Carey Gillam on Monsanto Lawsuit view post on FAIR.org MP3 Link (cc photo: Aqua Mechanical) This week on CounterSpin: A US District Court just ruled that a 70-year-old California man’s non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma was caused, at least substantively, by his decades of spraying Roundup. The pesticide produced by Monsanto, now owned by Bayer, is key to the megacompany’s business model, which is to sell a pesticide, Roundup, and also sell the only seeds engineered to resist that pesticide—”Roundup Ready” corn and cotton and soybeans—so that one can’t be used without the other. It’s expensive, and it’s not how a lot of people around the world want to farm, but as a business plan, it’s been wildly successful. The fact that the pesticide is carcinogenic is not part of the plan, and we can expect Monsanto/Bayer’s massive PR machinery to work overtime to convince us to ignore the court’s findings. It’s an important case for our physical health—virtually every American has pesticides or pesticide byproducts in our bodies at this point, and the risk is obviously greater for farmworkers and others more exposed. But it’s also about societal health, and how much power we will grant profit-driven corporations to determine not just what we’re exposed to, but what we’re permitted to know about it. We’ll talk about the legal picture and the bigger picture with Carey Gillam, longtime journalist, currently research director at the group US Right to Know, and author of the book Whitewash: The Story of a Weedkiller, Cancer and the Corruption of Science. MP3 Link Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at media “moderates” and Chelsea Manning’s reimprisonment. MP3 Link

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