(cc photo: Aqua Mechanical)
This week on CounterSpin: A US District Court just ruled that a 70-year-old California man’s non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma was caused, at least substantively, by his decades of spraying Roundup. The pesticide produced by Monsanto, now owned by Bayer, is key to the megacompany’s business model, which is to sell a pesticide, Roundup, and also sell the only seeds engineered to resist that pesticide—”Roundup Ready” corn and cotton and soybeans—so that one can’t be used without the other. It’s expensive, and it’s not how a lot of people around the world want to farm, but as a business plan, it’s been wildly successful. The fact that the pesticide is carcinogenic is not part of the plan, and we can expect Monsanto/Bayer’s massive PR machinery to work overtime to convince us to ignore the court’s findings.
It’s an important case for our physical health—virtually every American has pesticides or pesticide byproducts in our bodies at this point, and the risk is obviously greater for farmworkers and others more exposed. But it’s also about societal health, and how much power we will grant profit-driven corporations to determine not just what we’re exposed to, but what we’re permitted to know about it.
We’ll talk about the legal picture and the bigger picture with Carey Gillam, longtime journalist, currently research director at the group US Right to Know, and author of the book Whitewash: The Story of a Weedkiller, Cancer and the Corruption of Science.
Transcript: ‘A Lot of That Science They Point to Is Science They Paid For’
Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at media “moderates” and Chelsea Manning’s reimprisonment.
Since Corporations are said to be”people,” what happens when a corporation kills people with its product? If a human killed a human, that human could get the death penalty—but a corporate person needs only give money not, his/her life. Since a cooperation cannot die like a human—why does the Supreme Court still consider a corporation to be a person? Corporation— a person — with all the rights of a human—-except it has more rights in that it cannot forfeit its life.
Maybe CEO’s should stand in for the corporation because if CEO death was an option, I bet Monsanto and Bayer and others would
create much safer products—because a CEO’s life would depend upon it! Yes, this might be an odd way of looking at things—but killer corporations have more rights than We the Humans!
Good point and well said:)
Although corporations seem to essentially be vampire-like entities that can’t die, they CAN be killed financially, either by there own business decisions, or by lawsuits. IF there are many successful lawsuits against them for large amounts, they will eventually declare bankruptcy, at least in theory. In practice, conservatives in government, and sympathetic conservative voters, put low caps on lawsuits through so-called ‘tort reform’ such that the judgements become a minor normal business expense and often not a significant operations policy factor.
Monsanto, Bayer (Roundup), 3M, Dow Chemical… and countless other poisoners-of-the-Earth have been destroying thousands of acres and untold numbers of rivers and water sources in Mexico for decades (thanks to NAFTA). All one need do is travel into the mountain regions of Toluca and take a moment to peek behind the hillsides on which these companies are located. The environment is Dead, desecrated beyond belief. It looks like some uninhabitable planet from outer space.
Typically excellent Jackson interview on an important topic. Bravo FAIR and Janine.
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