Forum… Or Against ’em

By Count Friedrich von Olsen
THEY SAY IT’S HARD TO ARGUE with success. And when people doing gardening across these United States found weeds growing in their gardens or pesky weeds sprouting up in the cracks in their sidewalks or between their sidewalk and driveway, they would reach for some Roundup, a glyphosate-based herbicide formulated and developed by Monsanto, which was sold in handy-dandy plastic spray bottles. With just a few squeezes of the handle of the easily-aimed spray nozzle at the top of the bottle, enough mist would enshroud the unwanted plant. The next day the effects were in full evidence, as even the greenest and most persistent weed would have begun to wilt, and a day later would be turning brown. The poison would work itself from the surface into the internal tissue of the plant, ultimately throughout its system and clear into the roots. While the more fastidious keepers of their yards might pull the plants out after two or three days, that was not necessary because the plant would dessicate to the point that within a week to ten days, it would be virtually gone. Isn’t that neat! Roundup was an example of entrepreneurial success and an example of how American ingenuity works…
IF ONLY THE WORLD WERE that simple. You see, the active ingredients in Roundup were an isopropylamine salt of glyphosate and polyethoxylated tallow amine. They were effective because the concoction acted as a 5-enolpyruvulshikimate-3-phosphate synthase inhibitor. I could give you a rather complicated explanation, but I don’t have room to do that, so let’s have it suffice to say that this really took the starch out of the plant. Plants are living things. Living things can be tough and resilient, but life also involves a very delicate balance. Isopropylamine salt of glyphosate and polyethoxylated tallow amine are very successful at upsetting that balance…
ONE MIGHT IMAGINE THAT the average person might take note of the success Roundup had and take into consideration that in spraying that mist about, some of it might land on the shoes or pant cuffs of the person doing the spraying, maybe come into contact with that person’s skin, or that quite possibly the individual might just breathe in a little of that mist. One might expect the person doing the spraying or observing the spraying going on might make the connection that, like the plants being dessicated, people are living things, too…
INDEED, IT WOULD SEEM THAT it would take a special brand of stupidity not to put that together. Anyone observing what was going on with the plant when it came into surface contact with Roundup – that the toxins penetrated to well beyond the surface and made their way generally throughout the organism whereupon they worked their splendid destructive magic – might move to the conclusion that maybe it would not be so splendid for those toxins to permeate one’s skin or come into his lungs and make direct or indirect contact with that person’s mucous membranes, or kidneys or liver or gonads or bones or bone marrow. That brand of stupidity however, must be in plentiful supply. Over the years Roundup became a hot selling product, with sales of the stuff eclipsing a billion dollars over the first three decades of it being on the market. Indeed, the use of Roundup became so widespread because of its effectiveness against unwanted weeds and invasive plants that measures had to be taken to limit the damage it was doing to crops and desirable plant life. Monsanto was thus obliged to genetically modify plants so that they were resistant to Roundup. It then made a fortune selling those seeds, including ones for soy, corn, canola, alfalfa, cotton, sorghum, and wheat…
WHEN QUESTIONS EMERGED ABOUT whether Roundup was too dangerous to be applied in the cavalier way in which it was, Monsanto used attorneys to threaten those who spoke out about the inadvisability of its product and hired a series of public relations firms to belittle and deride those who questioned the wisdom of what was going on as ignorant and backward technophobes…
SPEAKING OF STUPIDITY, SHORTLY after Werner Baumann became chief executive officer with Bayer in 2016, he announced his intent to make his mark by the acquisition of Monsanto. I managed to get through to him in Leverkusen, and as politely as I could I told him, essentially, that he needed to have his head examined if he thought he would be doing himself and Bayer and its stockholders any good by the takeover. Werner, mind you, is young enough to be my grandson. Without actually saying so, he politely implied that I am a bit on the doddering side. He gently reminded me that whatever principles I understood were ones applicable to the 20th Century, that this is the 21st Century, and the world has passed me by. He assured me the synergy of a Bayer-Monsanto merger was more than enough to overwhelm any conceivable minor liabilities Monsanto’s legal track record represented. There is no room for temerity in the world of international corporate advancement he chided me. He confidently predicted that within two years there would be double digit accretion with regard to the value of Bayer stock resulting from the buyout. I could see I had not made a dent in him. Less than a year later, in 2017, I removed Bayer – $7-plus million in stock – from my portfolio…
LAST SUMMER, TWO MONTHS AFTER Bayer made its $63 billion acquisition of Monsanto, Dewayne Johnson, a school groundskeeper, prevailed in a lawsuit against Bayer over his contention that his longtime exposure to the herbicide had caused his cancer. He was awarded $289 million. In a piece of encouraging news for Bayer, a judge has since reduced that award to a mere $78 million.
THIS WEEK, A SECOND VERDICT in a Roundup lawsuit was delivered. A jury in San Francisco again found that the evidence was convincing that Roundup was the major contributing factor with regard to Edwin Hardeman developing a malignant cancerous lump in his throat after three decades of using the herbicide to suppress weeds in his garden. The jury will hash out real and punitive damages later this month. There are more than 11,150 lawsuits now pending in federal and state courts against Bayer brought by farmers, home gardeners and landscapers in which the central contention is that its glyphosate-based herbicides, including Roundup and Ranger Pro, caused non-Hodgkin lymphoma and other cancers…
AT THE PHILOSOPHICAL AND moral level, there are outstanding questions as to the culpability of Monsanto and its corporate officials in the formulation, manufacturing and provision of a product like Roundup on the open market. There is evidence, it is alleged, that Monsanto and Bayer have suppressed data indicating the hazard that Roundup and Ranger Pro represented. There is a comeuppance heading there way, and I am not willing to say they do not deserve every bit of it. It is not inconceivable, with all of the litigation that is ongoing and the documents that are likely to surface and the facts to emerge through testimony, that some Monsanto executives or employees may be going to prison. That may be a stretch, but if those executives demonstrated depraved indifference to the health and well-being of Monsanto’s customers while in search of ever greater corporate profit, an energetic prosecutor may place them in the docket…
AND WHAT OF BAYER’S shareholders? Do they deserve to take a huge bath? After years of seeing their stock value skyrocket based on corporate avarice and irresponsibility, even as they were insulated from the decision-making process and reality of what was going on by being mere stockholders, is there not now justice in that stock value plummeting?
AND LASTLY, WHAT OF THE “victims” themselves? What is their culpability? When they sprayed weeds with Roundup and saw what it did, what went through their minds? What of their indolence? Doesn’t their belief that they could in some fashion avoid the unpleasantry of digging the weeds by applying a “chemical” fix to the situation play a role here? Did they truly believe there was no possible downside to their sloth? Should their own stupidity of what they, by large measure with their own hand in squeezing the handles on those spray bottles, were doing to themselves absolve them of any responsibility? And what of the impact their indolence, sloth and stupidity on their neighbors and children, those living nearby who were unwillingly exposed to the isopropylamine salt of glyphosate and polyethoxylated tallow amine that was liberally spread into the environment? Should they be held to account for that?
The Count’s views do not necessarily reflect those of the Sentinel, its ownership, its publisher or editors.

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