04/09/2019 / By Lance D Johnson
The three million U.S. soldiers who were physically and mentally damaged by Agent Orange have one corporation to resent: Monsanto. The 500,000 children born with birth defects and the millions more who suffered health problems because of Agent Orange have one corporation to thank: Monsanto. “The World’s Most Evil Corporation” has destroyed human lives for over a century, bringing to market some of the most harmful chemical substances ever to be created by scientists.
From saccharin to aspartame, from DDT to Agent Orange, from PCBs to Synthetic Bovine Growth Hormone, from dioxin to glyphosate, Monsanto has caused more health problems and destroyed the environment in more ways than can ever be fathomed. No amount of lawsuits, no regulatory agencies, no justice department, and no Supreme Court has ever been able to stop this corporation. If one Monsanto chemical gets banned, another is there to fill the void, causing oxidative stress, hormone imbalances, genetic defects, and organ system toxicity in humans for several generations. How long will the devastation last?
Monsanto was the brainchild of John Francis Queeny, a thirty-year pharmaceutical pro. The company, Monsanto Chemical Works, was named after his beautiful wife, Olga Mendez Monsanto. Founded in 1901, Monsanto’s first chemical invention was saccharin, an artificial sweetener. Incorporating saccharin into their beverage formulas, Coca-Cola was the first company to jump on board with Monsanto’s toxic influence. The U.S. government had evidence of saccharin’s toxicity and even ventured to sue Monsanto, but the government lost. This only emboldened Monsanto for many years to come.
By the 1920s, Monsanto jumped on board with the mass production of synthetic drugs, taking advantage of the popularity of acetylsalicylic acid, a synthetic form of salicin (a natural medicine found in white willow bark). At this time, Monsanto became the top producer of PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyl). Monsanto scientists knew about PCB toxicity in the beginning, but saw a great global business opportunity nonetheless. PCBs are oils that don’t burn nor degrade and therefore can be used as lubricants, hydraulic fluids, cutting oils, waterproof coatings and liquid sealants. Approximately 50 years after PCBs hit the market, prosecutors had enough evidence to show that Monsanto hid PCB toxicity from the public. PCBs cause reproductive, developmental, and immune system disorders. Today PCBs are banned but they can still be detected in animal and human blood tissue around the world.
By the time the world caught on to PCBs, Monsanto was already enjoying various toxic enterprises. In the 1930s, they began experimenting with genetic modification of crops. In the 1940s the corporation was conscripted by the government to enrich uranium and work for the Manhattan Project. Monsanto had its hands on the world’s most nefarious invention, the first atomic bomb, which was ultimately used to burn the populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki into shadows on the concrete.
Monsanto was also the brainchild behind the insecticide DDT, used from 1944 to 1957. In those days, benign childhood infections such as polio became serious nervous system disorders in large part because DDT was liberally sprayed throughout communities and directly on children to combat mosquitoes. DDT not only was banned because it destroyed ecology, but it also imposed serious immune system issues in humans. Dr. Morton S. Biskind’s brave scientific work showed how DDT destroyed the central nervous system, causing damage to the cerebellum and spinal cord.
In the 1940s, Monsanto began manufacturing dioxins. Their marketing team concealed dioxin’s presence in several mass-produced products. Pesticides that contained dioxins poisoned both the food and the water supply for years, creating a geno-toxic nightmare for humans. Dioxin was a concealed ingredient in Agent Orange, the chemical that was sold to the government and used on soldiers in Vietnam. The courts initially sided with Monsanto’s research on dioxin, but it was later revealed to be an effective, deadly poison. Legislation to prevent dioxins from being dumped in the water supply ultimately failed in the 1990s. Monsanto survived countless lawsuits proving that dioxins cause disease in plant workers. Hundreds of thousands of birth defects are the result of Monsanto’s dioxins: $100 million settlements became routine for Monsanto. Flush with billions of dollars in profit, these settlements are just the cost of doing business for Monsanto.
Today, it’s only fitting that Monsanto has merged with Bayer, a company that manufactured and sold the chemicals that were used to kill Jews in Nazi Germany. Bayer, along with BASF and Hoechst, originally merged as IG Farben and contributed heavily to Adolf Hitler. In return, Hitler relied on the chemical manufacturers to create Zyklon B, a chemical weapon used in Auschwitz and other concentration camps to exterminate the Jews who were too old, too small, or too weak to work. The Monsanto-Bayer merger provides perpetual funds to settle upcoming cases on glyphosate.
To protect their image and appeal to the next generation, Monsanto partnered with Walt Disney Company in the 1960s and constructed several attractions at Disney’s Tomorrowland. Praising chemicals and plastic, Monsanto introduced the world to some of the most non-biodegradable, hormone-disrupting plastic fibers ever to be invented. Made of indestructible plastic fibers, the “House of the Future” was viewed by 20 million people in a ten year span at Disney, but it eventually had to be torn down piece by piece with choker cables because Monsanto lied about the plastic’s degradability and toxicity. Monsanto would go on to mass produce styrene, introducing yet another hormone-disrupting chemical to humans and the environment.
In the 1970s, Monsanto partnered with G.D. Searle and began mass producing aspartame. When the FDA researched aspartame, they found it caused tumors and holes in the brains of rats. A grand jury indicted G.D. Searle because they were “knowingly misrepresenting findings and concealing material facts and making false statements” in regard to aspartame safety. However, the FDA withdrew from the investigation after Samuel Skinner resigned from his post at the U.S. Attorney’s Office to go work for Searle’s law firm. Monsanto ultimately purchased the company and formed a new aspartame subsidiary called NutraSweet Company. Even though they lied about the breakdown of aspartame into carcinogenic formaldehyde, aspartame is still in today’s diet soda brands and is in 5,000 other consumer products.
By 1994, Monsanto had regulatory agencies so trained, the FDA quickly approved synthetic Bovine Growth Hormone (rBGH) for use in milk products, even though there was significant scientific backlash. The synthetic hormone, produced from genetically modified E. coli bacteria, became a hit until dairy companies fully realized what was happening to their product and to those who drank it. When dairy companies stopped using the synthetic hormone and began using rBGH-free labels on their products, Monsanto sued!
Monsanto’s biggest money maker today is Roundup and a slew of genetically modified crops that were designed to withstand the herbicide. Today, there are over eighty-eight scientific assays documenting glyphosate’s geno-toxicity. Glyphosate is Monsanto’s most popular herbicide chemical, formulated with adjuvants and sold as Roundup weed killer. More than just a weedkiller, glyphosate destroys the commensal microbes in the human gut and imposes toxicity on human genes. When Roundup-ready canola oil (rapeseed), soybeans, corn and BT cotton began hitting the market, they were advertised as safer, healthier alternatives to organic non-GMO varieties. Farmers who refused these GM terminator seeds were driven out of business.
This model of agriculture gave Monsanto a monopoly. Because non-GMO crops could not survive a non-chemical environment, farmers were increasingly forced to buy both Roundup and GMO seeds. GM foods are prevalent today because their use has destroyed the natural environment and the nutritious biodiversity of food crops.
Just as they attacked dairy producers for not going along with rBGH, Monsanto filed frivolous suits against farmers. Monsanto sued farmers for infringing on their seed patents because Monsanto’s terminator seeds blow into their fields, causing cross-bred seed varieties. These lawsuits forced many farmers into bankruptcy and gave Monsanto authority to ruin traditional agriculture. Monsanto’s terrorism continued unabated after the turn of the century as GMO crops failed in India, destroying farmers’ lives and causing wide-scale suicides so families could survive on death insurance payments.
By 2016, Russia adopted a new law that prohibits GMO crop cultivation and GMO animal breeding to prevent the release of GMOs into the environment and to allow the Russian government to restrict the import of damaging GMO products into the country. The European Union has also taken great measures to reject GMOs. The U.S., on the other hand, has only implemented voluntary labeling laws for GMOs. In 2015, independent scientists for the International Agency on Cancer Research identified glyphosate as a “probable carcinogen.” Monsanto-Bayer currently faces hundreds of lawsuits on glyphosate, for its role in causing non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Monsanto lost the first case and now faces a long line of impending lawsuits and settlements.
The truth about Monsanto is revealed in the facts about its sordid history. No entity in the history of the world has ever unleashed so much suffering and continued to operate with impunity such as Monsanto: truly the world’s most evil corporation.
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