DeVos Blasted for Student Debt Relief Rule Change That Hurts Defrauded Borrowers

Jessica Corbett, 

Common Dreams

PUBLISHED

August 31, 2019

https://truthout.org/articles/devos-blasted-for-student-debt-relief-rule-change-that-hurts-defrauded-borrowers/

Critics condemned Trump Education Secretary Betsy DeVos Friday for replacing Obama-era federal loan forgiveness regulations for student borrowers who claim that they were defrauded by their schools with new policies that could make it more difficult to access relief.

“On the Friday of Labor Day weekend, Betsy DeVos is gleefully forcing hundreds of thousands of students defrauded by for-profit colleges to suffer yet another indignity,” Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said in a statement. “Shame on her.”

Outlining the policy changes, which the Department of Educationannounced late Friday, The New York Times reported:

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The new rules apply to federal student loans made from July 2020 onward. They will replace a set of policies, completed by the Obama administration in 2016, that Ms. DeVos had delayed carrying out until a court ordered her to do so last year.

Under the new rules, borrowers seeking loan forgiveness will have much higher hurdles to clear. They will need to prove that their college made a deceptive statement “with knowledge of its false, misleading, or deceptive nature or with reckless disregard for the truth,” and that they relied on the claim in deciding to enroll or stay at the school. They will also need to show that the deception harmed them financially.

There is currently no time limit on submitting claims, but Ms. DeVos set a three-year deadline from the date that students graduate or leave their school.

Since DeVos was narrowly confirmed by the Senate to lead the Education Department in early 2017, she has “refused to follow existing law and cancel the loans for these students, leaving them in debt they can’t get away from,” Eileen Connor, legal director of the Project on Predatory Student Lending, told the Times. “Now, she’s shredding a set of fair, common-sense rules that level the playing field between students and those who take advantage of them.”

“The rule takes a scythe to defrauded borrowers,” Weingarten said of DeVos’s policy. “For many affected students, disproportionately veterans, first-generation college-goers, and people of color, it’s a double whammy—not only are their finances and careers wrecked by worthless degrees, any chance at justice is then callously denied to them by the secretary.”

Weingarten charged that with these new regulations, “Betsy DeVos has again shown just how determined she is to hurt students while helping her friends who run failing for-profit colleges.”

In a statement to The Associated Press, Yan Cao—a fellow at The Century Fund, a progressive think tank—concurred.

“With this policy overhaul,” said Cao, “Secretary DeVos has cemented her legacy as best friend to predatory colleges and enemy to the students they rip off.”

James Kvaal, president of the non-profit Institute for College Access and Success, explained to the AP how DeVos’s policies will make it harder for students to get debt relief.

Students, he said, would be required “to submit evidence that students do not have and cannot get” and file their claims as individuals, rather than as part of a group that was defrauded.

There also would be a three-year limitation on filing a claim, either from the date of a student’s graduation or the school’s closure. “That will weed out about 30 percent of claims that would otherwise prevail,” Kvaal said, citing the department’s own estimates.

“By leaving students on the hook for colleges’ illegal actions, today’s rule sends a clear message that there will be little or no consequences for returning to the misrepresentations and deceptions that characterized the for-profit college boom,” he said.

While some advocates for students swiftly denounced DeVos for the overhaul, the Education Department’s announcement was welcomed by Career Education Colleges and Universities, which represents for-profit colleges. The group’s executive vice president, Michael Dakduk, told the AP that “we think it provides fairness and due process to all parties involved.”

However, its remains unclear if the changes will actually take effect. According to the Times, “Consumer advocates said they planned to challenge the new rules in court.”

Abby Shafroth, a lawyer with the National Consumer Law Center, warned the Times that the Trump administration’s rollback will “encourage schools to break the law, engage in risky practices that lead to abrupt closures, and harm students with impunity.”

From Kentucky Miners to Toys ‘R’ Us Employees, Workers Confront Corporate Greed

Negin Owliaei, 

Truthout

PUBLISHED

August 28, 2019

https://truthout.org/articles/from-kentucky-miners-to-toys-r-us-employees-workers-confront-corporate-greed/

For the last few weeks, all eyes have been on Kentucky as coal miners blockade a railroad in protest of what’s essentially highway robbery. The coal miners in Harlan County are demanding their unpaid wages from Blackjewel, the company that employed them before suddenly declaring bankruptcy earlier this year. Their physical blockade of a train full of coal is critical given that Wall Street investors are still looking to eke out money from Blackjewel — even if it means leaving workers without the paychecks they’ve already earned.

The standoff is among the latest instances highlighting a system that funnels the wealth created by workers upwards to the elite. The statistics are startling. Incomes of the top 1 percent of U.S. households have grown more than seven times more quickly than those of the bottom 20 percent of households over the past four decades. CEO compensation rose by 940 percent since 1978, the Economic Policy Institute reports. Meanwhile, the typical worker’s wages grew by only 12 percent.

Workers — from retail employees to rideshare drivers, teachers to bank tellers — are taking on the structures that allow this lopsided economy to thrive. Last year, more than 485,000 workers were involved in major work stoppages, the Bureau of Labor Services found — the highest number since 1986. They’re taking action against the insatiable corporate greed and predatory financial forces widening the chasm between the elite and everyone else.

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What does that corporate greed look like? It’s industries that rake in billions and still pay their workers poverty wages, as airlines do. That’s why dozens of airline catering workers were arrested outside American Airlines headquarters in Fort Worth, Texas, earlier this month, announcing that one job should be enough for them to live with dignity, especially during what their union calls “a time of unprecedented prosperity” for the industry.

The workers aren’t employed directly by American Airlines, but by a subcontractor that provides the company’s in-flight meals and beverages. But they know this type of system is essentially run as a scam — companies can pit subcontractors against each other to get the lowest price, all while avoiding direct accountability to the workers that allow them to prosper. Meanwhile, CEOs like American Airlines’ Doug Parker rake in nearly $12 million in annual compensation.

Thousands of airline workers have authorized a strike if negotiations continue to fail. Despite the fact that they negotiate directly with the subcontractors, workers know where the power lies, which is why they’ve taken their fight to American Airlines’s front door.

This is the same logic that animated the Uber and Lyft strikes, timed to the public offerings of their companies earlier this year. While executives were set to become instant billionaires as the companies went public, workers went on strike to show investors who actually generated the wealth and to ensure their concerns were front and center.

Like the airline industry, rideshare companies have found a way to avoid any responsibility to ensure their workers live with dignity. In a Securities and Exchange Commission filing ahead of the public offering, Uber essentially admitted that its business model relies on misclassifying drivers as independent contractors rather than employees, keeping the company from being required to provide a minimum wage, much less health care or other benefits.

Drivers were keen to contrast this fundamentally anti-worker business model with the sky-high profits expected by company executives, including disgraced former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick. Lenny Sanchez, a rideshare driver and co-founder of Chicago Rideshare Advocates, said he wished he could tell Kalanick how drivers reacted when they heard how much he had to gain. “They’re like, ‘I have to work. I’m away from my home for 14 hours, six to seven days a week … and this guy is going to make [billions] overnight.’”

It’s no secret that an economic system that allows executives to make such exorbitant profit off the backs of its workers is exploitative. But some worker campaigns are also pointing out how disparities between worker and CEO pay add a new level of risk into the economy, encouraging executives to pursue profit over absolutely everything else.

Bank workers, for example, are highlighting how the inequality baked into financial companies hurt the country’s economic systems as a whole. The Committee for Better Banks is a coalition of bank employees, community and consumer groups, and labor organizations fighting for better conditions for bank workers and advocating for more protections for bank customers. Bank workers in the coalition have blown the whistle on predatory bank practices, like a harmful quota system used by Wells Fargo connected to the fabrication of millions of additional bank accounts for depositors.

Bank workers are the ones both most motivated and most knowledgeable to regulate from below, as the Committee for Better Banks argues. That regulation is critical given that missteps from banks can bring down the entire global economy. Bank executives are more focused on a feedback loop of tax cuts, stock buybacks and inflated CEO compensation, further distorting inequality within their industry. Building power among bank workers helps the entire economy.

For retail workers, taking on predatory institutions means challenging the private equity vultures that profit off the job losses in their sector. Thanks to Wall Street’s “investments,” more than 1.3 million retail jobs have been lost over the last decade, a recent report found.

Toys ‘R’ Us workers, among the most affected by private equity’s greed, staged several protests, including a mock graveyard in the New York lobby of Bain Capital, one of the firms that drove the company into bankruptcy. Those workers initially didn’t receive severance pay when they were laid off — despite the fact that the company’s executives took home millions in bonuses.

The retail workers received a boost from public sector employees, who used their own financial power to challenge the companies that play an active role in destroying the well-being of their fellow workers. State pension funds across the country that had invested in KKR, Bain and Vornado Realty Trust — the profiteers who benefitted off the Toys ‘R’ Us bankruptcy — threatened to divest their ample capital.

“My teacher friends are disgusted,” Ann Marie Reinhart, a former Toys ‘R’ Us employee and an organizer for United for Respect, said. “They say that we’re all hard-working people, and it makes them sick to know their pensions are funded by people losing their jobs.”

Thanks to protests from retail workers and the solidarity from public sector workers, KKR and Bain Capital eventually agreed to put $20 million toward a worker severance fund.

All of this organizing has gotten attention from politicians, like Senators Elizabeth Warren, Tammy Baldwin and Sherrod Brown, and Reps. Mark Pocan and Pramila Jayapal — the sponsors of the Stop Wall Street Looting Act introduced in Congress last month. A direct response to the role of private equity and hedge funds in the demise of retailers like Toys ‘R’ Us, the legislation puts safeguards in place to protect the 5.8 million workers employed by private equity-owned companies, from newspapers to nursing homes.

Corporate leaders are also taking notice. In a recent statement from Business Roundtable, 181 CEOs announced a shared commitment to “investing in our employees” and “supporting the communities in which we work” — additions to their past mottos that put shareholders over everyone else. They may think a populist tone will help stem off criticism about heightened inequality, especially as concerns about a recession grow. But their statements amount to embarrassingly little, and far too late. Look to worker organizing, not CEO platitudes, for the path toward a new, equitable economy.

Five Reasons for Workers to Celebrate This Labor Day

Rebecca Burns, 

In These Times

PUBLISHED

August 31, 2019

https://truthout.org/articles/five-reasons-for-workers-to-celebrate-this-labor-day/

Labor Day often gets short shrift as a worker’s holiday. Marked primarily by sales on patio furniture and mattresses, the day also has a more muddled history than May Day, which stands for internationalism and solidarity among the working class. Labor Day, by contrast, was declared a federal holiday in 1894 by President Grover Cleveland, fresh off his administration’s violent suppression of the Pullman railroad strike.

But Labor Day was first celebrated twelve years earlier, when a coalition of socialists and labor activists organized a mass march in New York City calling for shorter hours, safer working conditions, increased pay and a labor holiday. On September 5, 1882, 10,000 people took to the streets of New York instead.

That history, plus the simple fact that workers deserve more than one holiday, makes Labor Day worth celebrating. And this year, there are more reasons than usual for working people to rejoice.

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The Teacher Strike Wave Rolls On

The wave of teacher strikes that began in red states last year has continued apace in some of the biggest U.S. cities. Earlier this year, Los Angeles teachers wrung a hard-won deal from their school district through a week-long strike.

A first-ever charter strike in Chicago last year kicked off a domino effect—more than 700 Chicago charter teachers at 22 different campuses have walked off the job in the past year, and they’re winning things previously unthinkable in the traditionally union-free charter industry.

An impending teacher strike in Las Vegas is drawing some creative solidarity from students, and the Chicago Teachers Union—whose 2012 walkout arguably laid the groundwork for renewed teacher militancy—could be on the verge of another massive strike.

Workers Are Winning Strikes in the Private Sector, Too

There’s an important caveat to statistics showing that the number of striking workers is at a two-decade high: Most of this strike activity is still limited to the public sector.

In the private sector, there is not yet an equivalent strike wave. There are, however, some encouraging signs. A rare, coordinated strike by workers at nearly 30 hotels in Chicago ended largely in victory (workers at one hotel are still holding out). This spring, locomotive plant workers in Erie, Pennsylvania staged a nine-day strike against the company that purchased their facility and attempted to impose significantly lower wages for new hires. Negotiations continued into the summer, and the deal the union eventually accepted included some concessions. But the strike against a two-tier wage system—long-ago conceded by most manufacturing unions—was an important sign of life in the once-militant sector.

Labor Support for Green New Deal Is on the Rise

To hear the mainstream media tell it, blue-collar workers are united in their opposition to climate action. In June, Politico published an article citing local labor leaders who leveled a dire warning at Democrats: the Green New Deal is pushing members into the Republican camp.

In fact, a survey released this year from the think tank Data for Progress found that 62 percent of current union members back the GND. That figure suggests that while climate activists certainly can’t take labor’s backing as a given, there’s substantial support from workers—and the biggest factor in growing this support is organizing with labor to ensure that the Green New Deal benefits workers, and that they’re at the core of the fight to pass it.

This year, the Green New Deal picked up major endorsements from the Service Employees International Union and the Association of Flight Attendants led by president Sara Nelson. In May, Nelson spoke to In These Times about how Green New Deal advocates can engage labor:

Make labor central to the discussion, including labor rights, labor protections and labor expertise. We must recognize that labor unions were among the first to fight for the environment because it was our workspaces that had pollutants, our communities that industry polluted. Let’s not dismiss the labor movement. Let’s recognize and engage the infrastructure and experience of the labor movement to make this work.

Rank-And-File Reformers Are Gaining Traction

Speaking of Sara Nelson, her star has been rising since she called for a general strike to end the government shutdown in January, and she could potentially end up succeeding Richard Trumka as the next president of the AFL-CIO.

While they’re still few in number, it’s a breath of fresh air to see national labor leaders who come out of the rank-and-file use their positions to encourage, rather than stifle, independent action by workers, happily break bread with socialists and readily draw connections between labor issues and those of climate change and immigration.

Labor Could Actually Make Gains Through the 2020 Elections

Let’s be honest: Presidential elections have long been a dead-end for unions. Awarding early endorsements without member input and spending millions of dollars on behalf of candidates who won’t even talk about workers’ rights is not a winning strategy.

This year could be different.

With Democratic candidates scrambling to tack to the left, the primaries are also putting important labor policy ideas back on the table. As Jeremy Gantz reported in July, 2020 candidates are rushing to embrace worker-friendly policies in order to win labor’s support.

Bernie Sanders’ Workplace Democracy Plan, in particular, includes ideas that should get a full hearing—ending “at-will” employment, expanding workers’ rights to strike and permitting collective bargaining at the sectoral level.

Sanders is also using his campaign infrastructure to turn supporters out for strikes and labor actions, another welcome development for labor when it comes to presidential campaign season.

The U.S. labor movement may still be under siege, thanks to powerful anti-union forces, including the Trump administration. But with approval of unions at a 15-year high, and a wave of labor militancy on the rise, working people have plenty to celebrate this Labor Day.

Oil and Gas Lobby Split by Trump Rollback of Federal Methane Rules

Jessica Piper, 

Center for Responsive Politics

PUBLISHED

August 31, 2019

https://truthout.org/articles/oil-and-gas-lobby-split-by-trump-rollback-of-federal-methane-rules/

The Environmental Protection Agency announced Thursday plans to roll back federal methane rules, reversing standards enacted under President Barack Obama to reduce emissions of the greenhouse gas that is a major contributor to climate change.

The move had split the oil and gas lobbies in Washington. Major companies such as ExxonMobil and Shell publicly encouraged the Trump administration to leave the standards in place. But the American Petroleum Institute, the industry’s biggest industry trade association, supported the revisions, arguing that the EPA had not complied with the proper statutes when it first implemented the regulation in 2016.

EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler said in a statement that the rule change would remove “unnecessary and duplicative regulatory burdens from the oil and gas industry.” The agency also called into question whether it had the authority to regulate methane emissions without first classifying the gas as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act.

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Environmental groups chided the rollback, raising concerns about increased pollution. Methane only makes up about 10 percent of U.S. emissions but traps about 28 times as much heat as carbon dioxide over the course of a century, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

“This proposal is irresponsible, dangerous and out of step with calls from oil and gas industry leaders to preserve and strengthen federal methane rules,” said Matt Watson, vice president for energy at the Environmental Defense Fund, in a statement.

Most major oil companies now acknowledge the threat of climate change, and many companies’ shareholders have pushed them to reduce emissions.

Shell, which spent $3.7 million on lobbying through the end of the second quarter, broke with precedent earlier this year when it called on the Trump administration to tighten, rather than loosen, the methane regulations. The company’s president, Gretchen Watkins, said at the time that the regulation helped the industry “develop better, more affordable methane technology.”

Exxon and BP were among the other energy giants to come out publicly in support of the methane rule. The two companies spent a combined $7.8 million on lobbying during the first half of 2019.

But Exxon, BP and Shell are also members of API, which opposed the regulations and supported the EPA’s latest revision.

In a statement Thursday, Erik Milito, API’s vice president of upstream and industry operations, concurred with Wheeler’s assessment, saying the methane regulations were unnecessary because the industry was already focused on reducing emissions.

“We support EPA’s efforts to adhere to its statutory obligations under the Clean Air Act,” Milito said.

API spent $3.5 million on lobbying through June 30, working on a number of issues including methane regulations. The trade association’s president is Mike Sommers, former chief of staff to former House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), and its top communications official is former Trump aide Megan Bloomgren. Neither Sommers nor Bloomgren is formally registered as a lobbyist.

A second industry group, the Independent Petroleum Association of America, likewise commended the EPA’s decision to roll back the standards. The association spent $767,648 on lobbying through the second quarter, on issues including methane emissions.

Wheeler, who took the helm at the EPA last year, previously worked as an energy lobbyist. As recently as 2017, his clients included the coal producer Murray Energy, for whom he lobbied against the regulation of greenhouse gas emissions.

The methane revision is not the first time the Trump administration has rolled back environmental regulations, and many previous initiatives have also been met with mixed industry support. In May, the EPA lifted a ban on the use of E15, an ethanol gasoline blend known for contributing to smog. That decision was lauded by farm groups but criticized by members of the oil industry, including API.

The administration has also proposed weakening vehicle fuel-efficiency standards. While automakers had grumbled at the Obama-era regulations, many in the industry felt that Trump’s proposed rollback went too far, and have sided with the state of California in an ongoing lawsuit over the rule.

OpenSecrets reporter Karl Evers-Hillstrom contributed to this report.

What Happens to Carbon Offsets When the Amazon Is on Fire?

Lisa Song & Paula Moura, 

ProPublica

PUBLISHED

August 31, 2019

https://truthout.org/articles/what-happens-to-carbon-offsets-when-the-amazon-is-on-fire/

Next month, California regulators will decide whether to support a plan for tropical forest carbon offsets, a controversial measure that could allow companies like Chevron, which is headquartered there, to write off some of their greenhouse gas emissions by paying people in countries like Brazil to preserve trees. The Amazon rainforest has long been viewed as a natural testing ground for this proposed Tropical Forest Standard, which, if approved, would likely expand to countries throughout the world.

Now that record fires are engulfing the Amazon, started by humans seeking to log, mine and farm on the land, supporters are using the international emergency to double down on their case for offsets. The Environmental Defense Fund posted a petition urging that state officials endorse the standard: “The people — and wildlife — who call the Amazon home are running for their lives,” it said. “The entire world is counting on [the board] taking action.” Ivaneide Bandeira Cardozo, who helped manage a Brazilian offset project that was derailed by illegal logging, said, “People who are against carbon credits are not suffering and don’t want to keep the forest standing.”

But the devastating blaze encapsulates a key weakness of offsets that scientists have been warning about for the past decade: that they are too vulnerable to political whims and disasters like wildfires. As a recent ProPublica investigation noted, if you give corporations a pass to pollute by saying their emissions are being canceled out somewhere else, you need a way to guarantee that continues to be the case.

Because carbon dioxide lingers in the atmosphere for about 100 years, protected forests must remain intact for a century to offset the pollution; this requirement is written into the Tropical Forest Standard. That plan can go up in smoke the moment a country elects a president like Jair Bolsonaro, who took office in Brazil in January and de-funded environmental agencies, cut back on enforcement and encouraged the clearing of the Amazon for beef and soy production. Indigenous communities who live in the Amazon report a surge of intruders mining and logging on their land.

People have always exploited the forest illegally, “but in the last few months, it has increased significantly,” said Camões Boaventura, a federal prosecutor in the Brazilian state of Pará. Meanwhile, he said, environmental officials are struggling to pay for the gas they need to drive around enforcing regulations. Gisele Bleggi, a federal prosecutor in Rondônia, said Bolsonaro didn’t have to change a single environmental law to encourage deforestation. “Once you stop giving money for surveillance … the system it protects will collapse.”

One of the biggest sources of funding for the rainforest, the Amazon Fund, was suspended after Norway and Germany withdrew support worth $72 million. The fund has provided more than $1 billion over the past decade and is contingent on minimizing deforestation, but it doesn’t provide offsets that allow others to pollute. The countries suspended their payments amid a recent spike in deforestation and after Bolsonaro interfered with how the money would be used. In early August, Bolsonaro fired the head of the space agency after it released data showing rising deforestation.

The Amazon fires also showcase a second hurdle in making offsets work: For them to be a valid reflection of how much pollution is being canceled out, the math needs to be accurate. This accounting is especially hard to do after wildfires, because they stifle a forest’s regrowth far more than previously estimated. Scientists are just starting to understand this impact, which is hard to quantify and has led the Amazon’s carbon content to be overestimated, creating the potential to give offsets more credit than they’re worth.

This month, California state Sen. Bob Wieckowski urged the state’s Air Resources Board to reject the Tropical Forest Standard because it “risks producing a landslide of false credits.” His letter referenced ProPublica’s reporting and academic research that cited the challenges of ensuring credits are real. His letter followed an earlier one from California lawmakers who cautiously supported the standard but told the board to exercise “vigorous and proactive monitoring” to ensure offsets are valid.

Jeff Conant, who directs the international forests program at the advocacy group Friends of the Earth, said Brazil absolutely “should receive some money from the global north,” but not as offsets that give companies a “loophole” to continue emitting carbon. Conant said the offsets debate has been “a distraction” from what he considers the real solution: strong regulations and keeping fossil fuels in the ground. “We’ve been saying for over a decade that we need regulation, we need demand-side measures, we need to take responsibility for our own consumption up here in the north,” he said.

Both the Environmental Defense Fund and Conant support a California assembly bill designed to ensure the state government doesn’t buy paper, furniture or other forest products made from deforestation in the tropics. Companies with state contracts would need to certify that their products didn’t destroy sensitive ecosystems like the Amazon.

In Brazil, experts widely credit regulations as the driving force that brought deforestation to a record low in 2012; then, the federal government relaxed its stringent rules and enforcement, and it began to creep up, years before Bolsonaro took office. Brazil is “going backwards in the bigger picture,” said Matthew Hansen, a satellite and mapping expert at the University of Maryland. “I think that’s the bigger story.”

The wildfires have worsened fears that the Amazon is being pushed toward a tipping point where it will turn into a savanna, with devastating consequences for climate change and ecosystems. Luiz Aragão, who heads the remote sensing division at Brazil’s space agency, said 2019 has seen the highest number of fires since 2010, and it’s just the start of the fire season, which ends in November. He said the human-set fires — which were almost all started on agricultural or newly cleared land — will spread into healthy, intact areas of the rainforest, and it will take time to figure out how much of the forest is burned. There are no reports yet that any of the offset projects located in the Amazon are on fire.

Many supporters of offsets, including Cardozo, who runs an indigenous rights organization in Rondônia, also support more traditional conservation aid like the Amazon Fund, but they say offsets are necessary because rich countries aren’t willing to provide enough funding to preserve forests without getting something in return.

As global leaders discussed the Amazon over the weekend at the G7 meeting and pledged $22 million to help fight the fires, prosecutors in Brazil are eyeing measures they can take even in the face of a hostile presidential administration. Boaventura, who works for the Public Ministry, a powerful independent federal agency, said his team is investigating the role that Bolsonaro and national environmental agencies have had on increasing deforestation and fires.

“Once this link is proven, we want to hold the agencies and authorities that justified this destructive action against society accountable,” Boaventura said.

Lisa Song

Lisa Song is a reporter covering the environment, energy and climate change at ProPublica.

Monsanto Emails Show Employees Wanted to “Beat the Shit” Out of Concerned Moms

https://truthout.org/articles/monsanto-emails-show-employees-wanted-to-beat-the-shit-out-of-concerned-moms/

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!

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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.

The New UN Climate Report: We're Screwed

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHdcpxmJ6vg