At some point, all of us have
bought something that we almost immediately came to regret. Maybe a car whose
color was intriguing on the lot but looks like a four-wheeled cold sore in your
driveway, or that last beer during the ballgame that turned what would have
been a mild headache into a four-alarm hangover. We’ve all been there to one
degree or another, but Bayer, by purchasing the genuinely despicable agrochemical
giant Monsanto,
transformed the practice into a vivid form of corporate self-immolation that is
currently playing out in lawsuits and on front pages all over the country.
“Last year, Bayer completed
the purchase of US agrochemicals group Monsanto for $63 billion,” reported The
Financial Times at the beginning of August. “Measured by the share price
fall since the deal was first mooted three years ago, the deal ranks among the
worst in corporate history. US courts have linked Roundup, a widely used
herbicide made by Monsanto, to cancer. With more than 18,000 legal cases
pending — three have already been heard — Bayer faces possibly paying billions
in compensation.”
A long time ago in a galaxy
far, far away, thoughts of maybe becoming a lawyer someday led me into
paralegal work at a number of law firms on both coasts. As a litigation
paralegal, I worked on cases involving major automakers, pharmaceutical giants,
international banks, large pipeline manufacturers and other sundry corporate
monstrosities. The work, by and large, was a grueling paper chase involving
long archaeological digs through massive post-subpoena document dumps. You
rarely came across The Document that would turn the whole case on its
ear, but it happened every so often, and when it did, the cheers from the
cubicles would rattle the fluorescent lights: Plowing through all the boxes,
dust bunnies, ink stains, paper cuts and miles of memos had finally paid off!
Bottom of Form
I didn’t wind up going to law
school, but I do know what the people suing Bayer-Monsanto over Roundup and
cancer are dealing with in these litigations … and boy oh boy, did they ever
strike gold, if “gold” were redefined as being “corporate communications so
crassly revealing that Enron looks
tame by comparison.”
The story of
this document dump begins in June of 2013, when a grassroots advocacy group
called Moms Across America published an open letter to then-Monsanto CEO Hugh
Grant about the dangers involved in his company’s wide distribution of
genetically modified (GM) foods and the use of their pesticide, Roundup.
“We ask you to have the
courage to acknowledge that GM practices and Roundup are hurting our
world,” read the
letter. “We have seen the recent and new scientific studies on the impact of
GMOs and Glyphosate with links to autism, Alzheimer’s, food allergies, liver
cancer, IBS, breast cancer in humans and possibly mental illness and we have
witnessed the results firsthand in our kids.”
As the resulting emails show,
these accusations did not sit well with the folks at Monsanto. One conversation
between Monsanto scientist Dr. Daniel Goldstein and two outside consultants —
Bruce Chassy, a former professor at the University of Illinois and Wayne
Parrot, a crop scientist at the University of Georgia — stand out in stark
relief.
Dr. Goldstein stated that Moms
Across America was making “a pretty nasty looking set of allegations,” and he
had been arguing for a week that the company should “beat the shit out of them”
in return. Chassy was all for attacking the group, but Parrot was less
sanguine. “You can’t beat up mothers,” he wrote, “even if they are dumb mothers
but you can beat up the organic industry.”
That conversation verged into
a discussion of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which was at the
time holding a public
comment period regarding supermarket produce and glyphosate, the
ingredient in Roundup that has been directly connected to incidents of cancer.
“BTW,” wrote Dr. Goldstein, “a minor tolerance increase petition for glyphosate
on specialty crops got 10,821 negative public comments in the last 48 hours —
NOT form letters — individually written comments. We’re on our way to being
corporate road kill.”
The documents also reveal how
the problems of Roundup, language and truth repeatedly dogged Monsanto over the
years. “We cannot say [glyphosate] is ‘safe,’” warned Monsanto toxicologist
Donna Farmer in a May 2014 email, “we can say history of safe use, used safely
etc.”
After the International Agency
for Research on Cancer (IARC) classified glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic
to humans” in a 2015 report,
Monsanto went into battle mode to knock down the IARC’s conclusions. The
company hired an outside consulting firm to prepare a competing report to
refute those findings, which was tentatively titled, “An Expert Panel Concludes
There Is No Evidence That Glyphosate Is Carcinogenic to Humans.”
Tom Sorahan, a Monsanto
consultant and epidemiologist at the University of Birmingham, took issue with
that working title. “We can’t say ‘no evidence’ because that means there is not
a single scrap of evidence,” he wrote in a November 2015 email, “and I don’t
see how we can go that far.”
“Trial juries in three
California lawsuits against Bayer-Monsanto have found in favor of the
plaintiffs,” reports the
nonprofit Environmental Working Group, “all of whom have been diagnosed with
non-Hodgkin lymphoma. There are now roughly 13,000 other cases against
Bayer-Monsanto awaiting trial in the U.S. alone.”
There is a jarring bit of
historical symmetry to all this. Bayer, in the middle of the last century, was
part of the
IG Farben corporation, the company that served as the economic engine for Nazi
Germany. Among IG Farben’s many contributions to the Nazi war effort was
Zyklon-B, the gas used to murder people imprisoned in concentration camps.
After the war, IG Farben was
not destroyed outright, though many of its corporate officers were convicted of
monstrous crimes at Nuremberg. The corporation itself, it seems, was deemed
“too big to fail” before anyone in this century ever thought to coin the term.
Instead of eliminating it, IG
Farben was broken up into smaller companies, one of which was Bayer. IG Farben
executive Fritz ter Meer, convicted of mass murder and slavery after the
war, became
a top executive at Bayer in 1956.
Matters will not improve in
the near term for Bayer-Monsanto. “Major food companies like General Mills
continue to sell popular children’s breakfast cereals and other foods
contaminated with troubling levels of glyphosate, the cancer-causing ingredient
in the herbicide Roundup,” reports EWG.
“The weedkiller, produced by Bayer-Monsanto, was detected in all 21 oat-based
cereal and snack products sampled in a new round of testing commissioned by the
Environmental Working Group.”
Lead
in the tap water, glyphosate in the Cheerios … you get the definite sense
that our national priorities are badly out of joint. One thing is certain: The
paralegals will be busy, because more revelatory document dumps are coming as
all the Roundup lawsuits march through the courts.
You can check out this one
yourself right
here, courtesy of the law firm of Baum Hedlund Aristei & Goldman. Mind
the paper cuts, and think twice the next time you go to buy something. Bayer
surely wishes it had.
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