Thanks for having me.
>> PAPANTONIO: Alex Zaitchik is the author of the book Common Nonsense, Glenn Beck and the Triumph of Ignorance. Cancer has become our generation's
greatest medical battle. So why would anybody take a pill that's been shown to cause cancer in patients? Drug companies covered up their knowledge
of the relationship between cancer and the diabetes drug, Actos. I have attorney Kim Truongle with me now to talk about the dangers of Actos so
another medicine on the market killing people all different kinds of ways. It seems like every week there is another story like the one we're
telling here. Tell us the Actos story.
>> KIM TRUONGLE: Well, with Actos unfortunately there's over 25 million affected with diabetes across America. So they've got to take drugs to help
them with that kind of condition. Actos is one of the diabetes drugs out there. Actos is manufactured by Takeda who is the largest manufacturer in
Asia and one of the top 15 drug manufacturers in the world so essentially the problem with Actos is that it's being linked to the chronic condition
of bladder cancer which of course could kill you.
>> PAPANTONIO: Well they knew this going in, didn't they? They saw a relationship- the company saw a clear relationship between rats that were dying
from bladder cancer in their product.
>> TRUONGLE: Right.
>> PAPANTONIO: And they ignored that. Is it safe to say that?
>> TRUONGLE: Yeah, it's safe to say that. I would say more than ignored it. I think they just blatantly pushed that evidence aside. They basically
said that they couldn't tell what that relationship was between the rats and how that could affect humans but of course their only studies done
before the drug was approved as on rats.
>> PAPANTONIO: Yeah and so one reason they might want to ignore that is because they were making so damn much money. I mean $4 billion, $5 billion, one
of the biggest selling products in America. Tell us why they would ignore the fact that they have a product that they know has the potential to
cause cancer in rats and they completely ignore it. Tell us why.
>> TRUONGLE: Right. In one year alone Takeda was making more than $4 billion on this drug. That was making up practically 25 percent of their revenue
for just one year alone. So of course it would make sense for them not to warn about this drug that was such a big seller for the company.
>> PAPANTONIO: Don't you wonder- I think people listening to this broadcast are saying how did the FDA let another one get by? How did it occur that
now we're talking about a product that A, we don't even need. Do you agree we don't even need this product? There are plenty of alternatives. Did
I get that right?
>> TRUONGLE: Right. Yeah, there are plenty of drugs out there.
>> PAPANTONIO: So we don't need the product. It's a cash cow for this company and so all of a sudden now we see that we're in a situation to there the
FDA ignores the same information that this company ignored. It's Eli Lilly isn't it? Aren't they one of the companies involved?
>> TRUONGLE: Right so when Takeda wanted to bring this product over to America, they went ahead and joined with Eli Lilly which is a huge manufacturer
here in America to market this to Americans. So basically this is another situation of the FDA just dragging its heels and just taking its time to
do anything to help the consumers here in America. We compare it to Europe where France has pulled the drug completely off the market. Germany has
strongly cautioned against its use and here in America, the FDA said in 2010 that they were going to review the study reports. Then nine months later
they said, "Okay, we're gonna change the label and talk about a few of the warnings, that it may be linked to bladder cancer." It took another two
months for that to then get onto the label but since then it's still on the market. There's no major warning on it. There's no black box warning.
There's no message out to America that says, "You know what? This drug is killing people."
>> PAPANTONIO: And so here you have a drug that if it is a 40- now tell me if this number is right because it's startling- a 40 percent increase
of getting bladder cancer if you've been on the drug for a period longer than two years. Is that the number that the FDA is allowing this product to
stay on the market; is that the number that they know?
>> TRUONGLE: Right, actually it's even worse than that. You know when they initially put out the report in 2010 that said that the FDA was going to
review the information, the information they were reviewing said it was two years exposure that would cause a 40 percent increase, you know, risk of
bladder cancer. Since then when they finally decided to change the label, they actually said that it was use of more than just one year. Now
diabetes is a chronic condition. It's going to take a while for someone to get used to that drug. It's going to take a while for the doctors to see
the result but unfortunately by the time that happens, the patient has already had an increased risk of bladder cancer.
>> PAPANTONIO: And again, a diabetic doesn't even need this drug. There are plenty, plenty of good alternatives besides this drug. But Eli Lilly
wanted this drug because it is the cash cow. But right now what is it, about 2.3 million prescriptions in the United States of Actos for diabetics?
>> TRUONGLE: Right and that was just in one year. That was just for about nine months in one year so that number should be larger than that.
>> PAPANTONIO: Where do you see this going? Will the FDA do anything or will they do what they typically do and that is let the drug industry run wild
in America and make as much money as they want and just close their eyes to it?
>> TRUONGLE: You know, it's really unfortunate because I think that's what they're gonna do. I think they're just gonna wait and sit this out and not
really sock it to the companies like they should be. And that's why the patients and the consumers, they need help from other avenues from lawsuits
that are going on nationwide to try to help people with this because unfortunately the FDA is really not doing enough.
>> PAPANTONIO: Well, then what you're saying is what we've seen so many times. Unless you have individual advocates bringing cases against this
company, the American public would never know A, this company clearly knew the product could kill people by the way of cancer. And B, they covered
it up and C, the FDA participated in that cover-up and doesn't seem to want to do anything about it. Thanks for joining me. It's a story we'll
follow.
>> TRUONGLE: Thank you.
>> PAPANTONIO: Kim Truongle is an attorney with the Howard Nations Law Firm. That's it for this week's Ring of Fire but you can keep up with us
throughout the week online at Ringoffireradio.com or on Twitter @ringoffireradio and on Facebook. I'm Mike Papantonio. We'll see you next week on
Ring of Fire. If you're witness to a political coup taking place right in front of your damn eyes, that caliber of evil needed to be held accountable
in courtrooms. Billionaire mad money wasn't enough to buy democracy. Legislators don't have enough sense to think for themselves. They let Alec do
it. Here at Ring of Fire the truth is our only agenda so we're able to bring you the stories that mainstream media just ignored or completely got
wrong.