Roundup's day in court
When I was growing up in the sixties, the cigarette companies kept ending up in court, because there were thousands of lawsuits claiming correctly that cigarettes caused cancer. The companies had the best lawyers money could buy, and they had plenty of money, so the inevitable was put off for years. The evidence was clear. Cigarettes were killing children. Eventually they had to pay up; even the best lawyers couldn't avoid it.Today Bayer is going through the same thing, more or less. There are 65,000 lawsuits claiming that Roundup causes cancer. It does. It causes other things too. Bayer has the best lawyers money can buy, claiming basically that if the feds are on your side it doesn't matter what kills who. And the Supreme Court has proven to be in Trump's pocket, whether it is because they are extorted, paid off, blackmailed, or just plain mean is irrelevant, but I don't expect much from the Supreme Court in terms of justice for dying people. I don't know which way this will go but I do want to make a few points.
Once one of my sons asked me if there was anything good about the Trump presidency that I could think of, and I came up blank. But now I can think of one thing: The identifying and naming of the MAHA movement. There are people like myself who care about the health of our children and our future. The fact is that a small number of my friends from the back-to-nature movement actually were supporters of Kennedy and thus went over to Trump when it appeared he would do something about the nation's health. Whether Kennedy actually had a clue or whether Trump would be independent of the millions that funded his election was another question. But the MAHA movement now is making noise at the Supreme Court hearing and that's good. If you care about the nation's health, now's the time to say so.
Second, there's a kind of inevitability about it. The science is clear. It's killing people. It doesn't matter if Trump and the Supreme Court are all in favor of killing. Eventually it will catch up with them.
Third, it's an especially huge problem here in the Midwest (I am in Illinois) where they are literally pouring Roundup on every square foot of land outside of our small towns. No one farmer is going to go out there and do it the hard way when every single one of his neighbors is poisoning their acreage. In other words, these farmers need a government to tell them what's murder and what's crop yield maximization, or they'll do what their friends do. They are waiting for someone to tell them to do the right thing.
Finally, Roundup is only the tip of the iceberg. There are many pesticides. There's autism and nerve damage all over the horizon. There's a dead zone down by New Orleans where if there are any fish at all, they all have three eyes and are still trying to find a river that's not choked up with pesticides. Fertilizers also have their hazards but not quite as bad. It's a very unhealthy river, as are all of them in these parts, and I wouldn't drill a well or touch the drinking water any more.
So yes I'm MAHA. I may be alarmist but I've been away from the Midwest and now I'm back, and I know what I see. It's the single biggest issue we face. In a world where half of us don't have kids and don't care, I say, if you work with kids, or have them, or have your eyes open, you should care.
posted by tom @ 7:18 AM
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