Is Monsanto Seriously Exempt from ALL Liability Lawsuits for PCB Contamination?
“Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” – Lord Acton, 1887
Monsanto says it has nothing to do with the clause that our corrupt Congress just passed in a piece of legislation exempting the St. Louis-based company from ALL financial liability involved with lawsuits and financial settlements related to PCB contamination and cleanup sites. REALLY? [1]
We’re supposed to assume that a company responsible for almost 1.25 billion pounds of carcinogenic PCBs, or polychlorinated biphenyls, sold in the US between the 1930’s and 1970’s had absolutely nothing to do with a provision giving Monsanto a free pass for polluting the waterways, fields, and air. The EPA even admits that these chemicals are carcinogenic and harmful to reproductive health, the immune system, the endocrine system, and the nervous system?
Just because Monsanto switched its focus from polluting the world with PCBs to polluting it with Round Up and Round Up ready crops, the mega-corp is absolved from taking an ounce of responsibility?
Monsanto already agreed to pay $700 million to a city in Alabama to clean up PCB contamination, but with a host of new cities suing for the same reason – did Monsanto just turn Congress onto a new level of corruption in order to protect itself from further culpability?
The provision was slipped into another bill regarding chemical safety introduced last year by an unknown representative, and though it doesn’t name Monsanto specifically, it has the company’s name written all over it. The provision would benefit the only manufacturer in the United States of now-banned PCBs, a mainstay of Monsanto business model for decades. [1]
The House and the Senate last year both passed versions of legislation to replace the 40-year-old Toxic Substances Control Act, a law that the Environmental Protection Agency acknowledged had become so unworkable that as many as 1,000 hazardous chemicals still on sale today needed to be evaluated to see if they should be banned or restricted. But instead of protecting Americans from further chemical exposure, it just renegotiated Monsanto’s past misdeeds into a disappearing pit of corporate escapism.
Charla Lord, a spokesperson for Monsanto, said in response to the bill:
“Monsanto does not consider either version of the bill, with respect to the effect on preemption, to be a ‘gift.’”
I can assure you that cities like Berkely, California, and Seattle, Washington, with pending lawsuits against Monsanto for PCB contamination consider the bill more than just a gift – it is a fleecing of US citizen’s money, and downright negligence of both our political system and the corporate polluters which that system protects.
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