When The Media Says Experts They Mean Paid Corporate Shills (Part 11)
Originally posted on Quora June 15, 2023
Occasionally The Intercept will stop shilling for the DNC and their donors and report real news for once like the glaring failures of the administrative state. Multinationals poisoning consumers is often confined to the realm of “conspiracy” theory if the designated regulators gave them the green light and ignored the poisoning. However, occasionally they will allow the reality of regulatory capture to slip into the consciousness of their addled readers. Such was the case two years ago when they stopped foaming over Trump and the Proud boys to report on the EPA concealing data on the hazardous effects of certain pesticides and herbicides. For instance, an EPA report warning about the carcinogenic effects of glyphosate was shuttered by higher ups in the agency on behalf of Bayer-Monsanto. The ubiquity of glyphosate in particular in our food supply and surrounding ecosystems has largely been a result of efforts by Bayer-Monsanto to steer The Science™ in a more profitable direction by ghostwriting so called independent scientific papers on their product, cajoling EPA employees to do their bidding, hiring PR reps to pose as journalists, harassing real journalists who challenge their narrative, planting favorable news articles in corporate outlets, and hiring front groups posing as “misinformation experts” to spread their message across social media.
Front Groups and Paid Shills
One such front, Academics Review, is a bonafide Monsanto front group launched in 2012 under the pretext of being a non-profit research organization. However, their main MO has been to attack critics of the pesticide and herbicide industry particularly critics of Monsanto and its two major product lines of Roundup Ready GM crops and glyphosate herbicide. Another front group called The Genetic Literacy Project is also paid to attack scientists working on cancer research, specifically those associated with the IARC, and lobbying against legislative attempts to curtail the ubiquity of GM crops and glyphosate herbicides. Yet another paid front group is the American Council on Science and Health, whom tax documents have also shown to have financial ties to Bayer-Monsanto. Like the aforementioned, they have also published anti-critic and pro-GMO messages in mainstream papers like USA Today, The Wall Street Journal and Forbes. After the IARC classified glyphosate as a probable carcinogenic, Bayer-Monsanto hired Reuters reporter Kate Kelland to write a scathing article about the IARC cancer scientists for supposedly missing the evidence in favor of Monsanto. This paid shill even won the ‘Science Story of the Year’ award at the 2017 Foreign Press Association media awards for parroting Monsanto executive Sam Murphey. Reuters reporters were hired for at least two more hit pieces against the IARC and one critical of the WHO for supposedly misleading consumers about the hazards of glyphosate after the UN agency, following IARC recommendations, classified glyphosate as a probable carcinogenic. Before being acquired by Bayer AG in 2018, Monsanto’s media ties were so pervasive that French prosecutors probed their campaigns to manipulate journalists and compile secret files on all of the influential individuals across Western Europe.
The Science™
As I mentioned in part 5, the research that supports the safety and efficacy of GM foods and glyphosate herbicides mostly comes from corporate funded studies that use experimental fields much smaller than those actually used for agriculture and either don’t use the glyphosate herbicide actually sprayed on GM crops or do not specify their use and even when they do they do not specify the quantity used and/or do not measure the residual glyphosate on test crops. This is what you would typically call junk science yet it constitutes the vast majority of research on GM foods which MSM then cites as evidence for their safety for the environment and human consumption.
What I did not mention in part 5 is how the EPA and IARC evaluated the carcinogenic potential of Glyphosate based herbicides with completely different methodologies the former of which assessed genotoxicity and oxidative stress in manner meant to obscure health hazards by 1) relying on unpublished regulatory studies 2) ignoring elevated occupational risks and instead basing it on exposure to the general population through the food supply and water 3) ignoring genotoxicity studies on actual human populations but using bacterial reverse mutation studies and 4) basing their assessments on less adulterated “technical” glyphosate which does not include co-formulates included in commercially available glyphosate herbicides such as pelargonic acid, which has been found to be a co-carcinogenic and may facilitate the absorption of glyphosate into the body. Why a so-called regulator would go out of their way to clear Bayer-Monsanto of any maleficence brings us to the reality that the EPA, like the FDA, is a thoroughly captured institution.
The Revolving Door Between the EPA and Pesticide Industry
Like the FDA relationship with the drug industry mentioned in part 2, the EPA as an institution maintains an adversarial facade for the public while the people managing the EPA and its many divisions often aspire to work for the chemical companies they regulate after their stint with the agency is up creating an incentive for leniency. Since 1974, seven out of the nine pesticide office directors have gone on to work for the pesticide companies they use to regulate. The other two went into retirement. At least three of those former directors became industry attorneys including Marcia Mulkey, Dan Barolo, and Steve Schatzow. Steve Bradbury left his pesticide office director position to become an industry consultant and later a professor at Iowa State University where his research is funded by Bayer-Monsanto, Symgenta and the Iowa Farm Bureau Federation. Former director Debra Edwards joined the board of American Vanguard after she left the agency. Stephen Lee Johnson, the assistant administrator for the Office of Prevention, Pesticides and Toxic Substances during Bush’s first term and the EPA administrator during Bush’s second term, later joined the board of Scotts Miracle Gro which markets glyphosate herbicide in the US. Bill Jordan, who served as deputy director of the pesticide office under Obama, went on to become a pesticide company consultant. Ultimately, the revolving door between EPA management and the chemical industry works to the benefit of both and to the detriment of the public as one EPA employee observes:
“Management officials graduate and move to direct hires with the registrants,” said Bill Hirzy, a 27-year veteran of EPA. “So these management officials are loath to take any action that is likely to limit their post-EPA employment opportunities.”
How The Entire Pesticide Registration Process Favors Monsanto
The EPA gets their data from corporate funded studies and much of their revenue from registration fees from the chemical industry. For instance, the decision to approve glyphosate based herbicides and switch its carcinogenic classification from “suggestive evidence” to “no evidence” was exclusively based on Monsanto funded studies. The incredibly vague legislation that guides the EPA pesticide office, which pits hazards to human health and the environment against projections of higher crop yields and the stipulation that pesticides don’t pose an “unreasonable” risk to the environment leaves much of the judgment to opinion.
Whistleblowers are Censored and Often Face Retaliation
Such was the case for one toxicologist, who discovered that another ingredient in RoundUp, pelargonic acid, was also a probable carcinogenic after reviewing rodent studies going all the way back to 1997 that concluded that the substance posed no health threat even though the actual data showed several mice developing leukemia and lymphoma after exposure. When the toxicologists tried to present their findings to the cancer assessment review committee, they were blocked by management within the pesticide's office. After raising concerns with colleagues about the potential of pelargonic acid to be a co-carcinogenic alongside glyphosate the toxicologist in question suddenly began to be threatened with disciplinary action and was written up for failing to meet a deadline that was changed without their knowledge. In 2016, the EPA’s Office of Research and Development conducted a meta-analysis of 7 different epidemiological studies of the association between glyphosate and non-Hodgkin lymphoma and found that 4 of the highest quality studies all found that exposure to glyphosate alone was associated with an elevated risk of developing non-Hodgkin lymphoma and concluded, as the EPA had prior to 1991, that the studies “provide suggestive evidence of carcinogenic potential between glyphosate exposure and increased risk of non-Hodgkin lymphoma.” Unfortunately, the EPA leadership had an agenda other than consumer safety and prevented the analysis from being published by marking it confidential. Instead the EPA has continued to run with the conclusion that glyphosate is not a probable carcinogenic releasing reports in 2016, 2017, 2019 and 2020 saying so and reregistering glyphosate as a pesticide for another 15 year period in 2020.
Monsanto Has A Long History Of Poisoning Americans both at Home and Abroad
There might have been a rational basis to give Bayer-Monsanto the benefit of the doubt when it comes to their glyphosate herbicide used on GM crops but no such basis can exist when the same corporation has a long history of poisoning Americans going back almost a century. Between the early 1930s and 1979 Monsanto produced an electronics chemical for car manufacturers called PCB. Despite the fact the PCB was banned over four decades ago, this forever-chemical continues to pollute the water and air near car factories and the sites of former factories leaving elevated rates of cancer in its wake. Monsanto was also one of the makers of an older herbicide called agent orange that was used during the Vietnam war as a defoliant. In 1979, the same year their PCB was banned, Vietnam vets filed a class action lawsuit against Monsanto for cancers, birth defects and miscarriages caused by exposure to agent orange. The Vietnam vets were only compensated $180 million from Monsanto and other agent orange producers largely due to company representatives using Big Tobacco tactics to deny and obfuscate government reports on the toxicity of the herbicide. The toll on Vietnam was even worse: 150,000 children were born with birth defects after the war and at least 3 million were poisoned by the dioxins in the herbicides.
A Monopolistic Business Model
As I explained last year in Why India Banned Glyphosate and GM Cotton, Monsanto engages in a monopolistic business model. The basic model is to sell their glyphosate herbicide as a panacea for weeds and Roundup ready crops that are resistant to the poison in the form of sterile terminator seeds that only last a generation and must be repurchased every planting season. This allows Monsanto to charge farmers an exorbitant monopoly price for seeds each season and requires them to purchase larger quantities of glyphosate to kill glyphosate tolerant weeds. When exported to the developing world the results can be devastating for small hold farmers indebted to Monsanto and indigenous crops supplanted by GM crops.