BAYER BOSSES, AND MON(STER)SANTO MISERY IN MISSOURI?

Before we get started with this week's blogs, there are a few housekeeping chores that I need to mention before we get to it. Firstly, I have encountered yet another technical glitch in our increasingly unstable software world, this time on our website admin page. Normally, I schedule blogs on Sundays as I go through emails, sort them, and then decide which ones to blog about. On the admin page there is an "edit" button that allows me to set the date and times for this to occur, but my attempts to use it and schedule blogs today have been met with nothing but frustration. Accordingly I am simply publishing all this weeks' blogs (sans the Honourable Mentions Tidbits, which we'll get to in a moment), all at once. I hope you'll understand, as I don't know what is wrong nor when (nor if) it is fixable.  Secondly, today (Sunday) is the Orthodox Palm Sunday and begins our holy week, so my second reason for scheduling things this way is to accommodate for that. I had intended to frontload this week anyway, with the blogs appearing on Monday, Tuesday, and  Wednesday respectively, rather than Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Thirdly,l I had not intended to do an honourable mention this coming Saturday anyway, but to save them for the following weekend. We also have had a cycle in just incredibly bad stormy weather on top of everything else, so Shiloh and I are both a bit worn out from that, so I hope all of you will understand if my blogs this week turn out to be either shorter, or somewhat lacking in lucidity.

With that in mind, it's been a while since we've had an update on GMOs and  the efforts of Big Agriculture to continue to attempt the technocratic substitute of frankenfoods for the real thing, to pollute the soil with questionable pesticides, and in general, to engineer hybrids, like the recent combination of pig DNA with soybean DNA (I kid you not! Q.v.: USDA Approves New Frankenfood Made by Splicing Pig Genes into Soybeans, article courtesy of W.G. with our thanks.) As always, there has been little to no intergenerational testing of the safety of this "product", nor any forthcoming really good reason why anyone would want to splice pigs and soybeans.

In any case, Big Agriculture, which we less-than-lovingly refer to on this website alternatively as I.G. Farbensanto, or Mon(ster)santo, has been up to some interesting tricks recently, as the world has been justifiably distracted by threats of war and more war. We have two articles for consideration, and both of them concern I.G. Farbensanto, and its two most infamous members: Bayer, and Bayer's recently acquired stake in Mon(ster)santo, the Missouri-based agricultural firm responsible for... well, need we really rehearse the long litany?

Bayer, it seems, is getting somewhat desperate, and is willing to try anything according to this story shared by M.W. (with our thanks, once again):

Pharmaceutical giant Bayer is getting rid of bosses and asking nearly 100,000 workers to ‘self-organize’ to save $2.15 billion

Yes, you read that headline correctly; Bayer, taking a cue from Ilya Prigogine and non-equilibrium thermodynamics, wants its management to "self-organize":

In a bid to claw back $2.15 billion, the struggling pharmaceutical giant Bayer CEO is doing away with middle managers and 99% of the company’s 1,362-page corporate handbook, allowing nearly 100,000 employees to self-manage.

Bayer, the 160-year-old German company known for inventing aspirin, has been stuck in a rut: Its market cap has plunged to two-decade lows—spurred by its so-far disastrous acquisition of Monsanto—and its CEO Bill Anderson believes that flattening hierarchy and slashing corporate bureaucracy could be key to turning it around.

When Anderson took the helm last June, he learned that the company’s rules and procedures handbook was longer thanWar and Peace. It’s why, he says, when he listened to feedback from the firm’s workforce, the same complaints surfaced repeatedly.

A handbook longer than War and Peace (and probably nowhere near as entertaining)?  One wonders if this might be one of the problems at Boeing. But I digress.  Beyond the management morass, there is another problem lurking:

To top that off, since its acquisition of Monsanto in 2018, Bayer has been fighting thousands of claims that its Roundup weed killer causes cancer.

In other words, by buying Mon(ster)santo, Bayer bought itself a shipload of trouble in the form of lawsuits, from angry victims alleging physical ailments from using its products, to angry farmers that suffered under Mon(ster)santo's oft-alleged legal regime of suing farmers for allegedly using its seeds without license if a plant was found on that farmer's land that could only have sprouted from a Mon(ster)santo seed. On top of all this, the Big Agriculture companies were also  spearheading the drive for the doctrine of "substantial equivalence" for their genetically engineered seeds. This doctrine, eventually embraced in the late 1980s by the Food and Disease Administration...er... the Fouled Drugs Administration... (sigh) I mean the Federal Disinformation Administration... oh, you know what I mean, the FDA, said that GMO seeds were "substantially equivalent" to their non-genetically engineered regular old-fashioned seeds, for the purposes of human health and nutrition. No long term inter-generational scientific studies needed. Sound familiar? Note how that was replayed during the cofib planscamdemic and the mRNA quackcines: simply declare an engineered product to be the same as the nature-produced thing (be it a food or an immuno-response) and it is the same. At least, for us plebes. But of course, they're not the same when it comes to those all important patents and licensing-royalty agreements, in which case the ordinary natural seed is not patentable and not near the money maker. See how it works? Replace Mother nature with something poisonous, and charge more money for it, because your company did a lot of expensive research on how to make it more poisonous, and unable to reproduce itself.

But like the cofib quackcine narrative, the "substantial equivalence" narrative is unravelling as the adverse reactions keep piling up, and too many people keep noticing the correlations. So what to do when you're a big corporation facing retribution from an injured public? You seek special privileges - patents of nobility and so on - from the government, an idea which, the last time I recall anything about this problem, was still unconstitutional, even though the federal and several state goobernments have long ago shredded that idea (article shared by W.G.):

Missouri House backs legal shield for weedkiller maker facing thousands of cancer-related lawsuits

And lest you're in any doubt about the seriousness of the situation for Bayer, check this out:

he manufacturer of a popular weedkiller won support Wednesday from the Missouri House for a proposal that could shield it from costly lawsuits alleging it failed to warn customers its product could cause cancer.

The House vote marked an important but incremental victory for chemical giant Bayer, which acquired an avalanche of legal claims involving the weedkiller Roundup when it bought the product’s original St. Louis-area-based producer, Monsanto.

The legislation now heads to the Missouri Senate with several weeks remaining in the annual legislative session. Bayer pursued similar legislation this year in Idaho and Iowa, where it has mining and manufacturing facilities, but it fell short in both states.

Note that this sought-after privilege is exactly the same as what Big Pharma has sought for its quackcines: immunity from  civil and criminal prosecution for its questionable products. And note also, that this immunity is simply for glyphosate pesticide, used quite often in conjunction with the genetically-modified seeds and crops themselves. We have as yet seen little civil litigation against the genetically modified food, though there have been some suggestive studies out of Europe. I suspect, therefore, that what this effort represents is the camel's nose: get the immunity for the current problem, and any subsequent problems will be easier to obtain a similar immunity.

There's a lesson here, and the lesson is that neither Big Pharma, nor Big Agra, should be immune from responsibility for poisoning anyone.

See you on the flip side...