For all of its flaws, the United States has one of the best governments that has ever been developed. This is because the system is rife with checks and balances, where one part of the country or government can constrain another part from acting out of line, and the public has a voice that can frequently be mobilized if things become too egregious and bring everything back to balance.
This framework naturally leads to bad actors taking a multi-pronged approach where they attempt to co-opt every single thing that constrains their misdeeds. While challenging, this can eventually be done with concerted effort. For example, during COVID-19, virtually every institution that should have prevented the unconstitutional lockdowns, the top-down suppression of unpatented COVID-19 treatments, and the COVID-19 vaccine mandates (let alone their approvals) failed as every institution worked in concert to advance the COVID cartel—resulting in arguably the worst “public health” crime in history.
Yet, even here, due to the independent media, liberty-minded politicians, and the egregiousness of the COVID policies, a check was eventually able to neutralize the COVID cartel. Furthermore, beyond the COVID vaccine program failing to accomplish its primary goal (an annual mandated vaccine and mainstreaming mRNA technology) the trust they’ve long used to market medical products has been shattered and longterm, COVID is now arguably costing the medical industry far more than was made from the pandemic—all of which illustrates our political system has a robust series of checks once things get too out of line.
Exempting Liability
Since so many institutions within our society have been co-opted by the pharmaceutical industry, it has both become vital to find alternative options (e.g., creating a robust independent media) and to protect the viable options that remain.
One of those has always been the courts, as frequently, if a bad actor steps too far out of line, a legal framework exists to constrain their actions. For this reason, a holy grail of the industries which profit from poisoning us has long been to take away the ability of the courts to check them by passing laws (or securing court rulings) that shield them from liability and hence terminate the lawsuits that can stop their egregious conduct.
For example, the whole-cell DPT vaccine was long recognized to be a particularly dangerous vaccine which frequently caused brain damage and death, yet for decades the medical community and government covered it up, and industry refused to bring a safer (but more expensive) acellular DPT vaccine to market.
As a grassroots awareness of the dangers of the vaccine spread across the country (aided by a 1982 NBC program) more and more lawsuits were filed against vaccine manufacturers, the majority of which were for DPT injuries.
Information provided by the three commercial manufacturers of diphtheria and tetanus toxoids and pertussis (DPT) vaccine indicates a striking increase in the number of lawsuits filed against them alleging damage caused by the vaccine. Only one such case was filed in 1978, whereas 73 were filed in 1984. During the seven-year period from 1978 to 1984, the average amount claimed per suit has risen from $10 million to $46.5 million. If the current trend continues, suits will pose an increasing threat to the availability of DTP vaccines in the United States.
Because of this, DPT manufacturers rapidly left the market (e.g., due to rising liability insurance costs) and by 1984, only one remained. As such, something needed to be done to protect the vaccine supply, and a deal was brokered between advocates for vaccine injured children (along with their supporters within Congress) and the pharmaceutical industry. After some work, a framework was put together which was intended to help the vaccine-injured (as lawsuits for vaccine injuries were a grueling and not always successful process), create safer vaccines, and transfer liability from the vaccine manufacturers to the US government so the manufacturers could remain in business.
On one hand, this act accomplished positive things (e.g., vaccine manufacturers became required to list lots as previously ambiguous lot numbers had been used to escape liability for injuries, a safer DPT vaccine was finally brought to market, and VAERS was created). Conversely however, since many provisions of the act designed to protect the vaccine injured were at the H.H.S. Secretary’s discretion and the government ultimately paid for injury compensation. It created a massive incentive to deny that injuries could occur, and as a result, most of the acts’ intended provisions failed to manifest or were systematically undermined.
As such, there’s still very little reliable data on vaccine injury (e.g., VAERS was systematically undermined as the government did not want a publicly available injury database), the science linking vaccines to specific injuries that was supposed to be done never got done, and most importantly it’s nearly impossible for vaccine injuries “not supported by science” to be compensated in the vaccine court. Worst still, a 2011 Supreme Court ruling further gutted the act, making it impossible for vaccine manufacturers to be directly sued, even in cases of grossly defective vaccines that the 1986 law had specifically intended to allow.
Note: this is somewhat similar to how the highly contentious 2015 California law, which took away religious exemptions to vaccination (effectively mandating them), was signed by the governor under the understanding that medical exemptions would always be honored, shortly after which a new law was passed which banned medical exemptions to vaccination in California.
Conversely, this birthed a massive industry, as removing the primary check against the industry (lawsuits for injuries they caused) incentivized producing a glut of new vaccines to enter the market and removed any incentive to ensure their safety. As such, an apparatus gradually developed to ensure investors could expect a successful return on upcoming vaccines by ensuring they would always be approved and mandated upon our children, eventually culminating in the COVID catastrophe.
Fortunately, as our system has a robust series of checks and balances, even though a primary one failed (injury lawsuits), eventually the unrestrained proliferation of injurious vaccines went so far a new check emerged—public loss of trust in the vaccine apparatus, MAHA’s political ascendency and RFK becoming a H.H.S. Secretary who amongst other things has begun to implement the key safety provisions of the 1986 Act every Secretary before him refused to do.
Note: one of the remarkable results of RFK’s tenure and the H.H.S. at last no longer green-lighting (unproven) vaccines for all of America’s children is that the vaccine industry can no longer obtain investor funding for new vaccines (which their trade group has noted is creating an existential threat to the industry).
I mention all of this to provide some context as to when many are quite concerned by the recent push to exempt pesticides from lawsuits.
Monsanto’s Legacy
Monsanto (founded in 1901 where it first produced the controversial artificial sweetener saccharin) has long been one of my least favorite corporations, as it routinely conducts business practices which are both extremely damaging and cruel. For example:
1. Monsanto was heavily invested in dioxins (and related organochlorines like DDT), which they knew were extremely toxic but claimed were “safe.” The most notorious of these was Agent Orange, a potent defoliating (vegetation destroying) agent that was mass-sprayed on Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam (e.g., 12% of South Vietnam) to starve the local population and eliminate hiding places for the Vietcong (for which Monsanto and Dow Chemical were the primary producers). Unfortunately, while the military claimed Agent Orange was safe, it was highly toxic and has since persisted for decades in the environment.
Because of this, Agent Orange caused at least 400,000 deaths and 500,000, often severe, birth defects in Vietnam (with non-Western estimates showing roughly ten times as much harm), and with most of the victims (and their descendants) left with no recourse and a lifetime of death and disability. Likewise, it also severely harmed many Vietnam veterans (e.g., it frequently caused cancer—and in this manner killed a few friends of mine). This in turn, eventually resulted in a 180 million dollar class action settlement (of which Monsanto had to pay approximately 81 million).
Ultimately, while the two components of Agent Orange had some toxicity, the primary issue with Agent Orange was TCDD, a highly toxic dioxin produced during manufacturing, which contaminated the final product, allowing Monsanto to argue Agent Orange was “safe” since TCDD was not part of it. This is a critical point, as Dow had warned Monsanto of the need to reduce TCDD contamination, but Monsanto’s contained much higher levels due to them using a high temperature manufacturing process (which Monsanto’s internal memos described as “dirty”) to accelerate production. As such, depending on the manufacturer and batch, there was a roughly 1000-fold variation in Agent Orange TCDD content.
In 2004, Monsanto spokesman Jill Montgomery said Monsanto should not be liable at all for injuries or deaths caused by Agent Orange, saying: “We are sympathetic with people who believe they have been injured and understand their concern to find the cause, but reliable scientific evidence indicates that Agent Orange is not the cause of serious long-term health effects.
Note: I recently learned from an excellent vaccine safety book (that I’m currently reviewing for an upcoming article) that the same US agencies and scientists (e.g., the CDC and the IOM) who covered up vaccine injuries also spent decades claiming there was “no evidence” for much of Agent Orange’s toxicity.
Additionally, there were many other issues with Agent Orange being leaked into the environment. For example, at their production site in West Virginia, Monsanto routinely disposed of TCDD contaminated wastes in landfills and waterways, polluting the area, and eventually decades later, in 2012, paid $84 million for a class action lawsuit over this (as the residents had experienced a variety of health problems). Likewise, in the 1970s, Monsanto offloaded TCDD containing waste (an impurity in Agent Orange which was its most toxic dioxin) to a company in Missouri without warning them of its toxicity, after which it was disposed of throughout the soil of a popular Missouri riverside resort town (another friend lived next to)—rendering it permanently uninhabitable (for which Monsanto ultimately payed 33 million).
Note: a classic symptom of dioxin poisoning (often seen in these contaminated areas) is chloracne.
2. Polychlorinated Biphenyls (PCBs) are extremely resistant to degradation, and hence have many industrial uses (e.g., for insulating, cooling, lubricating or hydraulic fluids or as additives to many common products). Unfortunately, they also persist for decades if not centuries in the environment and are highly toxic (e.g., they often cause cancer, immune suppression, reproductive and developmental issues, endocrine disruption, neurological impairments, liver damage, skin and eye conditions, and cardiovascular and metabolic disorders).
Note: the most extraordinary PCB story I know of is that Kenya had a longstanding problem with thieves dismantling power transformers to extract the durable PCB oil and use it to fry street foods.
Monsanto began producing PCBs in 1929, and before long produced over 99% of America’s. Despite knowing their toxicity as early as the 1930s (and definitely by the 1960s), Monsanto continually claimed they were safe, and only stopped selling them in 1977 shortly before a 1979 Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) ban due to their toxicity and environmental persistence.
As Monsanto excels in cutthroat legal tactics, they were able to hold PCB lawsuits back for decades (e.g., initially, the only “successful” ones were a few settlements with PCB workers in the 1990s), but eventually in 2003, the dam broke. Many judgments were awarded against Monsanto (primarily for environmental pollution). These included 600 million in 2003 [of which Monsanto directly paid 390 million], 52 million, and then 92 million in 2020, 25 million, 80 million, 537.5 million, then 698 million in 2022, 80 million, then 67 million in 2023, and 35 million, then 160 million in 2024.
Note: Superfund sites designate places too contaminated by hazardous wastes (e.g., toxic chemicals) for general human habitation. In 1995, of America’s 1,238 Superfund sites, 190 had PCB contamination and 80 had dioxin contamination. Sadly, these are not Monsanto’s only Superfund contributions (e.g., they’ve contaminated numerous areas with heavy metals, arsenic, radium and benzenes1,2,3,4).
3. Monsanto has also produced other problematic persistent chemicals. These include Acetochlor and Propachlor, carcinogenic herbicides which persist in the environment (one of which was taken off the market), and Lasso, another problematic herbicide that was phased out.
4. In 1993, Monsanto released a rBGH, a synthetic growth hormone designed to increase cow milk production that ended up in their milk. Health concerns (e.g., preliminary data suggested a cancer,1,2,3 allergy and obesity risk—all of which was subsequently never studied) and animal welfare concerns (e.g., overstraining their milk production lead to an 18% increase in infertility, a 25% increase in mastitis, a 50% increase in lameness and an overall 20-25% increase risk in the animal needing to be culled) it quickly created public concerns about rBGH milk.
To protect their market, Monsanto began an infamous public relations campaign. For example, in 1997 after investigative journalists revealed dairy farms were continuing to use rBGH despite grocery stores promising not to sell that milk (and showed the human and animal health risks from rBGH), Monsanto legally intimated the station into pulling the story and revising it to echo Monsanto’s (unsubstantiated) “safe and effective” claims, after which the journalists were fired for refusing to. Likewise, once milk producers responded to public demands and began specifying on their labels the milk was “rGBH free” Monsanto launched an aggressive legal and legislative campaign to outlaw those labels (which ultimately backfired and made the public much more cynical about the product eventually killing its market).
5. After realizing genetically modified seeds were a highly lucrative market, Monsanto repurposed many of their tactics to monopolize this sector. These included:
• Creating a division to sue small farmers who replanted Monsanto’s genetically modified (GMO) seeds (with over 23 million being awarded to Monsanto).
• Developing seeds which could not reproduce (so farmers would be forced to buy them perpetually), which was eventually withdrawn due to public backlash.
• Having a revolving door at the FDA to shield them from regulatory scrutiny (e.g., this Monsanto Vice President is a well-known example).
• Locking farmers in poorer nations into a cycle of poverty as the seeds were so much more expensive, most notably resulting in mass suicides of Indian farmers who became trapped by debt from Monsanto’s costly BT corn.
• As shown by court documents, manipulating the entire scientific system to create the impression their GMOs were safe (e.g., paying off academics to write or put their names on favorable studies and successfully targeting academic critics along with getting their papers retracted so others would not be willing to risk publishing critical data).1,2,3
• Since significantly more growing cycles exist in topical areas (3-4 rather than 1 in areas with winters), Hawaii became a popular area for cultivating and producing GMO seed crops, rapidly coming to comprise the majority of Hawaii’s agricultural revenue (with 92% coming from GMO corn). As this process required heavy use of restricted-use herbicides and pesticides, due to both environmental concerns and health effects (e.g., cancers and birth defects observed), community resistance gradually mounted against their cultivation.
Note: Monsanto also later received a $10 million fine for using a banned pesticide on Maui and Molokai and a $12 million fine for improperly using a restricted pesticide.
These practices eventually (in 2013-2014) resulted in Kauai (the primary growing site) banning spraying restricted use agrochemicals within 500 feet of schools, hospitals or parks (and requiring announcements of exactl what was being sprayed), a Maui citizen initiative pausing GMO cultivation there until safety studies had been conducted, and the island of Hawai’i banning GMO cultivation. When reading through the reports about what was happening (I was involved in the GMO field at the time due to serious concerns about their safety), I noted how contentious these laws were and was astonished Monsanto had upset Hawaii so much, the citizen initiative was able to pass despite being outspent over 87-1 by the GMO industry (which as far as I know has never otherwise happened). Sadly however, Monsanto was eventually able to overturn all of the laws with the courts by arguing only the state government (which was dependent on the GMO revenue) had the authority to restrict GMO cultivation.
Note: once Monsanto no longer benefited from using Hawaii’s land (e.g., due to fines and community pushback) they shifted their operations to their other USA-based (and subsidized) option, Puerto Rico, where they have continued poisoning the community, but due to the political climate have received minimal pushback. As the land Monsanto used in Hawaii was leased native land,1,2,3 they were able to escape any liability for poisoning the environment, and again offloaded the costs of their predatory practices onto the community.
In short, many people really detest Monsanto (and in my case, presenting all of this is quite cathartic for me—particularly due to my friends’ experiences with Agent Orange). In my eyes, the most important point to take from this is that it is not a good idea to give Monsanto additional legal leverage, as they have shown their legal team will use any means necessary to ensure they can continuing poisoning the world without accountability—and as they have already been successful in fairly outrageous cases, giving them additional tools will make it quite difficult to have any remaining check against their egregious behavior.
